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Race for AI supremacy: Chinese-born scientists in Musk’s Grok squad line up against China
Media in China is taking notice of the large number of key developers, researchers and scientists born and educated in China at work in US
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After Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI unveiled Grok 3, its latest chatbot, on Tuesday, the presence of a large number of Chinese developers at the company came under the spotlight.
The United States and China continue to release new AI models in a bid to outperform each other. The victor in the global AI race may be determined by the efforts of Chinese computer scientists and engineers on either side.
During a live stream on X announcing the release, Musk said Grok 3 outperformed Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s default V3 model and US-based OpenAI’s GPT-4o on science, maths and coding benchmarks.
Chinese media quickly took notice, releasing articles highlighting the Chinese talent on the xAI team, including a core member who went to Zhejiang University – the university DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng also attended.
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Around one-third of the founding members of xAI are reportedly of Chinese heritage, with two members present during the live stream to introduce the model to the world.
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