DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: China-US AI Model Gap Is Now Just “A Few Months” — The Race Is Neck-and-Neck
In a high-profile interview at the World Economic Forum Davos 2026 on January 14, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis stated that the performance gap between leading Chinese and American frontier AI models has narrowed dramatically to “only a few months.” He highlighted rapid progress from companies like DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and ByteDance, crediting massive compute investments, open-source momentum, and talent density. This candid assessment marks the first time a top Western lab leader has publicly acknowledged near-parity in frontier capabilities, signaling a decisive shift in the global AI power balance.
MiniMax Goes Public on HKEX: Raises Over HK$5 Billion in Record 4-Year IPO Sprint, Shares Surge 50% on Debut Day
On January 8, 2026, Chinese AI unicorn MiniMax made history with its blockbuster Hong Kong IPO, raising more than HK$5 billion (≈US$640 million) — the fastest path from founding to public listing among major Chinese AI companies in just four years. Priced at the top of the range, the stock (ticker: 9898.HK) opened 38% higher and closed up 50% on debut, valuing the company at over HK$45 billion. The explosive first-day performance reflects surging global appetite for frontier AI infrastructure plays and cements MiniMax as the hottest AI IPO of the post-ChatGPT era.
The Silent Power Shift: xAI's Grok 4.1 Emerges, Claiming Unprecedented General-Purpose Prowess
In a move that caught the AI community off guard, Elon Musk's xAI has quietly released Grok-4.1, the latest iteration of its flagship large language model. Unlike the fanfare surrounding its rivals' releases, this launch was subdued, yet its claimed capabilities are anything but. xAI asserts that Grok-4.1 demonstrates "state-of-the-art" performance across a comprehensive range of general-purpose benchmarks—from reasoning and coding to advanced mathematics—potentially surpassing established leaders like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 2.0 in overall versatility and raw intellectual horsepower. This release marks a critical inflection point, challenging the perceived hierarchy of the frontier model race.
