Ant Group claims its AI models outperformed Meta’s in benchmarks and cut inference costs, signaling a potential leap forward in China’s AI development efforts.

The Ant Group, backed by Alibaba (BABA), is reportedly using semiconductors made both in the US and China to build more efficient artificial intelligence (AI) models and to limit reliance on a single supplier.

Ant used domestic chips, including from Alibaba and Huawei, to train models using the so-called Mixture of Experts machine learning approach.