Chinese Tech Companies Used to Benchmark Against America, but the World Model Field Has Broken That Pattern: WAIC Panel Says China Now Leads Without a US Counterpart to Follow

A WAIC panel said China’s world model startups are now moving on their own in a field without a direct U.S. benchmark.

Examples cited included Shengshu’s open-sourced generative robotics work, Yizhuang Center’s large-scale pretraining, and architecture-led efforts like MOS and MotoBrain.

Panelists argued that China’s limits in compute are offset by abundant data, hardware-software coordination, and fast iteration in hubs like Shenzhen.

The competition in world models may hinge more on efficient architectures and data systems than raw compute, potentially giving China an edge.