Justin Lin, head of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen series of open-source large language models, has put the odds of any Chinese company leapfrogging leaders such as OpenAI or Anthropic through fundamental breakthroughs at less than 20% over the next three to five years.

Speaking during a panel discussion at the AGI-Next summit in Beijing, Lin highlighted how access to computing power — increasingly shaped by US export restrictions on advanced chips — has become a key differentiator between American and Chinese AI labs.

“A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin — just meeting delivery demands consumes most of our resources,” Lin said at the event, which was co-organised by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua University, as reported by Bloomberg.

The imbalance, he suggested, raises a fundamental question about innovation itself. “It’s an age-old question: does innovation happen in the hands of the rich, or the poor?” Lin added.

US export controls have limited Chinese firms’ access to cutting-edge semiconductors, forcing many companies to prioritise commercial deployment and customer delivery over long-term foundational research. In contrast, US-based labs continue to channel vast amounts of compute into training frontier models and pursuing breakthroughs in reasoning, multimodality, and artificial general intelligence.