Useful context for a field full of shorthand.

A short guide to recurring groups, phrases, and career patterns that show up in China AI coverage. These are here to make names and labels legible, not to turn every pattern into a grand theory.

2 field notes

Named set

Foundation Model Four

基模四杰

A rare same-stage snapshot of how China's foundation-model builders think after DeepSeek: agents, long context, open models, enterprise work, and whether chat is already old news.

"基模" compresses 基础模型, or foundation models; "四杰" is the classic four-standouts framing.

People

Labs

Context

Post-DeepSeek agenda

The set captures the questions Chinese labs are actually arguing over now: agents, cost, differentiation, and what comes after chat.

Four live playbooks

Zhipu brings the Tsinghua/GLM institution path, Kimi the long-context startup path, Qwen the open-model platform path, and Tencent the agent push.

Baidu Baike starmap

CCTV-recognized cohort

2025 AI Figures of the Year

2025年度AI人物

A broad official snapshot of Chinese AI influence in 2025: robotics, AI chips, compute networks, foundation models, cloud/open models, brain-computer interfaces, and enterprise AI.

A national-stage China AI Festival / CCTV recognition set; China Daily framed the cohort as people sketching China's AI “stars and sea.”

Tracked people

Labs

Context

Official signal

This is a CCTV / China AI Festival recognition set, so these are not just lab-internal names. They crossed into the national story of China AI in 2025.

Atlas-tracked overlap

Shown here are the three people already tracked in this atlas: Zhang Peng, Zhou Jingren, and Jiang Daxin.

China Daily