Baseten's Tuhin Srivastava on China AI Coding breaking into the U.S. — 1/26/2026

Chinese AI startups like Jipu, DeepSeek, and GLM are rapidly emerging as formidable competitors to U.S. frontier models, particularly in the critical domain of coding agents. Tuhin Srivastava, from the AI infrastructure platform Base10, highlights that these Chinese models are not mere blips but represent a growing ecosystem of cost-efficient, open-source alternatives that enterprises are increasingly deploying within private environments. While a performance gap compared to top-tier U.S. models persists, it is narrowing significantly each month. The shift from simple chatbots to complex, agentic applications is driving an exponential surge in inference demand, forcing a reevaluation of compute infrastructure and the necessity for diverse, efficient model architectures. This trend underscores a broader transition where AI is moving beyond basic utility toward becoming a functional, value-driven tool for real-world enterprise tasks.