Beating AI News Flash: Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) states that as Chinese AI labs such as DeepSeek make progress, the performance lead of U.S. AI companies over China has narrowed to a historic low. After DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was released in September, China's top models lagged behind their U.S. counterparts by only 3% in benchmark tests, a marked narrowing from about 9% in May and 15% at the beginning of the year.DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ranked sixth globally on LiveBench last month with a score of 81.1, close to Anthropic's highest score of 83.4. BI senior analyst Robert Lea believes the model has already achieved performance comparable to leading systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, but only 3 of the top 15 models on LiveBench still come from China.China's AI progress stems from improved specialized capabilities and the ability to optimize models for domestic hardware, and it has also raised questions about the effectiveness of U.S. chip export restrictions. However, China's AI industry still faces commercialization pressure. Lea expects that low-margin token supply, fierce price wars, and competition among more than 1,100 large language models may prevent the industry from achieving profitability even by 2030. At present, ByteDance's Doubao leads in monetizing AI applications, while chatbots from DeepSeek and Tencent are still offered for free.