During the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference, Wu Shichun, founding partner of Plum Ventures, attended the "Long-Term Capital and Resilient Growth" forum and stated that in the AI competition between China and the United States, America is strong at the foundation while China excels at applications.
Under Huang Renxun's "five-layer cake" theory, China currently holds advantages in the infrastructure layer, application layer, and energy layer.
The United States maintains its lead in the current era where "computing power is king," with a clear advantage in the core chip layer.
In the model algorithm layer, industry assessments place the gap at approximately two to three months, especially as DeepSeek's open-source approach has dramatically lowered costs, allowing China to still keep pace with the latest algorithmic capabilities.
"The foundation determines the ceiling, while the top layer determines the value," he said, expressing hope that over the next ten to twenty years, a large number of excellent companies will emerge at the application layer.
"The ByteDance of the AI era, the Meituan of the AI era, may have just been born," he added.
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