China is giving them to control the future standard

It is no longer enough to chat with AI. We want you to do things for us, and AI agents They promise precisely that. It is the new frantic race in which everyone competes, but attentive because the Chinese strategy is overwhelming.

Chinese ia agents everywhere. In recent months, large technology companies and Chinese startups have launched various AI agents. Among the protagonists are the still small Butterfly Effect and Zhipu, who have “deep research” agents that manage Openai Deep Research to overcome in Some metrics. And they are added giants such as Alibaba or Bytedance, who have announced agents based on their foundational models.

Machine, do everything for me. Those agents are of all kinds. There are as we say dedicated to deep research – “make me a report of the current state of X” -, but also to areas such as travel planning or, of course, the development of the Autonomous Code with the supervision of a human programmer.

Four protagonists. As they point out In Rest of Worldalthough there are several Chinese companies working on this type of technology, there are four that are now outstanding:

1. Manus (Butterfly Effect)
2. Quark (Alibaba)
3. Autogglm Rumination (Zhipu)
4. Coze (bytedance)

But they are cheaper … At least, competitively and if we attend to its benefits. Manus It has a subscription of 199 dollars a month to use its AI agent. That gives access to a certain number of credits (19,900) to execute tasks autonomously. OpenAI and its Chatgpt Pro plan It also costs 200 dollars, but it is more a conversational assistant with deep analysis, programming and research, but at the moment it does not offer that guidance to Agent of Autonomous that allows you to complete tasks from the beginning to the end, which is what Manus presumes.

… or free. Zhipu, one of the most promising AI startups in China, launched its agent, called Autogglm Rumination. Demo videos showed how it served to compare services prices of food sendingbut also to generate Research reports through web searches. The agent is based on Zhipu’s reasoning model (GLM-Z1-AIR) and its founding model (GLM-4-AIR-0414). The company presumes that its reasoning model is as good as Deepseek R1, but it runs up to eight times faster and only needs 1/30 of the resources used by its competitor, which was already considered especially efficient. That is important, but this particular agent It is free.

Bytedance. Something similar happens With Cozethat more than an AI agent is a platform to create ia agents and bots in a relatively simple way. The proposal is similar to the one Openai offers with its personalized GPS store, but here the objective is to create the aforementioned agents of the IA specifically oriented to what the user needs. And it’s free.

Spectacular growth. These Chinese ia agents are having a spectacular success in the market. It is demonstrated by the statistics of mobile apps that have precisely come out to boost them. Quark, from Alibaba, has 149 million monthly active users and is in the world top 6 In just a few months. Other AI platforms such as Doubao (more than 100 million monthly active users) or Deepseek make more than 325 million users among the three.

This remembers Android. There is a curious simile, and it is that of how Android managed to conquer mobile telephony with that “free” model – for users, not for manufacturers – that allowed it to grow like foam. Startups and large AI companies in China also offer free access to these AI agents and platforms with that same goal: to gain volume and end up becoming de facto standards.

But chatgpt also follows that strategy. That tactic of offering access to AI models for free is not something new: Chatgpt has been doing it since it went on the market, and here the Freemium model is absolute dominator. You can use part of the functions in a limited way without problems, But if you want to use more, you have to pay. Its rivals – Gemini, Claude, etc. – follow the same scheme, and in the meantime we won we users.

Image | Alejandro Luengo

In Xataka | Four AI companies are monopolizing the intellectual future of humanity. They are not good news