The United States may want the world to choose sides in the AI race with China, but in Africa, many businesses are pursuing a more pragmatic strategy: using Chinese models where they offer better value or flexibility, while keeping their options open.<\/p>\n
For example, when African insurtech platform Curacel expanded the range of artificial intelligence (AI) models powering its internal infrastructure, it did not look only to Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
Instead, the Nigeria-based firm \u2013 which provides AI-powered claims<\/a> and fraud-detection infrastructure to African insurers and fintech companies \u2013 added GLM-5.3, a Chinese model developed by Beijing-based Zhipu AI<\/a>, alongside models from Western providers.<\/p>\n Henry Mascot, chief executive and co-founder of Curacel, said Chinese models delivered comparable results at lower cost on high-volume tasks such as coding, data extraction, classification and customer support, although Western systems remained stronger on the most demanding reasoning and reliability-sensitive work.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our experience, the leading Chinese models have closed much of the performance gap,\u201d Mascot said.<\/p>\n He said Curacel\u2019s multi-model set-up allowed it to use GLM-5.3 selectively.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can route suitable workloads to it based on quality and cost without moving the entire stack or locking ourselves into one vendor,\u201d Mascot said. \u201cWe have also used lower-cost [Chinese] models within client deployments.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States may want the world to choose sides in the AI race with China, but in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3259,24,2477,53,25,2699,387,72861,6010,926,132,933,7826,9603,72860,63714],"class_list":["post-148648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-africa","tag-ai","tag-alibaba","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-beijing","tag-china","tag-curacel","tag-deepseek","tag-glm","tag-google","tag-huawei-technologies","tag-kimi","tag-moonshot-ai","tag-nairobi","tag-nigeria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}