China’s “AI Big Four” Are Laying Off 70% of Staff—While the U.S. Breaks Into AGI

1. Once the Future of AI—Now Barely Hanging On

Remember when China’s “AI Big Four” were supposed to take over the world?

Between 2015 and 2019, companies like SenseTime, Megvii, CloudWalk, and Yitu were hailed as the future of AI—especially in computer vision. Billions in funding poured in. IPOs were announced. National pride was attached.

But now?

• SenseTime has lost over $7.5 billion since 2018.
• CloudWalk’s revenue dropped 36.6% YoY in 2024.
• Yitu shut down over 70% of its workforce and closed multiple regional offices.
• Megvii quietly pivoted to auto-driving after losing its edge in AI infrastructure.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

2. While China Cuts, the U.S. Builds

Let’s compare:

| Metric | China’s AI Big Four | U.S. AI Leaders | |-------|----------------------|-----------------| | 2024 Net Revenue | Falling | Exploding | | Layoffs | Up to 70% | Hiring surges | | Public Perception | “Struggling to survive” | “Leading the AGI race” | | Market Focus | Government contracts, surveillance | Open models, agents, AGI | | Core Tech | Computer vision | Multimodal LLMs, agents, tools, APIs |

While China’s AI firms are laying off engineers, cutting salaries by 20%, and shutting down offices, OpenAI is launching GPT-4o, Google is rolling out Gemini 1.5 Pro, and startups like Perplexity and Rabbit are shipping new AI-native products every month.

3. What Went Wrong in China?

🚨 3.1 Overreliance on Government Contracts

Most of the “Big Four” built their empires on:

• Facial recognition for public surveillance
• Smart city infrastructure
• State-sponsored projects

When government contracts slowed down?
So did their cash flow.

Unlike U.S. companies, they never truly cracked the consumer market.

🧠 3.2 Missed the LLM Wave

While the world pivoted to large language models (LLMs), China’s AI giants were still doubling down on computer vision.

By the time they tried to catch up, OpenAI was already on GPT-4.

SenseTime only launched its own LLM—“Daily New V6”—in April 2024.

It claims to outperform GPT-4o in math and multimodal understanding...
But with $7.5B in cumulative losses and massive layoffs, it may be too little, too late.

🧪 3.3 AGI Talk, No AGI Walk

China’s AI leaders are now talking about AGI, multimodal systems, and “bridging modalities.”

But here’s the thing:

• They’re still years behind in foundation model architecture
• Their compute is often dependent on Huawei chips, not NVIDIA
• They lack an open-source ecosystem like Hugging Face or LangChain
• And most importantly: no breakout product adoption

Even their most advanced AI assistants are barely used in the wild.

4. Meanwhile in the U.S.: AGI Labs Are Breaking Everything

Let’s be real:
The U.S. AI ecosystem is chaotic—but it’s working.

• OpenAI is building AI agents that can browse, click, and reason
• Anthropic’s Claude 3 is beating GPT-4 in live benchmarks
• Meta is open-sourcing Llama 3 and building its own AI OS
• Startups are shipping AI-native browsers, OSes, and companions

And all of it is happening on top of trillion-parameter models, massive GPU clusters, and billions in VC funding.

5. The Global AI Race Is No Longer Close

China’s AI strategy was once seen as a serious threat to U.S. dominance.

Now?

It’s clear:

• The U.S. is building AGI infrastructure
• China is trying to survive the pivot

Yes, Chinese companies like SenseTime and Yitu are now investing in multimodal LLMs.

But with layoffs, declining revenue, and no breakout product, they’re miles behind.

6. Final Thought: The Real Divide Isn’t East vs. West—It’s Build vs. Burn

The biggest difference isn’t geography.
It’s mindset.

• In the U.S., AI companies are shipping fast, failing loud, and reinventing interfaces
• In China, AI giants are cutting costs, playing defense, and chasing hype cycles

If this continues, the next generation of AI tools, agents, and assistants won’t come from Beijing or Shanghai.

They’ll come from San Francisco, London, or maybe Warsaw.

“The U.S. is building AGI. China is building press releases.”
—An investor, anonymously

SEO Keywords (for your reference):

China AI collapse, AI Big Four layoffs, SenseTime financial losses, China vs US AI race, AGI development 2024, OpenAI vs China AI, Chinese AI startups failing, AI layoffs China, multimodal LLMs, AGI infrastructure, US AI dominance, Chinese tech downturn, computer vision vs LLMs, AI startup comparison, global AI innovation gap