The Chinese Academy of Engineering has named open-source large language models from Chinese startup DeepSeek and an artificial intelligence chip design from US firm Nvidia among the world’s top 10 engineering achievements. The selection, announced by Engineering, a journal under the academy, places both companies alongside major space, ocean, infrastructure, and biomedical projects recognized for their global impact.
Engineering highlighted DeepSeek’s two large language models, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, which launched between December last year and January this year. The journal said the models pioneered a new approach to exploring general artificial intelligence under resource-constrained conditions, achieved through systematic innovations in model algorithms and engineering optimization. This progress, according to Engineering, has helped make DeepSeek one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence developers worldwide and showcases the momentum of open-source contributions in the field.
Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing unit architecture, introduced in March last year to meet the complex computational demands of artificial intelligence inference, was also recognized. The journal noted that Blackwell has markedly accelerated training, cut inference latency to seconds, lowered the computational thresholds for ultra-large models, and helped usher artificial intelligence systems into the trillion-parameter era. The architecture’s emphasis on performance for inference workloads underscores its role in scaling next-generation model deployment.
Since 2021, Engineering has annually selected the world’s top 10 engineering achievements from innovations completed in the past five years that have proven effective in practice and exerted a global impact. The list covers landmark projects, critical technical equipment, and original breakthroughs. This year’s cohort also includes the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Perseverance Rover, the European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope, and China’s Full-Ocean-Depth Manned Submersible, emphasizing advances in space and deep-sea exploration.
Two major Chinese infrastructure and environmental initiatives were featured: the South-to-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project, which optimizes national water resource distribution, and the Taklimakan Desert ‘Edge-Locking’ Project, an ecological barrier along the desert’s perimeter. Other cited breakthroughs span high-performance carbon fiber composite materials, humanoid robots progressing from laboratory research to real-world applications, and antibody-drug conjugates that advance targeted cancer therapies. Together, the selections reflect a broad spectrum of engineering innovation, with artificial intelligence developments from DeepSeek and Nvidia standing out for their impact on model design, training, and deployment at unprecedented scales.
