The San Francisco-based AI design app Lovart was officially launched on Wednesday, focusing on North American users.
Lovert
Beijing – China’s developers are driving some of the latest artificial intelligence tools targeting the global market.
Melvin Chen moved from China to San Francisco and co-founded AI design startup Lovart.
“We’ll focus on North America as our first step,” Chen said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. He previously led the China business of Capcut, a popular video editing app from Buidan, which is the first to rank in the photo and video category of Apple’s US App Store.
Lovart uses AI to generate logos, stickers and other branding visuals based on text prompts. The new version, which will be released on Wednesday, includes the “ChatCanvas” feature, which claims to make certain editing easier. Clients may ask a professional designer to switch between the two icons. The task is difficult to explain in words alone, but it is simple when it contains visuals.
He expects Lovart to surpass 1 million users in one week after its launch. However, he said the app wouldn’t come to China any time soon. This is mainly because it is based on the Claude 4 AI model of humanity and other models from Openai. Neither is officially available in China.
Beijing has to operate strict firewalls that give the generated AI model green light for public use and block sites like Google and Facebook. Businesses also have their own rules about where they can use their services.
While a majority of Lovart’s team is based in San Francisco with the aim of improving product localization, Chen said some of the production teams are in China. He refused to share operational costs and said the startup would seek investor funds after ensuring sufficient user growth.
Lovart offers free usage options, with monthly subscription fees of up to $90.
Video AI Applications
In the global AI race, the US government has tightened restrictions on American companies selling advanced semiconductors to China over the past few years. San Francisco-based Openai launched ChatGpt Chatbot in late 2022. Until January this year, China created a clear rival with Deepseek’s breakthrough.
However, analysts have long anticipated that the benefits of Chinese AI are likely to be in applications rather than models, especially given that internet-based Chinese companies were able to build large-scale food delivery and short video apps for the large local consumer market.
Already in the AI video generation, Kuaishou’s Kling and Shengshu’s Vidu have gained global users in the past 18 months. In the realm of AI agents, which can automatically perform a series of complex tasks, Manus is gaining international attention.
“We’re committed to providing a range of services to our customers,” said Charlie Dye, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester. “They excel at cost-effective model training and quick consumer app iterations, and often prioritize open source accessibility.”
“Now, China’s model is competing globally, challenging US domination while reducing AI costs,” he said.
Another advantage is that Chinese models such as Deepseek and several other models are open source. This means it can be downloaded and used by developers.
HugFace is an online platform where people can try out open source AI models, and regularly shows that the Chinese model is one of the top trending models for users.
As of Wednesday, the Kimi K2 coding-centric model launched this month was first ranked on the site, followed by Alibaba’s QWEN3 coding-centric mode, which was released earlier in the day. In 3D models from images, Tencent’s Hunyuan is the first to rank, while France-based Mistral’s Voxtral is the first to rank from audio text to text.
Chen said Lovart will focus on AI to generate images and videos rather than 3D models.
“AI is a new camera… [for] He said the goal is to help startups build traction by hosting events with design communities, including New York, Tokyo and Europe.
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According to Sensor Tower, ChatGpt is the most popular AI app in the West, with an average of 70 million users in the US and 144.6 million in Europe.
Google’s Gemini was the distant second in both markets, while Microsoft Copilot was ranked third in the US, while Deepseek held the third spot in Europe.
During a visit to Beijing last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that almost every user of Deepseek downloaded the model to run it locally in countries around the world. He also emphasized that AI development priorities are changing.
“I think it’s going to become more and more important as time goes on, which models are the smartest,” he said. “One of the models will be the most useful.”
