By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Feb 14 (Reuters) – As China prepares for Lunar New Year holidays starting on Sunday, rivals to DeepSeek are scrambling to release artificial-intelligence models a year after it burst onto the scene with its game-changing R1 and V3 models.
With DeepSeek set to launch its next-generation V4 model soon, according to tech news site The Information, many other Chinese AI firms have released or are preparing to launch their own models in the hopes of stealing the spotlight – or at least avoid being off-guard again during this year’s Spring Festival.
Below are the companies and models looking to make a Spring Festival splash:
DEEPSEEK
The Hangzhou-based startup’s V4 would replace last year’s V3 model, which powered the AI assistant app that overtook ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available on Apple’s App Store in the U.S. Investors and industry insiders are also on the lookout for R2, successor to the R1 model.
This week DeepSeek fuelled anticipation when its web and mobile chatbot upgraded its “context window” – the amount of information it can remember and handle in a single task, from 128,000 to 1 million tokens, the unit of data processed by the AI model.
This means the chatbot can now process book-length passages of text to answer a single user command.
BYTEDANCE
The makers of short-video platform TikTok are soon expected to release an upgrade of Doubao, China’s most popular AI chatbot, in terms of active users.
Thursday’s release of video-generation AI model Seedance 2.0 has generated comparisons to DeepSeek’s global rise, going viral on Chinese social media and drawing widespread praise on X, including from the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. Seedance 2.0 can produce high-quality cinematic videos based on a few prompts, or even one.
The tech giant released picture-generation model Seedream 5.0 Lite on Friday.
ALIBABA
Alibaba, the first Chinese firm to respond to DeepSeek’s viral ascent last year, with Qwen 2.5-Max, is preparing to launch Qwen 3.5.
The e-commerce giant’s Qwen app is riding a wave of growing domestic usage after it spent 3 billion yuan ($400 million) last week on a coupon giveaway campaign to promote “agentic commerce”, where AI handles consumers’ online shopping.
This drove more than 120 million consumer orders in the six days through Wednesday, the company said.
ZHIPU
Zhipu AI released its open-source GLM-5 model on Wednesday, with enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running agent tasks.
Zhipu is considered one of China’s “AI tigers” – promising startups vying with the U.S. to win the AI race. Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last month, alongside rival MiniMax, another AI tiger.
Both stocks have rallied strongly as investors bet on the companies benefiting from China’s AI boom. Zhipu plans a secondary listing in Shanghai, a regulatory filing on Friday showed.
MINIMAX
MiniMax released its M2.5 open-source model on its overseas agent website on Wednesday. The company’s Hong Kong listing raised HK$4.8 billion ($620 million), higher than Zhipu’s $558 million.
Shanghai-based MiniMax has developed popular apps like Hailuo AI, a video generation tool, and Talkie, a character interaction app that enables users to engage with AI-powered virtual personas.
TENCENT
Tencent’s Hunyuan team on Tuesday released a low-storage, compressed AI model, HY-1.8B-2Bit, designed to be used on consumer hardware including mobile phones.
IFLYTEK
iFlytek on Wednesday released Spark X2, trained entirely on Chinese-made chips. The company said the upgrade focuses on practical deployment in sectors including education, healthcare, automotive and agent-based applications.
NETEASE YOUDAO
NetEase Youdao on Wednesday launched LobsterAI, a desktop-level personal assistant agent that can perform tasks such as information retrieval, scheduling and data analysis by executing workflows locally on a user’s computer after authorisation.
The product supports mobile and PC connections and allows remote interaction via enterprise apps popular among Chinese companies such as DingTalk and Feishu.
DEXMAL
Embodied-intelligence startup Dexmal on Tuesday unveiled DM0, an AI model designed for robot-related scenarios. DM0 integrates multimodal internet data with driving, navigation and robotic operation data, and was trained across multiple robot platforms.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by William Mallard)
Comments