BEIJING, Feb 14 — As China prepares for Lunar New Year holidays starting tomorrow, rivals to DeepSeek are scrambling to release artificial intelligence (AI) 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 avoiding 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 United States (US). 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 one 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 released the Doubao 2.0 chatbot, the company said on Saturday. The new model is capable of deep thinking and long, multi-step task execution that matches the capabilities of US rivals OpenAI's GPT-5.2 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro.
Doubao is China's most popular AI chatbot app, with the most weekly active users, according to data published by Quest Mobile in December last year.
Thursday's (February 12) 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 (formerly Twitter), 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 yesterday.
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 CN¥3 billion (RM1.69 billion) last week on a coupon giveaway campaign to promote "agentic commerce", where AI handles consumers' online shopping.
It added that this drove more than 120 million consumer orders in the six days through Wednesday (February 11).
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 US 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, according to a regulatory filing yesterday.
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 (RM2.4 billion), higher than Zhipu's HK$558 million (RM278.9 million).
Shanghai-based MiniMax has developed popular apps such as Hailuo AI, a video-generation tool, and Talkie, a character-interaction app that lets users engage with AI-powered virtual personas.
Tencent
On Tuesday (February 10), Tencent's Hunyuan team released a low-storage, compressed AI model, HY-1.8B-2Bit, designed to be used on consumer hardware, including mobile phones.
iFlytek
On Wednesday, iFlytek 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
On Wednesday, NetEase Youdao launched LobsterAI, a desktop-level personal assistant agent that can perform tasks like 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 like DingTalk and Feishu.
Dexmal
On Tuesday, embodied-intelligence startup Dexmal unveiled DM0, an AI model designed for robot-related scenarios. It integrates multimodal internet data with driving, navigation and robotic operation data, and was trained across multiple robot platforms.
