China Focus: Chinese AI firms race to release models, angling for next DeepSeek moment

Chinese AI companies are racing to launch new models over the Lunar New Year holiday, angling for the next game-changing DeepSeek moment.

Days ago, a mysterious test version dubbed Pony Alpha became a hot topic in the AI community for its exceptional coding performance, sparking widespread speculation about its developer. On Thursday, it was revealed to be GLM-5 by Beijing-based AI company Zhipu AI.

The new model has achieved high scores on top agent benchmarks and has been used successfully in many agent flows during its stealth period, according to a post on OpenRouter's X handle. This stealth-testing approach demonstrates Chinese developers' growing confidence in their product capabilities.

Late last month, Moonshot, another tech firm from Beijing, unveiled its new Kimi 2.5 release, surprising the AI community with its open-source performance across agents, coding, image, video and a range of general intelligence tasks.

The open-source model is going to save 90 percent of the cost, and create a "Kimi 2.5 moment," said Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent Silicon Valley analyst, calling it "incredibly profound."

DeepSeek has also quietly kicked off a gray-scale test on its app and web interfaces. The context window length has been expanded directly from the previous 128K tokens to one million tokens, suggesting a significant upgrade in the pipeline.

The push to replicate the significant global impact of DeepSeek's R1 launch in January 2025 has extended to video and image AI as well.

ByteDance's recently tested text-to-video tool Seedance 2.0, which can generate a multi-shot film sequence in roughly 60 seconds with rather simple prompts, has sparked a short video creation craze across the global cyberspace.

"The childhood era of AIGC is over," said Feng Ji, creator of the globally hit game Black Myth: Wukong, when discussing Seedance 2.0.

"It's fortunate that, at least for now, Seedance 2.0 originates from China," added Feng, awestruck by the AI capabilities.

Meanwhile, Alibaba's AI arm Qwen launched its next-generation image generation foundation model, Qwen-Image 2.0, on Tuesday. The open-source Qwen model is powering AI tools for the International Olympic Committee in preparation for the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics.

China's technology titans, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, are leveraging the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday season to lock in users for their intelligent assistants, gearing up to accelerate the build-out of an R&D-to-consumption ecosystem anchored on their respective AI models and platforms.

The country had 1.125 billion internet users by the end of 2025, and its user numbers of generative AI technology reached 602 million, a striking 141.7 percent increase from the end of 2024, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.