China has placed robotics and artificial Intelligence (AI) at the centre of its manufacturing strategy – and this Lunar New Year, its tech giants are racing to unveil new AI models.
DeepSeek is reportedly preparing to launch its next-generation V4 model, following the success of V3, which briefly overtook ChatGPT to top Apple’s US App store rankings.
TikTok-owner, ByteDance has upgraded Doubao, China’s most-used AI chatbot, and released Seedance 2.0, a video-generation model capable of producing cinematic clips from minimal prompts.
Alibaba has rolled out Qwen 3.5, promoting “agentic commerce” – AI-driven online shopping, after a $400m coupon campaign generated more than 120 million orders in 6 days.
Start-ups, Zhipu AI and MiniMax, dubbed China’s “AI tigers”, have launched new open-source models and raised hundreds of millions in Hong Kong listings.
Meanwhile, Tencent, iFlytek, NetEase Youdao and robotics firm Dexmal have introduced models targeting mobile devices, enterprise users and real-world robotic applications.
(Editor: Ken Eseni)
