China's AI race heats up with Lunar New Year launches
Chinese firms timed launches around the Spring Festival (mid-February 2026), hoping to score big like DeepSeek did last year.
Zhipu AI, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Moonshot are all in the race with some seriously upgraded tools.
GLM-5 and Seedance 2.0 lead the pack
Zhipu AI's GLM-5 (aka "Pony Alpha") stands out for its coding skills and top agent scores.
ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 is grabbing attention online, especially on Tencent's Weixin Index.
Together they show how China's tech scene is pushing for smarter, more versatile AI, with GLM-5 emphasizing coding and agent capabilities and Seedance 2.0 focused on text-to-video generation and multi-step tasks.
Qwen-Image 2.0 powers Olympic tools; Kimi 2.5 shows strong performance
Alibaba's Qwen-Image 2.0 is powering Olympic prep tools, while Moonshot's Kimi 2.5 showed strong open-source performance across agents, coding, image and video tasks, and an analyst said open-source models are going to save 90% of the cost—pretty impressive in a crowded market.
JPMorgan's picks for AI models to watch
JPMorgan says Zhipu AI and MiniMax are worth watching if you're into tech stocks—especially since their models work best when built into popular apps instead of just being chatbots.
ByteDance has shown strong consumer traction for some products, and Tencent has registered platform interest and activity around low-storage models.
DeepSeek's upcoming V4 model could shake things up
DeepSeek is rumored to drop its V4 model soon—Tencent could benefit most if that happens, with Trip.com and Kuaishou also in the mix.
With so much competition, expect even more creative uses for AI coming out of China this year.