Micah Jonah, February 14, 2026
As China prepares to celebrate the Lunar New Year, domestic AI companies are racing to release new models, a year after the breakout success of DeepSeek with its R1 and V3 platforms.
DeepSeek is set to unveil its next-generation V4 model, which follows last year’s V3 that helped its AI assistant app overtake ChatGPT in popularity on Apple’s U.S. App Store. The company recently expanded its chatbot’s “context window” from 128,000 to 1 million tokens, allowing the AI to process book-length passages in a single command.
Rivals are also pushing innovations:
ByteDance upgraded its video-generation AI Seedance 2.0 and is preparing a Doubao chatbot upgrade.
Alibaba plans to launch Qwen 3.5, following the success of Qwen 2.5-Max and a major domestic shopping promotion.
Zhipu AI released GLM-5 with advanced coding capabilities and long-running agent task support.
MiniMax launched M2.5, following a strong Hong Kong listing.
Tencent released a low-storage model, HY-1.8B-2Bit, optimized for mobile devices.
iFlytek unveiled Spark X2, focusing on sectors like education, healthcare, and automotive.
NetEase Youdao launched LobsterAI, a personal assistant agent for desktop and mobile.
Dexmal released DM0, an AI model designed for robot integration and multimodal operations.
Investors are closely watching China’s AI market, which is rapidly expanding with firms aiming to match or surpass U.S. counterparts. Analysts note that these moves ahead of the Spring Festival highlight the country’s ambition to solidify its position in global AI innovation.
