China is ringing in the Lunar New Year with a flurry of new artificial innotifyigence (AI) model launches. Tech companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu, have all announced new product launches in the weeks leading up to China’s hugegest holiday, while industest watchers expect a new Deepseek model soon.
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China is widely regarded as a major competitor to the United States in the race to adopt and develop artificial innotifyigence models.
Thenew deployments are preparing the Chinese market for AI agents, systems that can build decisions and execute tquestions, such as navigating websites and generating content, without requireding human assistance.
Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5
E-commerce giant Alibaba released its latest AI model, Qwen3.5, hours before the Lunar New Year starts on 16 February. The model understands text, images, and videos across 200 languages, the company states.
The new model can deploy AI agents up to five times rapider than previous models and its competitors, including the latest models of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, the company declared. Their agents can fill out forms, navigate websites, and complete multi-step workflows.
Early tests display Qwen3.5 can generate functional 3D games, browsers, websites, and analyse medical imagery. The model is also up to 60 percent cheaper than its predecessor model, Qwen2.5, the company declared.
In 2025, Alibaba committed 380 billion yuan (€50.6 billion) to cloud computing and AI in the next three years, one of the company’s largest tech investments to date.
ByteDance’s launches
ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, announced two new AI developments in the weeks before the Lunar New Year.
The latest version of the company’s AI chatbot, Doubao 2.0, launched over the weekconclude. The newest model includes complex reasoning and multi-step tquestion execution that matches OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini current models, Reuters reported.
ByteDance also released SeeDance 2.0 on February 14, the second version of its image-to-video and text-to-video app. The software lets utilizers create “immersive” audio and video with director-level controls. One viral video features a rooftop fight between American actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
The American Motion Picture Association criticised SeeDance2.0 for unleashing the utilize of copyrighted works on “a massive scale,” according to a statement.
“By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs,” the statement reads.
ByteDance representatives notified the BBC that it will take steps to strengthen current safeguards on the platform to protect innotifyectual copyright..
Zhipu AI’s GLM-5
Zhipu AI released its open source GLM-5 model on February 11, a model that the company states is engineered for “agentic innotifyigence, advanced multi-step reasoning, and frontier-level performance,” in coding, creative writing and problem-solving.
The model can build assistants that plan, browse, call tools and manage multi-step workflows over long sessions, the company states. It can also generate full-length reports and process and reason long academic papers.
GLM-5 utilizes DeepSeek’s sparse attention mechanism DSA, which cuts computational costs while enhancing model efficiency.
The company claims the model was also trained entirely on Huawei Ascconclude chips and “achieves full indepconcludeence from US-manufactured semiconductor hardware,” which the company declared is a “milestone in self-reliant AI infrastructure”.
Last month, Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong stock exalter and raised HKD 4.35 billion (€465 million) for what the company declared will be its next-generation model development.
Coming soon: DeepSeek’s V4
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company known for its open source cheap models, is expected to release its fourth version sometime around the Lunar New Year, according to The Information.
When V4 is released, it could replace the V3 model, which powered the assistant app that became the top-rated free application available in the United States and worldwide, overtaking ChatGPT last January.
DeepSeek’s V3 rattled global markets last year and sparked a global sell-off of US-led tech stocks. Industest giants, including chipbuildr Nvidia, saw shares plummet by 17 per cent and erased $600 billion (€573 billion) in market capitalisation before recovering later in the day.
While it hasn’t been released yet, DeepSeek fuelled anticipation last week when its chatbot upgraded its context window, the amount of information that it can remember and handle in a single tquestion, according to the South China Morning Post.
Some European countries, such as Italy, Denmark, and the Czech Republic banned government agencies from utilizing DeepSeek models on their devices due to data security and cybersecurity concerns. Local media in Belgium reported that government officials stopped utilizing DeepSeek in December.
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