Chinese artificial intelligence groups have been rushing out model updates before the lunar new year holiday, as the world wakes up to the sector’s major advances led by start-up DeepSeek in the face of US chip restrictions.
On Monday, the eve of China’s most important annual holiday, the Hangzhou-based company released a new open-source model for image generation, cementing its reputation as the disrupter-in-chief in a field previously dominated by US giants. It came hot on the heels of model releases from tech giant Alibaba and start-ups Moonshot and Zhipu.
“This is the equivalent of dropping a massive release on Christmas Eve. We’ve all been working overtime to get stuff out before the holiday,” said one product manager at a large language model start-up.