Chinese AI Companies Accelerate Model Updates Ahead of New Year

The Final Stretch in the Model Race

Chinese AI companies are in a frantic push to release major model updates before the Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) holiday. According to a report by the South China Morning Post, both Zhipu AI and Minimax, which recently went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, plan to bring significant updates to their flagship models within the next two weeks.

Update Details

Zhipu AI is reportedly working on GLM-5, the successor to its GLM-4.7 model, which includes improvements in creative writing, programming, and logical reasoning. Minimax is preparing its M2.2 model, focusing on parallel programming capabilities.

These moves coincide with a period throughout 2025 where Chinese companies have increasingly challenged the dominance of major US AI players. Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Baidu have also recently introduced their most powerful models, namely Qwen3-Max-Thinking, Kimi K2.5, and Ernie 5.0, respectively.

Competition and Strategies

However, it is noted that Deepseek plans only a smaller update this year. According to a source, the company's next major model will be a system with trillions of parameters, and its training process has been delayed due to its increased size.

On the other hand, tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba are investing billions of yuan in holiday advertising campaigns for their already popular AI chatbots. This is interpreted as an indication of the struggle to boost consumer interest in AI assistants and protect market share. Experts point out that such rapidly spreading technologies can also bring security debates, as seen in the OpenClaw example.

This intense model launch and marketing activity in China shows that competition in the global AI arena is heating up and innovation is not slowing down. Companies are racing against time to gain both technological superiority and user bases.