[News] ByteDance, Alibaba, DeepSeek Reportedly Ready February Model Launches, Fueling China’s AI Race

China is rumored to roll out new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday in February. According to ijiwei, sources say that ByteDance and Alibaba are preparing to launch a new generation of flagship AI models around the period. Previously, EE Times China noted that recent updates to DeepSeek’s GitHub repository revealed a new architecture identifier, “MODEL1,” widely seen as the technical foundation for its next-generation flagship model, DeepSeek V4. Sources say the model could be released as early as mid-February 2026, further intensifying competition across the industry.

ByteDance Advances AI Push With New Models and Doubao Expansion

Ijiwei notes that ByteDance may launch three new AI models as early as next month. Specifically, ByteDance is preparing to roll out a new generation of flagship models: the Doubao 2.0 large language model, the Seeddream 5.0 image generation model, and the Seeddance 2.0 video generation model.

Its Doubao chatbot is also gaining increasing traction. As the report points out, citing sources, by December 2025, Doubao’s monthly active users had reached 163 million. On the back of this massive user base, Doubao has become China’s largest AI application by number of users. Notably, the report adds that ByteDance has now integrated the Doubao chatbot into the Douyin app.

Alibaba Reportedly Lines Up New Qwen 3.5 Model

As for Alibaba, ijiwei indicates that it plans to launch its next-generation flagship model, Qwen 3.5, during the Lunar New Year holiday. The model is said to offer strong capabilities in mathematical reasoning and code generation, with targeted optimizations for complex reasoning tasks.

Sources also note that during the Lunar New Year period, Alibaba will roll out large-scale marketing campaigns for the consumer-facing version of Qwen, directly targeting competition with ByteDance’s popular Doubao chatbot.

China’s AI Race: New Entrants Emerge as Tencent Tries to Catch Up

Meanwhile, according to Global Market Bulletin on Sina Finance, another Chinese large language model startup, Moonshot AI, released its new Kimi K2.5 model earlier this month, showing strong performance in code generation and visual data understanding. However, unlike ByteDance and Alibaba, these emerging competitors lack both proprietary cloud platforms and the large user bases needed to sustain large-scale model development.

In China, the only technology heavyweight with the scale to compete head-to-head with ByteDance and Alibaba in the artificial intelligence race is Tencent Holdings, though it currently trails the two rivals in AI model development. Over recent months, Tencent has stepped up efforts to catch up. In September last year, former OpenAI scientist Yao Shunyu joined the company as chief AI scientist, and under his leadership Tencent has reorganized its AI teams, the report adds.

Read more

• [News] Chinese AI Models Reportedly Hit ~15% Global Share in Nov. 2025, Fueled by DeepSeek Open-Source Push
• [News] Alibaba T-Head Unveils New AI Chip Said to Match NVIDIA H20 as IPO Speculation Builds

(Photo credit: ByteDance)