Doubao AI has become a central figure in China’s generative AI race. Developed by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin, it was launched in August 2023 and quickly rose to prominence. By early 2026, it had over 155 million weekly active users, more than any other AI chatbot in China.  During the Lunar New […]

Since the start of the generative‑AI boom, enterprises have been torn between building their own models and licensing proprietary systems from a handful of powerful vendors. The arrival of the open‑source DeepSeek family in early 2025 disrupted that landscape. Within seven days of its R1 release on 24 January 2025, DeepSeek attracted more than 100 […]

China’s AI market in 2026 is consolidating around teams capable of executing at scale, a shift closely tied to broader China tech trends and AI ecosystem shifts that favor infrastructure and deployment over experimentation. StepFun AI stands out among the “Six Tigers” because it focuses on multimodal foundation models and real deployment rather than traffic […]

In 2025, Xiaohongshu (RedNote) had become too large and commercially significant to be described as just another social platform. Reuters reported in January that Xiaohongshu was already serving more than 300 million users, placing it firmly among China’s most influential consumer platforms.  In the same month, the app gained more than 700,000 new users in […]

Ask a team of engineers what they need from AI, and the answer is usually practical. They need code that follows team conventions, agents that stay on task, and pricing that supports daily use. MiniMax artificial intelligence has filled that gap over the past 14 months. Between the release of MiniMax-text-01 in January 2025 and […]

Chinese social media is a fast-moving universe. To understand how brands succeed in this environment, many marketers study Chinese consumer behavior and the digital ecosystems shaping modern retail. With over 1.3 billion WeChat users and more than 1 billion short-video users across platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, brands can no longer treat the country as […]

WeChat is one of the most powerful digital platforms in the world, yet most first-time users misunderstand what it actually does. People often download it because a friend, supplier, or client asked them to. They open the app expecting a simple messaging tool and quickly realize the environment feels different. WeChat operates as a digital […]

The emergence of DeepSeek, a family of large language models (LLMs) from the Hangzhou‑based start‑up DeepSeek Inc., marked a pivotal moment in the global artificial intelligence landscape. In December 2024 and January 2025, the company released DeepSeek‑V3 and DeepSeek‑R1, high‑performance LLMs that generated headlines for their impressive reasoning ability and surprisingly low training and inference […]

Digital life in mainland China operates through an interconnected system of search engines, social platforms, and super apps rather than a single gateway. Baidu remains the country’s primary structured search provider, yet younger consumers increasingly begin their journeys inside content-driven environments such as RedNote, Douyin, and WeChat.  Understanding Chinese search behavior requires examining how these […]

As China progresses through 2025 into 2026, its economy exhibits both resilience and structural transition. Official data shows China’s GDP grew by 5.0 percent in 2025, keeping growth near the government’s target amid slower global demand and domestic rebalancing. The services and technology sectors provided much of this support, while consumer retail showed steady expansion. […]

Enterprises evaluating DeepSeek are not choosing between two models. They are deciding how much reasoning their workflows actually require and when it is worth paying for it. DeepSeek V3, R1, and V3.1 introduce a structural shift in enterprise AI by separating high-volume language processing from computationally intensive problem-solving. This changes how organizations design automation, allocate […]

China artificial intelligence in 2026 is no longer just about chatbots or benchmark races. It has evolved into a fully integrated innovation stack—foundation models, multimodal systems, platform ecosystems, and industry deployments operating together at scale. Over the past 18 months, Chinese labs have accelerated open-weight releases, reduced inference costs, expanded long-context capabilities, and deeply embedded […]