Go excessive or go extensive? DeepSeek and ByteDance, the 2 leaders of China’s AI business, are adopting vastly totally different methods.
On Monday, DeepSeek launched DeepSeek V3.2, one other open-weight mannequin that anybody can tinker with. The startup says it performs on par with the newest fashions from OpenAI and Google, and it even beats them on some key arithmetic benchmarks.
That very same day, ByteDance, whose dominance in AI functions we lined beforehand, launched much more methods for individuals to make use of its chatbot, Doubao. ByteDance is now working with a Chinese language smartphone producer to embed Doubao into the working system, giving it entry to totally different apps and permitting it to conduct agentic duties with them. In different phrases, it’s coming for Apple’s Siri.
Each ByteDance and DeepSeek have AI apps with over 140 million month-to-month customers. However their newest bulletins signify two diverging developments in China’s AI business. Whereas some corporations are nonetheless competing with their Western counterparts to construct ever extra succesful fashions, others have quietly withdrawn from that sport and are specializing in how they will combine their AI instruments into individuals’s on a regular basis lives.
DeepSeek Resurfaces
DeepSeek’s newest open-weight mannequin could have disillusioned a few of its most loyal followers, who’re nonetheless ready for R2, a much-anticipated replace to the preliminary mannequin that rocked Silicon Valley in January. As a substitute, DeepSeek launched V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, that are better-optimized variations of its earlier mannequin V3.2-Exp, launched in September.
Nonetheless, V3.2 induced a stir within the AI business as a result of DeepSeek claims it might probably remedy the kind of superior math questions requested on the Worldwide Mathematical Olympiad, and its efficiency on different coding and reasoning duties is supposedly on par with or above GPT 5 and Gemini 3. “It immediately dawned on me why they name the corporate DeepSeek with the whale as a motif. As a result of similar to a whale, it not often surfaces, however each time it surfaces, it at all times makes a large splash,” says Jen Zhu Scott, an AI investor and the cofounder and CEO of Energy Dynamics, a modular data-center options agency.
Nevertheless, I can’t assist however really feel like this arms race of AI fashions is getting a bit tiring, notably as a result of so many new ones have been launched within the final month, every claiming to take humanity one step larger. In lower than 20 days, we had OpenAI’s GPT 5.1, Google’s Gemini 3 Professional, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5; throw in Chinese language open supply fashions like Moonshot’s Kimi K2 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, and it turns into a complete mess. My consideration span might be summarized by this excellent meme.
“On the finish of the day, we won’t sustain with all these hairline variations between totally different fashions, totally different releases,” Zhu says. “It really would not make an enormous distinction, aside from some type of inventory market hypothesis on who’s gonna win.”
