Chinese AI companies rush to ship new models before Lunar New Year

Chinese AI companies are pushing to ship major model updates ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday. Zhipu AI and Minimax, both of which recently went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, plan to release updates to their flagship models within the next two weeks, according to the South China Morning Post. Zhipu AI is reportedly working on GLM-5, a follow-up to GLM-4.7, with improvements in creative writing, programming, and logical reasoning. Minimax is preparing M2.2, which focuses on parallel programming capabilities. Throughout 2025, Chinese companies have increasingly challenged the dominance of major US AI players.

Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Baidu have all recently unveiled their most powerful models: Qwen3-Max-Thinking, Kimi K2.5, and Ernie 5.0. Deepseek, however, is apparently only planning a smaller update this year - according to a source, the company's next major model will be a trillion-parameter system, and training has been delayed due to its growing size. Meanwhile, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba are pouring billions of yuan into holiday advertising campaigns for their already popular AI chatbots.