China's AI firms release DeepSeek rivals in open tech drive

Months after DeepSeek's dazzling debut, China's generative AI firms are still racing with unabated fervor, clear proof that the competition in this sector is still dynamic, with vast innovation potential remaining.

On Monday, Beijing-based Zhipu.AI unveiled GLM-4.5, an AI platform that natively fuses reasoning, coding and agent capabilities. "The model now creates sophisticated standalone artifacts, ranging from interactive mini-games to physics simulations," read the update posted on Zhipu's official X account.

In a blog titled "Chinese Progress at the Front," OpenAI researchers noted that Zhipu is "independently building rival models at highly competitive prices."

Last week, Alibaba's AI division released a new update of the Qwen3 reasoning model, which is "smarter, knows more, can do more things and works better on agent tasks," according to the Qwen team.

"This is a small update! Bigger things are coming soon!" the team announced on X.

Another competitive player is Kimi K2, which was released this month by Beijing-based star startup Moonshot AI. This open-access model lets developers skip training from scratch and instead freely use, fine-tune and extend it as they wish.

Also on Sunday, Shenzhen-based tech titan Tencent debuted HunyuanWorld-1, a model that can instantly conjure a fully immersive, walk-through and fully editable 360-degree virtual world.

As of Thursday, the open model leaderboard on Hugging Face is topped by GLM-4.5, with Qwen and Tencent in hot pursuit. K2 sits at No. 9, while eight of the top ten models hail from China.

"Models like DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, MiniMax and Baidu Ernie bot are world-class, developed here and shared openly [and] have spurred AI developments worldwide," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, who attended an expo in Beijing this month.

Until now, China has launched 1,509 AI models out of the 3,755 models released worldwide, making China on top of the AI model releases.

Notably, the Chinese government last week proposed the creation of a global AI cooperation organization to advance tech collaboration worldwide.