Go tall or go wide? DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China’s AI industry, are taking very different strategies.
On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open weight model that anyone can play with. The startup says it performs just as well as the latest OpenAI and Google models, and even outperforms them on some key mathematical benchmarks.
That same day, ByteDance, whose dominance in AI applications we covered earlier, was introduced even more ways for people to use their chatbot, Doubao. ByteDance is now working with a Chinese smartphone maker to embed Doubao into the operating system, giving it access to different apps and allowing it to perform agent tasks with them. In other words, it’s coming for Apple’s Siri.
Both ByteDance and DeepSeek have AI applications with more than 140 million monthly users. But its latest announcements represent two diverging trends in China’s AI industry. While some companies are still competing with their Western counterparts to build increasingly capable models, others have quietly retreated from this game and are focusing on how they can integrate their AI tools into people’s everyday lives.
DeepSeek resurfaces
DeepSeek’s latest open-weight model may have disappointed some of its most loyal fans, who are still waiting for R2, a long-awaited update to the initial model that rocked Silicon Valley in January. Instead, DeepSeek released V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, which are better optimized versions of its previous model V3.2-Exp, released in September.
Still, V3.2 caused a stir in the AI industry because DeepSeek claims it can solve the kind of advanced math questions asked in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and its performance on other coding and reasoning tasks is said to be equal to or better than GPT 5 and Gemini 3. comes to the surface, it always makes a massive splash,” says Jen Zhu Scott, AI investor and co-founder and CEO of Power Dynamics, a modular data center solutions company.
However, I can’t help but feel that this arms race of AI models is getting a little tiring, especially since so many new ones have been released in the last month, each one claiming to take humanity one step further. In less than 20 days, we had OpenAI’s GPT 5.1, Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5; throw in Chinese open source models like Moonshot’s Kimi K2 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, and it becomes a total mess. My attention span can be summed up with this perfect meme.
“At the end of the day, we can’t keep up with all these differences between different models, different launches,” Zhu says. “It doesn’t really make a big difference, other than some kind of stock market speculation about who’s going to win.”
