From Hype to Execution — Chinese AI Models Race for Lunar New Year Market Share

According to ETO Markets, Chinas AI sector saw an unprecedented wave of major model launches during the 2026 Lunar New Year, as companies raced to debut flagship systems across video, multimodal, coding, and agent-native AI.

ByteDance led the rush with a three-model lineup: SeeDance 2.0 for video generation, Seedream 5.0 for imaging, and Doubao 2.0. SeeDance 2.0 went viral globally for its cinematic, highly controllable character rendering—hailed by industry creators as the strongest video‑generation model yet.

DeepSeek rolled out a major upgrade, expanding its context window from 128K to over one million tokens, enabling single‑pass processing of book‑length inputs and supporting legal, research, and large‑code‑base scenarios. Its knowledge base has been refreshed through May 2025.

Alibabas Qwen 3.5 is set to open‑source during the holiday, introducing a new hybrid‑attention mechanism optimized for long‑context and multimodal tasks. Backed by a ¥3 billion incentive campaign, Taobao users placed more than 120 million AI‑powered orders in six days.

Zhipu AI officially launched GLM‑5, expanding parameters to 744B and introducing a sparse‑expert architecture that boosts coding performance by over 20%. Its coding bundle sold out immediately.

MiniMax released M2.5, the worlds first agent‑native production‑grade coding model. Priced at one‑tenth of GPT‑5 while matching Claude Opus performance, it leads on Multi‑SWE‑Bench and accelerates task execution by 37%.

On the consumer front, Tencent Yuanbao surged to the top of the App Store within 14 hours, powered by a ¥1 billion giveaway and deep integration with WeChat and QQ for group interactions, media co‑watching, and creative image remixing.

Meanwhile, industry players such as Trip.com, Beike, and Kuaishou are rapidly customizing open‑source models for travel, real‑estate, and video‑understanding scenarios，becoming the quickest adopters of domain‑specific AI.

Compared with last year, Chinas AI race has shifted from model capability to full‑system competition. The focus is now on real‑world adoption and conversion efficiency rather than parameter size.

ETO Markets tracks this shift to help you stay ahead as AI monetization accelerates.