ByteDance and DeepSeek Are Placing Very Different AI Bets

The diverging path of China's two leading AI players shows where the country's artificial intelligence industry is headed. DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China's AI industry, are adopting vastly different strategies. On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open-weight model that anyone can tinker with. The startup says it performs on par with the latest models from OpenAI and Google, and it even beats them on some key mathematics benchmarks. That same day, ByteDance, whose dominance in AI applications we covered previously, introduced ways for people to use its chatbot, Doubao.