Chinese tech giant Tencent on Thursday released a new AI model that it says can answer queries faster than global hit DeepSeek's R1, in the latest sign the startup's domestic and overseas success is putting pressure on its larger competitors in China.

The fresh round of funding comes amid fierce competition in China's AI sector and follows the emergence of rival DeepSeek's ( DEEPSEEK) success with a low-cost AI model. Zhipu secured a 3 billion yuan investment in December last year,

See how Tencent’s newest AI platform called Hunyuan Turbo S compared to top competitors, including DeepSeek-R1-Zero.

Tencents AI assistant, Yuanbao, became the most downloaded free app on Chinas Apple App Store, surpassing DeepSeek in downloads on Tuesday. Last week, it also overtook ByteDances Doubao AI, fueled by Tencents

The rise in popularity of Yuanbao follows Tencent’s move to integrate DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model in February.

The company explained the model is capable of near “instant replies” within a second by doubling the output speed and cutting the delay of the first word out by almost 44%. Different from DeepSeek-R1 and other “reasoning models,

Tencent launched a new artificial intelligence model today, called the Hunyuan Turbo S, which it claims is faster than "DeepSeek R1, Hunyuan T1, and other slow thinking models that need to 'think for a while before answering,

Tencent's Yuanbao AI chatbot has overtaken DeepSeek as China's most downloaded iPhone app, intensifying the AI rivalry.

Tencent's new model doubles response speed while matching top performers like GPT-4o in reasoning tasks, intensifying the AI race between China and the U.S.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. joined the ranks of companies measuring themselves against DeepSeek by touting how much faster its latest AI model is.

Tencent’s AI chatbot app, Yuanbao, has climbed to the top of the free app download rankings in Apple’s China App Store as of March 3, surpassing DeepSeek.