Current State of Chinese LLMs: Market Leaders, Open Models, and Business Models

This is a summary of the current Chinese LLM scene based on research shared on r/LocalLLaMA. The analysis categorizes major players by their proprietary models, open-weight offerings, and business approaches.

Major Companies and Their Models

ByteDance: Their proprietary model dola-seed (also called Doubao) is described as the current market leader, playing a role similar to OpenAI. They also have an open-source Seed OSS 36B model, but the source notes it doesn't get much discussion.

Alibaba: Their proprietary model Qwen Max is reportedly not widely used. However, Alibaba is noted as strongest in open-weight offerings, especially small models, and leads in text-to-image (T2I) and text-to-video (T2V) capabilities.

Tencent: Their proprietary model Hunyuan is also not widely used. Their T2I and T2V efforts are considered second to Alibaba's.

Baidu: Their proprietary model Ernie is not widely used, with Baidu being stronger in autonomous driving.

Xiaomi: Their proprietary model is Mimo V2 Pro, and they have an open-weight model Mimo V2 Flash 309B-A15B.

DeepSeek: The Innovative Side Project

DeepSeek is described as a side project from an algorithmic trading firm. Current usage in China is reportedly a close second to ByteDance's Doubao, with about half the users. The source highlights DeepSeek as "the most innovative among all Chinese LLM companies," having invented techniques like MLA, MTP, DSA, and GRPO. The analysis suggests its business model might be similar to the 'Six AI Small Tigers,' but speculates the project might be more for attracting investments and gaining political access.

The Six AI Small Tigers

This group is characterized by highly similar business models: releasing big open-weight models to gain recognition while providing cheap inference services. The source questions their long-term viability.

• Zhipu: IPOed in Hong Kong. Their current GLM-5 model is described as a derivative of DeepSeek.
• Minimax: IPOed in Hong Kong. They have a proprietary MiniMax 2.7 model and an open-weight MiniMax 2.5 model, which is described as a "vanilla MoE 229B-A10B." This architecture reportedly gives them significantly lower inference costs than others.
• Moonshot: Their Kimi open-weight model is described as a derivative of DeepSeek.
• Stepfun: Their open-weight Step 3.5 flash model uses a mixture of full attention and sliding window attention (SWA) layers at a 1:3 ratio. It's described as a 196B-A11B model with a business model similar to Minimax's, though their model is reportedly not as good.
• Baichuan: Their Baichuan-M3 235B is described as a medical-enhanced open-weight model based on Qwen3Moe.
• 01 AI: Their last open-weight model was Yi-34B, published in November 2024. They now reportedly focus on enterprise AI agent systems, making them "irrelevant to people here."