Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) said yesterday its Weixin messaging app, China’s largest, is allowing some users to search via DeepSeek’s (深度求索) artificial intelligence (AI) model, as firms race to link up with the AI start-up that has grabbed global attention.
In a beta test, Weixin is testing access to DeepSeek for searches, Tencent said in an e-mailed statement to Reuters.
The move by the Chinese tech giant is notable as integrating DeepSeek brings in an external AI platform, while tech firms compete fiercely in developing the most advanced AI.
Photo: Qilai Shen, Bloomberg
Weixin uses Tencent’s proprietary Hunyuan-Large language model to enrich its AI search, a spokesperson said.
Tencent is exploring the integration of multiple products with DeepSeek, including Tencent Cloud AI Code Assistant and Tencent Yuanbao, another AI assistant app, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
DeepSeek is being tested by Weixin, which serves domestic users, not its sister app WeChat, which targets overseas users. The two had a combined 1.38 billion users at the end of September last year.
DeepSeek last month upended the AI world, launching a free AI assistant that it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent services. It quickly overtook US rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple Inc’s App Store.
Among Chinese companies seeking to capitalize on DeepSeek’s potential breakthrough, automaker Great Wall Motor Co (長城汽車) and leading telecoms providers are integrating the AI model released by DeepSeek into their offerings.
In related news, Elon Musk’s AI start-up xAI is to release its Grok 3 chatbot today, with the billionaire describing it as the “smartest AI on Earth,” the Tesla Inc CEO said in a post on X.
Musk teased the planned launch of Grok 3 chatbot during a video conference at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Thursday, calling it an AI model that would outperform every competing tool that’s been released so far.
The model was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on mistakes that it makes by going back and forth through the data to achieve logical consistency, Musk said.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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