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
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS