Tencent’s AI Bot Passes DeepSeek as China’s Favorite on iPhones

Tencent has integrated DeepSeek R1 into a slew of its products.

By Bloomberg News | Updated: 4 March 2025 16:50 IST

Tencent’s AI Bot Passes DeepSeek as China’s Favorite on iPhones

Photo Credit: Reuters

Tencent is the world’s biggest games distributor

Highlights

DeepSeek’s chatbot has galvanized China’s tech ecosystem
Tencent has integrated DeepSeek R1 into a slew of its products
Questions persist about how firms will eventually monetize such services

Tencent Holdings's Yuanbao AI chatbot passed DeepSeek to become the most downloaded iPhone app in China this week, highlighting the intensifying domestic competition. Tencent's app integrates its in-house Hunyuan artificial intelligence tech alongside DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model and has taken over at a time of acute interest and competition around AI in the country.

Three of the top five most downloaded free apps are AI bots, with ByteDance's Doubao joining Tencent and DeepSeek.

Now a month into its sensational rise, DeepSeek's chatbot has galvanized China's tech and internet ecosystem, accelerating investment and new product releases. Alibaba Group Holding has started benchmarking itself against DeepSeek and announced a $53 billion (roughly Rs. 4,63,090 crore) investment in AI.

China's Baidu Said to Launch Upgraded AI Ernie Model in Mid-March

Tencent, for its part, has integrated DeepSeek R1 into a slew of its products, including WeChat's search feature as well as powering a virtual companion in its evergreen game Peacekeeper Elite. Last week, Tencent also launched a Hunyuan Turbo edition that it says is faster than DeepSeek in delivering answers.

Shenzhen-based Tencent is the world's biggest games distributor and its WeChat platform is used by more than 1.4 billion people. That may have helped it secure the top spot, as the company looks to ramp up its presence in the race for AI users.

Questions persist about how companies will eventually monetize such services, which are presently free to use and increasingly released in open source form for other developers to take advantage of, as DeepSeek does with its AI models. For now, the focus remains on getting the most users on board and Tencent has stolen a march on rivals like Alibaba and Baidu, which have made bigger bets on AI than the Shenzhen company.

Tencent Releases New AI Model, Says Replies Faster Than DeepSeek-R1

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.