Recode China AI

💸Chinese AI Companies Just Had Their Payday

DeepSeek, Moonshot, and StepFun are raising billions.

May 11 • Tony Peng

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April 2026

🤔DeepSeek-V4 Doesn't Have to Win to Matter

DeepSeek-V4 may not be the best open LLM, but its architectural innovations will lift the entire open ecosystem.

Apr 28 • Tony Peng

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🫶🏻Chinese AI Companies Have a New Benchmark: Anthropic

China's AI companies have a new role model. That role model is also the most hawkish AI company on China.

Apr 23 • Tony Peng

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🪩Alibaba is Bankrolling China’s AI Video Race—Then Racing Against It

Two Chinese video AI startups just raised $300 million each. Their biggest investor is also their biggest rival.

Apr 13 • Tony Peng

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👀DeepSeek and Moonshot: The AI Labs That Refuse to Be Normal

Two in-depth profiles reveal what China's top AI labs actually look like from the inside.

Apr 6 • Tony Peng

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March 2026

🪩While Sora Dies, China’s AI Videos Are Busy Going Viral

AI is building China's hottest new entertainment format, but also threatening the careers of the people who used to fill it.

Mar 31 • Tony Peng

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🤖Chinese Star Robot Maker Unitree Doesn’t Look Like a High-Tech Company

How a 480-person company becomes the world's largest maker of humanoid robots.

Mar 23 • Tony Peng

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😱AI Anxiety Is Spreading Among People in China

Behind China's OpenClaw frenzy, a quieter wave of fear and anxiety among normal people is building.

Mar 16 • Tony Peng

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😮Alibaba Qwen's Lead Just Stepped Down. Is China's Open-Source Moment at Risk?

Team reorg, resource battles, and the pressure to commercialize, seemed to be the forces that pushed Lin out.

Mar 4 • Tony Peng

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👀DeepSeek’s Next Move: What V4 Will Look Like

Sparsity is DeepSeek's sauce to scale intelligence under hard constraints

Mar 2 • Tony Peng

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February 2026

👍DeepSeek Didn't Show Up—GLM-5 and Qwen3.5 Did, and They Came to Win

Chinese AI labs stay within three months of top U.S. models as GLM-5 targets Claude Opus 4.5 and Qwen 3.5 challenges Gemini 3.0

Feb 23 • Tony Peng

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🙌ByteDance’s 'Gemini 3.0 Moment': Meet Seedance 2.0 and Seed2.0

ByteDance aims to become one of the world's top three AI companies—and its latest model releases bring that goal within reach.

Feb 17 • Tony Peng

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