Alibaba and Tencent are releasing new models and spending millions on “red envelope” freebies to woo users ahead of the Lunar New Year
HONG KONG — China's biggest AI companies are releasing new models and handing out “red envelope” …
Nikkei AsiaCissy Zhou
Context & Ripple Effects
The campaign follows reports that Alibaba and ByteDance were preparing flagship releases for the holiday window, making the Lunar New Year a coordinated product-distribution moment rather than simply a launch date. Alibaba had already outlined a roughly $431 million Qwen app user-acquisition campaign, larger than the comparable Tencent and Baidu efforts cited in related coverage.
The stakes extend beyond model benchmarks: related coverage has tracked Chinese providers flooding the market with low-cost AI services after DeepSeek-R1. This article shows Alibaba and Tencent pairing model releases with consumer incentives to compete for habitual app use.
First-order effects
Alibaba and Tencent immediately give consumers a reason to try or return to their AI products while new models raise the visibility of those services during the holiday period.
The companies turn AI distribution into a paid acquisition push; Alibaba's previously reported Qwen campaign provides the clearest scale signal for that commitment.
Second-order effects
Rivals such as ByteDance, Baidu and other Chinese AI providers face pressure to match the combined cadence of flagship-model launches timed to the holiday and user incentives, rather than competing on model releases alone.
Subsidized acquisition can make consumer AI pricing and promotion more important competitive levers, raising the cost of winning users for firms without comparable distribution budgets.
Third-order effects
If repeatable, this points to a Chinese AI market in which durable consumer reach is shaped as much by distribution spend and existing app ecosystems as by model capability.
The pattern may favor large platforms able to fund both model development and recurring user-acquisition campaigns, though retention after promotions remains the key test.
The trend: Chinese AI competition is shifting from standalone model announcements toward subsidized, distribution-led campaigns designed to build consumer usage at scale.
Today marks a historic milestone in AI development: a tech company has now weaponized AI to incite a crowd event and DDoS-attack a bubble tea store. Alibaba is currently running a promotional campaign in China: users who engage in conversations with its AI chatbot Qwen can [image…
The ones seem to follow OpenAI-adjacent playbook (actually I would say what you might expect from OpenAI down the line) that target engagement and installation numbers Qwen - free milk tea Yuanbao (tencent) - red envelopes (which, also gets to be spent on milk tea) Alas, [image]
Alibaba's Qwen app today kicked off its CNY3 billion (USD420 million) Chinese New Year campaign, handing out free milk tea vouchers, briefly triggering minor system glitches in some regions. The AI app topped Apple's App Store free app chart at noon, followed by Tencent's Yuanbao…
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Claude opus 4.6 (adaptive) takes the lead on WeirdML with 77.9% ahead of gpt-5.2 (xhigh) at 72.2%. It sets a new high score on 3 tasks including scoring 73% on the hardest task (digits_generalize) up from 59%. Opus 4.6 is extremely token hungry and uses an average of 32k [image]
For anyone who is wondering, Pony Alpha is GLM-5, 100% sure. How? Go to settings in the Chats menu in openrouter, change the, Change the system prompt from “default” to “custom” and leave it blank. And then ask what model are you. Enjoy! [image]
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