Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Zhipu have unleashed major AI model upgrades just before the Lunar New Year, intensifying competition in China's rapidly evolving artificial intelligence sector. Zhipu's new GLM-5 model topped benchmarking rankings, surpassing recent releases from rivals like Moonshot AI, while ByteDance's video model Seedance 2.0 has drawn widespread praise online.

Zhipu hiked prices for its coding service by 30% this week, capitalizing on surging demand for AI development tools. The company's Hong Kong-listed shares surged as much as 34% following JPMorgan's coverage initiation and positive early feedback on GLM-5. The timing is strategic—Chinese tech firms historically leverage the weeklong holiday to accelerate user acquisition in consumer internet applications.

The model rollouts come as the industry anticipates DeepSeek's next-generation architecture release during the February holiday. Analysts note the performance gap between Chinese and US large language models is narrowing rapidly. However, the aggressive spending on user acquisition and subsidies has raised concerns about sustainability, with major players including Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent all competing for market share in what some describe as an unsustainable traffic war.