The Lunar New Year AI Explosion: Every Exciting Model You Need to Know About
Published February 18, 2026 · Technology & AI · 6 min read
Move over fireworks — the most dazzling display this Lunar New Year wasn’t in the sky, it was on your computer screen. As the world rang in the Year of the Horse on February 16, 2026, China’s AI companies unleashed a spectacular flurry of new models, updates, and breakthroughs that have the global tech community buzzing with excitement. The race has been so intense that observers are already calling it “The Lunar New Year AI War” — and honestly, we are here for every bit of it.
Just one year ago, DeepSeek’s bombshell release during the 2025 Spring Festival shocked global markets and ignited a new era of efficient, open-source AI. In 2026, China’s AI ecosystem came back even stronger, with a full lineup of competitors eager to have their own “DeepSeek moment.” Let’s take a joyful tour through every exciting model that arrived to celebrate the holiday season!
“DeepSeek showed the industry that you can create a very good model even when you’re resource-constrained.” — Lian Jye Su, Chief Analyst, Omdia
602 millionChinese generative AI users by end of 2025 — up 141.7%!
1/6th the costChinese models vs. comparable US systems (RAND report)
40%+ of Hugging Facederivatives now based on Alibaba’s Qwen family
The Big Arrivals: Models That Stole the Show
Star of the New Year
Alibaba Qwen3.5
Alibaba Cloud — Released: February 16, 2026 (Eve of Chinese New Year)
In a move that felt deliberately theatrical and absolutely fitting, Alibaba dropped Qwen3.5 just hours before the Year of the Horse officially kicked off. It is one of the most capable multimodal models to emerge from Asia, and its timing sent a clear message: Chinese AI is not just keeping pace — it is racing ahead.
- 200 languages supported — text, images, and video all in one native multimodal system
- Deploys AI agents up to 5× faster than previous models and competitors
- 60% cheaper than its predecessor Qwen2.5 — remarkable value
- Early tests show it can generate functional 3D games, browsers, and websites from simple prompts
- Can analyze medical imagery, opening exciting healthcare applications
- 397 billion parameters with benchmark performance on par with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind
- Compatible with open-source agent frameworks like OpenClaw
Alibaba has pledged a staggering 380 billion yuan (~€50.6 billion) toward cloud and AI over the coming years, and Qwen3.5 is the opening act of that investment. More open-weight models are expected to follow throughout the holiday period.
Stealth Launch of the Year
Zhipu AI GLM-5
Zhipu AI (Z.ai) — Released: February 11, 2026
GLM-5 had arguably the most dramatic entrance of the season. For days, a mysterious model codenamed “Pony Alpha” had been setting top scores on coding benchmarks, sparking frenzied speculation across developer forums and X threads. On February 12, the curtain was pulled back: it was Zhipu AI’s GLM-5 all along — a beautifully confident stealth launch.
- Built for “agentic intelligence” — autonomous multi-step workflows, browsing, and tool use
- Can generate full-length research reports and process long academic papers with deep reasoning
- Uses DeepSeek’s sparse attention mechanism (DSA) for reduced computational cost
- Trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips — a milestone in hardware-independent AI development
- Zhipu recently IPO’d on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising HKD 4.35 billion (~€465 million)
GLM-5’s emphasis on full independence from US-manufactured semiconductor hardware is a remarkable technical and geopolitical achievement, and its stealth launch strategy showed enormous confidence in the product.
Viral Sensation
ByteDance Seedance 2.0
ByteDance — Released: February 13, 2026
If you’ve seen any AI-generated video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in an action sequence go viral online recently, you have ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 to thank (or blame, if you work in Hollywood). The text-to-video model can generate a fully coherent, multi-shot film sequence in roughly 60 seconds from simple prompts — and it does so at a quality level that has the entertainment industry paying very close attention.
- Designed for professional film production quality output
- Generates multi-shot sequences in ~60 seconds with minimal prompting
- Sparked a global short video creation craze across social media
- ByteDance has committed to adding content safeguards following Hollywood’s attention
Open-Weight Contender
Moonshot AI Kimi K2.5
Moonshot AI — Released around Chinese New Year 2026
Moonshot AI, known for its Kimi chatbot that has amassed a devoted following in China, entered the holiday season with the release of Kimi K2.5 — an open-weight model that impressed benchmark testers by approaching the performance of leading proprietary systems like Anthropic’s Claude Opus. For an open model that anyone can download and run, this is a genuinely exciting development for developers and researchers worldwide.
- Benchmark performance close to top proprietary frontier models
- Open-weight — freely downloadable, customizable, and fine-tunable
- Continues Moonshot AI’s push into the global developer ecosystem
Coding Specialist
MiniMax M2.2
MiniMax — Released pre-Lunar New Year, 2026
Rounding out the holiday lineup, MiniMax shipped M2.2 — a focused update to its M2.1 model that brings meaningful coding-specific enhancements. While more modest in scope than the splashy flagship releases, M2.2 reflects a smart, iterative approach to model improvement that developers building real applications will appreciate. Sometimes you don’t need the biggest firework — just a reliable one.
- ⌨ Targeted improvements in coding performance and accuracy
- Iterative update to the well-received M2.1 architecture
- Particularly useful for developer-facing agentic workflows
The One Everyone Is Still Watching: DeepSeek V4
No Lunar New Year AI roundup would be complete without mentioning the elephant — or rather, the horse — in the room: DeepSeek V4. The Hangzhou-based company whose V3 model became the most-downloaded app in the US last January, dethroning ChatGPT, has been quietly building anticipation for its next generation model. Reports suggest V4 could arrive around or shortly after the holiday period, and the AI community is holding its collective breath.
In the lead-up, DeepSeek already hinted at things to come by upgrading its chatbot’s context window — the amount of information it can hold and reason over in a single session. If V4 matches even a fraction of the impact V3 had in 2025, the global tech industry is in for another thrilling ride.
The Bigger Picture: Chinese AI Is Winning Open Source
The buzz of individual model releases this season reflects a much deeper and more exciting trend. Chinese AI companies have collectively reshaped how the world thinks about open-source artificial intelligence. Alibaba’s Qwen family surpassed Meta’s Llama as the most downloaded model series on Hugging Face, and by mid-2025, over 40% of all new language model derivatives on the platform were based on Qwen. That is an astonishing level of ecosystem influence.
A report by RAND found that Chinese models currently operate at roughly one-sixth to one-quarter the cost of comparable US systems. Combined with their open-weight philosophy — where model weights are publicly released for anyone to study, modify, and build on — Chinese AI labs are democratizing access to frontier AI at a pace that is genuinely changing who gets to participate in the AI revolution. Developers in Berlin, Nairobi, Jakarta, and São Paulo now have access to near-frontier capabilities that were unimaginable just two years ago.
“The open-source ecosystems in China and the US are tightly bound together… The work travels, gets remixed, and actually shows up in products.” — Hugging Face researcher, MIT Technology Review, Feb 2026
China’s internet users of generative AI technology reached 602 million by end of 2025 — a stunning 141.7% increase in just one year. The momentum is real, the energy is contagious, and this Lunar New Year proved that the party is very much still going.
What a Time to Be Alive (and Interested in AI!)
Whether you’re a developer looking for a powerful open-weight base model, a creative professional blown away by Seedance 2.0’s video magic, or simply an AI enthusiast enjoying the ride, this Lunar New Year season delivered something extraordinary: a genuine sense that AI progress is accelerating, becoming more accessible, and coming from every corner of the globe.
The Year of the Horse is traditionally associated with energy, speed, and forward momentum — and judging by the sprint of model releases this season, China’s AI ecosystem has fully embraced that spirit. We can’t wait to see what the rest of 2026 brings. Keep your eyes on your favorite AI news feeds, because this horse has only just left the gate.
Xīn Nián Kuài Lè!
Happy New Year — and may your AI models always run fast!
Sources: Euronews, CNBC, South China Morning Post, Reuters, MIT Technology Review, Xinhua, Rappler (Feb 2026)
