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DeepSeek’s latest AI model was poised for a major launch. And yet, the markets did not react as expected to the release of DeepSeek’s V4 preview, despite the Chinese startup making technical headway with its latest software. Investors are less likely to swoon at the announcement of a more powerful, more efficient, and less expensive AI model. They know what we mean, and they’re waiting for it to do something impressive. This is not to imply that DeepSeek failed at its most recent endeavor, because it clearly did not. While its latest model has outperformed predecessors, it still solidifies China’s […]
Read full articleChinese AI lab DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first venture capital round at a valuation that has climbed from $20 billion to $45 billion in weeks, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. The round is expected to be led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, with cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba […]
In just a few weeks of talks, DeepSeek's potential valuation has reportedly soared from $20 billion to $45 billion.
Value soars in ongoing fundraising discussions as investors including Tencent seek slice of AI lab
China made the inner workings of the A.I. model open to all, and that’s starting to look like a soft-power win.
April 2026 turned out to be one of the most explosive months in AI history. OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5, Anthropic sparked debate by withholding Claude Mythos, and new releases from Google, DeepSeek, and other Chinese labs pushed reasoning, agentic capabilities, and multimodality to new heights.
PLUS: How to do a brand refresh with Claude Design
On Friday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited new flagship model. Notably, the model can process much longer prompts than its last generation, thanks to a new design that helps it handle large amounts of text more efficiently. Like DeepSeek’s previous models, V4 is open source, meaning it is available…
Tencent has updated its Hunyuan AI model, its first major release since it recruited Yao Shunyu, a leading AI scientist from OpenAI. Tencent’s Hy3 model, currently available in preview, offers improvements in areas from complex reasoning to coding. The Chinese technology conglomerate is playing catch-up with other Chinese AI developers including ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek. China is betting big on open-source AI to offer alternatives to major US players. Back in 2023, Tencent claimed its then-new Hunyuan LLM was a more powerful and intelligent option than the versions of ChatGPT and Llama available at the time. Tencent has backed AI start-ups including Moonshot AI and StepFun, hoping that they will boost its cloud computing division. The company has also restructured its research team to improve the quality of training data. It aims to double its investment in AI to more than $5 billion this year. Not to be outdone, DeepSeek announced its V4 Flash and V4 Pro Series, the newest vers
