The Spring Festival AI red packet competition has intensified further. On February 13th, the first phase of the "Doubao Celebrates New Year" event officially launched, with the topic "Doubao Red Packet" trending online.
Most users reported receiving amounts between 0.1 yuan and 8.88 yuan, with 1.66 yuan and 1.88 yuan being common. A small number of users shared screenshots showing larger wins of 66.6 yuan or 88.8 yuan, while the top prize of 8888 yuan has an extremely low probability.
Users can participate by opening the Doubao App, entering the "Doubao Celebrates New Year" activity page, and engaging with AI-powered New Year features such as generating festive greetings, creating New Year portraits and avatars, designing blessing cards, and producing video greetings. Participants are eligible for a lottery draw to win cash red packets, which are withdrawable upon winning.
The event's second phase will occur during the Spring Festival Gala broadcast on New Year's Eve, February 16th. Doubao will host three rounds of interactive prize draws, distributing over 100,000 tech gifts and cash red packets, including the top 8888 yuan prize, to viewers nationwide. Notably, Doubao's large model 2.0 was officially launched today, accompanied by upgrades to Seedance 2.0 for audio/video and Seedream 5.0 Preview for imaging, forming a comprehensive multimodal AI matrix.
Separately, the second round of the "Qianwen Treats, Share 3 Billion" campaign is set to begin tonight, February 14th. The official team is currently finalizing the details. When inquired within the Qianwen App about new features, it indicated that a major highlight is planned for tonight. The first wave of the freebie card event, which offered 25-yuan no-threshold vouchers, concluded at 24:00 on February 12th. Many users expressed that the initial allocation of 21 cards was insufficient.
On the afternoon of February 13th, Qianwen responded that it was working overnight on a solution and would provide an update the next day, acknowledging user feedback while humorously noting the team needed a rest after distributing vouchers for a week.
The Spring Festival period has historically been a prime window for internet platforms to acquire users. From WeChat's "Shake" red packets in 2015 to short-video platform card collection events in 2022, this year's spotlight is on various AI products. Public data indicates that three major companies—Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—have allocated over 4.5 billion yuan for Spring Festival marketing. ByteDance's Doubao large model has announced it will give away tech gifts and cash red packets. These four firms are leveraging their core ecosystem strengths to offer New Year benefits to users nationwide.
Behind this red packet campaign is the significant advancement of China's artificial intelligence industry over the past year. Since 2025, with the emergence of landmark models like DeepSeek, domestic large models have made continuous breakthroughs in areas such as conversational understanding, logical reasoning, text-to-image/video generation, and complex instruction execution, fueling vibrant innovation in AI applications.
According to industry estimates, the number of AI enterprises in China exceeded 6,000 by 2025, with the core industry scale expected to surpass 1.2 trillion yuan. Product forms have evolved from single tools to comprehensive ecosystems covering algorithms, platforms, and industry-specific solutions. As mainstream models reach stages of being "usable" and "user-friendly," leading domestic companies have shifted their competitive focus from "which model is stronger" to "which product gains more users" and "who can help users develop AI usage habits first."
Alibaba is concentrating on "consumer entry points," fully integrating Qianwen into core ecosystem scenarios like Taobao Flash Sales, Alipay, and Amap. Through the "Qianwen Treats" campaign, it aims to guide users toward adopting a "one-command completion of the entire consumption process" habit. Tencent is leveraging its social foundation, with its Yuanbao AI effectively connecting AI capabilities to social scenarios via WeChat and QQ relationship chains. Baidu has opted for a more direct user outreach strategy, embedding red packet activities and AI interactions within its main Baidu App.
In contrast to the other three companies' "real money" subsidy approaches, ByteDance's Doubao large model is utilizing the Spring Festival Gala, a top traffic event, to distribute over 100,000 tech gifts to the national audience on New Year's Eve. While the four companies employ different strategies, they share a common goal: building on technological maturity to retain users, establish ecosystems, and lay an intelligent foundation for future commercial landscapes.
However, as the festive season concludes and subsidy campaigns wind down, the long-term value of this competition will ultimately be measured by sustained product optimization, effective protection of user privacy and data security, and the ability of services to genuinely address practical user needs.