On February 23, as soon as the Hong Kong stock market opened, Tencent and Alibaba saw their stock prices rise at a 45-degree angle. Their closing prices increased by 3.07% and 3.47%, respectively, compared to the previous trading day. Capital markets cast their votes with real money in favor of the two major AI participants during the Spring Festival, indirectly responding to the intensive rollout of large AI models over the past month. From Doubao handling a peak traffic flow of 633 billion tokens per minute on New Year’s Eve and Alibaba Cloud releasing a new model, to Moon Dark Side setting new financing records and Alibaba’s "Qianwen Help Me" processing nearly 200 million orders during the holiday, both tech giants and smaller players engaged in a high-frequency product competition with no spectators.

The focus of this battle has shifted beyond robotic performances on the Spring Festival Gala stage. Three days before New Year’s Eve, a marketing professional from an internet platform company joked with industry peers, "There’s an 80% chance the red packet activities during the Gala will glitch—some companies’ systems crashed in the past." Three days later, the flawless operation of the system demonstrated the maturity of AI infrastructure.

Today, the spotlight has moved from embodied intelligence on stage to the behind-the-scenes large model applications penetrating millions of households. The stage showcases spectacle, but daily life unfolds offstage. In the past, ensuring smooth operations was the baseline for the Spring Festival Gala to flex its muscles; today, it is merely the starting point of mature AI infrastructure. As large models truly enter households, a deeper contest over user habits and commercial closed loops has reached its climax.

**Intense Competition at the Start of the Year** The large model arena is not limited to tech giants, and the Spring Festival competition involved more than three players. On February 15, the day before New Year’s Eve, MiniMax launched the MiniMax-M2.5-highspeed version, emphasizing extreme inference capabilities. On February 17, the first day of the Lunar New Year, Moon Dark Side was reported to be nearing the completion of a new funding round exceeding $7 billion, with a valuation between $100 billion and $120 billion.

Large model developers outside the major tech giants avoided head-on marketing clashes during the Spring Festival but made waves in the capital markets. On February 20, the first trading day of the Year of the Horse in Hong Kong, Zhipu’s stock price surged to HK$725 at the close, up 42.7% from the pre-holiday closing price of HK$508. On the same day, MiniMax’s stock price rose to HK$970, a 14.5% increase from HK$847 before the holiday.

By February 23, Zhipu and MiniMax’s stock prices retreated, closing at HK$560 and HK$840.5, respectively. Meanwhile, the two major AI players during the Spring Festival, Alibaba and Tencent, saw their stock prices rebound. Alibaba closed at HK$152.2, up 3.47% from the previous day’s close of HK$147.1, while Tencent ended at HK$538, a 3.07% increase from HK$522.

Amidst the fluctuating stock prices, technological iterations continued unabated. During this period, Zhipu openly addressed the unexpected traffic surge following the release of GLM-5 by issuing an apology and offering refund or extension options. It then fully disclosed the technical details of GLM-5, explaining how this next-generation foundational model is shifting programming paradigms from "Vibe Coding" to "Agentic Engineering." Moon Dark Side’s commercial achievements came to light, with its Kimi K2.5 large model generating cumulative revenues in under 20 days that surpassed its total annual revenue for 2025.

Leveraging the festive season, each player revealed their cards. Tencent continued to bet on social interactions. On the Lantern Festival, users could watch the Hunan TV Lantern Festival Gala live within the Yuanbao app, which also featured red packet drops. On the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, users chatting in the app received random red packets. Eleven years after WeChat Red Packets made a splash, Yuanbao aims to secure its position as an AI gateway through social relationships.

Following its promotional campaign, the Qianwen App launched a "First Daily Order Discount" event, offering users a minimum discount of 3.8 yuan on their first daily order when using Qianwen. This could be combined with existing discounts on platforms like Taobao Flash Sale, Fliggy, and Damai. Taobao Flash Sale was a key focus; before the Spring Festival, reports indicated that Alibaba’s core management encouraged teams to aggressively pursue flash sales in early 2026 without concerns for the next three years.

On February 6, Qianwen App invested 30 billion yuan in Spring Festival promotions. Over the 11-day campaign, more than 130 million users experienced AI-assisted ordering for the first time. While Qianwen did not disclose how many orders came from Taobao Flash Sale, on the first day—when only Flash Sale supported free orders—activity exceeded 10 million orders in nine hours.

ByteDance’s strategic moves cannot be overlooked. According to insiders, ByteDance is developing an AI chip and is in talks with Samsung Electronics for production, aiming to receive chip samples by the end of March. Another report revealed that ByteDance’s chip team has recently expanded to over 1,000 members, with the AI chip division comprising more than 500 people and the CPU team around 200.

Although ByteDance has not commented, the demand is evident, and supply must keep pace. As one large model developer remarked, "The Spring Festival is like an open-book exam. Once the papers are collected, grading begins."

**The "First Client"** Seedance 2.0 became a focal point in this large model competition. Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, described the Spring Festival Gala as Seedance 2.0’s "first client." Specifically, the AI and large model capabilities used throughout the Gala’s creative process were powered by Doubao’s large model. Even before Seedance 2.0’s launch, the team had been deeply customizing solutions for multiple Gala programs.

In the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, the creative program "Song of Riding the Wind" featured a moving ink-wash-style video behind the singer. Seedance 2.0 generated galloping horses with ink diffusion, making it one of the projects with the deepest AI involvement and highest technical challenges in the Gala collaboration.

The challenges lay in "style comprehension, motion fluency, multi-subject consistency, and fidelity to the original image." A ByteDance representative cited motion fluency as an example: "While maintaining the strong stylistic elements of ink-wash brushstrokes and ink diffusion, the galloping horses needed to appear lifelike rather than like pasted animations. However, training data for ink-wash paintings is scarce, demanding higher model generalization."

The representative noted that Seedance’s multimodal video generation capabilities ensured each horse’s gallop followed natural laws, with realistic joint movements and smooth motions free of stiffness. The body’s force, acceleration, and deceleration adhered to physical logic, and the rhythm exuded power and韵律, all while preserving the ink-wash style’s essence.

"Celebrating the Flower Goddess" was another experiment. Representing twelve months and twelve flowers, Seedance 2.0 customized unique visual backgrounds for each performer in the hollyhock and goldfish segments. AI-generated imagery blended with live stages, creating interactive special effects.

Then there was "Dream Base." On the massive stage set, several digital twins identical to the lead actor appeared simultaneously, blurring the lines between reality and illusion. According to Volcano Engine insiders, Seedance 2.0 attracted numerous client inquiries during the Spring Festival.

The technology not only brought ink-wash paintings to the stage but also paved the way for robots. The embodied intelligence of Unitree Robotics, Songyan Power, and Magic Atom, which danced nimbly on the Gala stage, relied on large models. "We maintain an open attitude toward large model developers," said Zhang Miao, CMO of Songyan Power, after the Gala, mentioning Doubao’s model. Before the Gala, Doubao’s tech gift list included Unitree’s G1 EDU U2 Advanced Edition, Songyan Power’s Bumi robot, and Magic Atom’s MagicDog-Pro, all integrated with Doubao’s model.

**Pushing the Limits** Tencent’s Yuanbao unusually disclosed daily and monthly active user figures on February 18: over 50 million and 114 million, respectively. The previous day, Yuanbao released a report on its "Distribute 1 Billion Cash" campaign: during the Spring Festival, users participated in over 3.6 billion lottery draws and completed more than 1 billion AI tasks via the "Creation" section. This meant that, on average, one in every 3.6 draws involved AI creation.

According to Yuanbao’s campaign rules, engaging in AI creations granted chances to win red packets. While the tasks were simple, repeated participation could cultivate habits.

ByteDance also let numbers speak. Doubao recorded 1.9 billion AI interactions, helping users generate 50 million Spring Festival-themed avatars and over 100 million New Year greetings. These figures, frozen in server logs on New Year’s Eve, mark a traceable milestone in AI history.

However, the impact on app adoption experienced a delay. When the Gala ended, the top four free apps on the Apple App Store were Ant Afu, Qianwen, Yuanbao, and Doubao. By the morning of the first day of the Lunar New Year, Doubao had climbed to third place. From 7 p.m. that day onward, Doubao reclaimed the top spots in the overall free, free app, and free efficiency categories.

The download peak did not occur on New Year’s Eve. According to Qimai Data, Doubao’s estimated downloads were 23,900 on February 16 but rose to 29,900 by February 18, returning to pre-early-February levels.

In contrast, Qianwen’s changes were subtler. During the Spring Festival, users accessing Qianwen’s web version were automatically served by Qwen3.5-Plus, launched on New Year’s Eve and marked with a prominent blue "New Model" label. The Qianwen App also introduced Qwen3.5-Plus, now offering three model choices: Qwen3-Qianwen, Qwen3.5-Plus, and Qwen3-Max.

Compared to the trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max, the Qwen3.5-Plus version has 397 billion total parameters, reduces deployment GPU memory usage by 60%, and increases maximum inference throughput by up to 19 times. These technical improvements reflect underlying cost considerations.

When discussing the Gala’s robotic performances, Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree, highlighted several world-first technologies, such as consecutive one-legged backflips and aerial maneuvers using ejectors. But what did the Spring Festival yield for large model developers? "Users are just one aspect," said Li Jinqing, an analyst at Bida. "Red packets, greetings, shopping, travel—these high-frequency scenarios were compressed into seven days. For the first time, AI faced such diverse real-world demands in such a short period. 1.9 billion interactions, 1 billion creations, 130 million orders—these aren’t lab test data but real user-generated training samples. Capital markets see these gains, users feel them, and developers can tangible grasp them."