Recently, the ranking of Apple's free APPs in China has undergone significant changes. Tencent's Yuanbao application has risen rapidly, successfully surpassing Doubao and jumping to second place in the ranking. The top spot is firmly occupied by DeepSeek. This phenomenon not only reflects the fierce competition in the domestic application market, but also reveals the rapid development trend of the big model industry in China.
Tencent Yuanbao is a tool application focused on improving productivity, and its core technology is based on Tencent’s Hunyuan model. Although the application was officially launched in May 2024 and its initial promotion efforts were limited, it has a big gap between its user scale and its competitors. According to QuestMobile data, as of December last year, Tencent Yuanbao had only 2.11 million monthly active users, ranking eighth. However, since Yuanbao split from Tencent's technology engineering business group to the cloud and smart industry business group in January this year, its development speed has accelerated significantly, and it has started a process of rapid iteration.
Tencent Yuanbao officially connected to the DeepSeek-R1 full-blood version on February 13, and supported the two major models of Hunyuan and DeepSeek. Just four days later, its self-developed in-depth thinking model "Hunyuan T1" was also launched in grayscale. As the AI function of WeChat search enters the grayscale testing stage, a large number of users flocked to the Yuanbao platform, resulting in a sharp increase in service pressure. Tencent had to urgently mobilize Yuanbao resources to support WeChat search.
On February 21, Tencent Yuanbao added a DeepSeek function, which can recognize pictures and analyze them. Users only need to send any picture, and Yuanbao can interpret the picture content in detail. At present, all models in Yuanbao support image understanding and file parsing functions, which greatly improves the user experience.
At the same time, ByteDance's bean bun application has also performed well in the field of big models. In December last year, Doubao's monthly active users reached 75.23 million, becoming one of the most popular AI native applications in China. However, with the rapid rise of Tencent Yuanbao, market competition has become increasingly fierce. Major manufacturers have been connecting to open source models or independently developed models to improve product performance and user experience in order to compete for more market share.
It is worth noting that the rapid rise of DeepSeek and the fierce competition among large companies have brought huge challenges to some small AI startups. These companies need to find their own unique development path in the fierce market competition in order to gain a foothold in the industry and continue to develop.