AI models are coming out thick and fast from China at a rate that it’s getting hard to keep track.
Chinese food delivery company Meituan has released the Longcat Flash model that compares to DeepSeek V3 and Gemini 2.5 Flash. The Mixture of Experts model has 560B parameters with 18B-31B activated parameters. The model is open-source, with the weights and the source code released under the MIT license.
“We introduce LongCat-Flash, a powerful and efficient language model with 560 billion total parameters, featuring an innovative Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture,” Meituan says on its Hugging Face page. “The model incorporates a dynamic computation mechanism that activates 18.6B∼31.3B parameters (averaging∼27B) based on contextual demands, optimizing both computational efficiency and performance. To achieve advanced training and inference efficiency, we employ a shortcut-connected architecture that expands computation-communication overlap window, achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference cost-effectively. Our comprehensive training and scaling strategies ensure stable, efficient training, while tailored data strategies enhance model performance. Now we release LongCat-Flash-Chat, a non-thinking foundation model that delivers highly competitive performance among leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks,” it adds.
On benchmarks, the model seems comparable to top non-thinking models and versions including Deepseek V3.1, Qwen3, Kimi K2, GPT 4.1, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.
But what makes this model so interesting is that it doesn’t come from an AI-first company. Meituan was founded in 2010 as a group discount website, and is now best known for food deliveries. Meituan has a super-app that offers a wide range of local consumer services, including food delivery and related on-demand services, in-store dining, hotel and travel bookings, and various new initiatives such as community e-commerce, grocery delivery, ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and micro-lending. It is now one of China’s largest platforms with over 770 million annual transacting users and millions of merchants, and aims to get people to “eat better and live better”.
And even a food delivery company creating a serious model that comes close to the state-of-the-art shows the depth of China’s AI ecosystem. The world had first learnt of China’s AI prowess with the release of Deepseek, but since then, a number of extremely capable AI model companies have popped up, each creating their own models. Now Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Meituan are also coming up with their own AI models that lie outside their core businesses. All these models are open-source, and are generating plenty of buzz in the developer community. In comparison, there are hardly any American, European or Indian non-AI companies that are releasing models at such a rate. China is pulling ahead of the rest of the world in open-source AI, and the lead might already be too big for anyone to catch up in the foreseeable future.