Chinese Food Delivery Giant Meituan Releases Powerful AI Model Challenging Top Non-Thinking Models
In recent developments, Chinese tech conglomerate Meituan has unveiled its latest offering in artificial intelligence (AI) – the Longcat Flash model. This new language model boasts an impressive 560 billion parameters, making it a formidable competitor to established models such as DeepSeek V3.1, Qwen3, Kimi K2, GPT 4.1, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.
The Longcat Flash model employs a unique Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, featuring dynamic computation mechanisms that activate approximately 27 billion parameters based on contextual demands. This innovative design aims to optimize both computational efficiency and performance, as well as achieve advanced training and inference efficiencies by employing a shortcut-connected architecture.
Meituan, initially established as a group discount website in 2010, has since expanded its horizons beyond food deliveries. With its super-app offering a diverse array of local consumer services such as food delivery, on-demand services, in-store dining, hotel and travel bookings, community e-commerce, grocery delivery, ride-sharing, bike-sharing, and micro-lending, Meituan now serves over 770 million annual transacting users and millions of merchants.
The introduction of the Longcat Flash model showcases China’s burgeoning AI ecosystem, with this food delivery company joining the ranks of powerful AI players. Since the world’s initial introduction to China’s AI capabilities through DeepSeek, numerous highly capable AI model companies have emerged, each contributing unique models to the field.
Notably, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Meituan are now developing their own AI models, expanding beyond their core businesses. These open-source AI models have generated significant interest within the developer community, with China seeming to pull ahead in the realm of open-source AI innovation. In contrast, there is a noticeable absence of similar rates of model release from non-AI companies based in America, Europe, or India. It appears that China may hold an insurmountable lead in open-source AI development for the foreseeable future.
