Tencent Holdings Ltd. became the latest tech company to unveil or enhance an AI model intended to eclipse DeepSeek, joining a spate of rollouts since the startup’s emergence energized the US-China technology race.

Chinese tech giant Tencent launched its latest AI model, Hunyuan Turbo S claiming it can answer questions faster than the global hit DeepSeek R1.

Chinese tech giant Tencent has launched its new AI model "Hunyuan Turbo S". The company claims that it is capable of giving faster answers than DeepSeek's popular model R1. The move is an indication that DeepSeek's growing influence domestically and internationally has put pressure on China's big tech companies.

The company explained the model is capable of near “instant replies” within a second by doubling the output speed and cutting the delay of the first word out by almost 44%. Different from DeepSeek-R1 and other “reasoning models,