Following the intense Spring Festival period, employees in AI divisions are now starting their delayed holidays.

During the Spring Festival, major tech companies maintained full staffing levels. Colleagues in industry circles shared posts before the holiday indicating that key project teams, such as those at Alipay, remained on duty with leave原则上 not approved and triple pay offered.

Meanwhile, some ByteDance teams from other cities traveled to Beijing to provide support for Doubao during the holiday period.

This reflects the most competitive Spring Festival AI battle to date. Moving beyond the phase of frenzied parameter optimization, domestic large language models have brought AI applications to a critical juncture—capturing users during the prime Spring Festival period. Consequently, nearly all of China's brightest tech minds remained on duty during the holiday.

Now, it is finally their turn to take breaks. A ByteDance employee who traveled to Beijing for overtime work only began their Spring Festival holiday a few days ago.

This Spring Festival saw collective overtime across major tech companies. As one saying goes, "There is no quiet time without someone bearing the weight for you."

This year, employees in AI departments had little respite. A Tencent Yuanbao staff member involved in overtime revealed that holiday work was necessary to support Yuanbao's Spring Festival activities and to await updates to the DeepSeek V4 model.

No one dared to be complacent. In late January, Tencent's chairman Ma Huateng announced at the company's annual meeting that the AI application Yuanbao would launch a cash giveaway event distributing 1 billion yuan during the Spring Festival. Ma expressed hopes to "recreate the scenario where WeChat's red envelope shake feature bound hundreds of millions of users."

It may be lesser known that after DeepSeek gained popularity last year, Yuanbao announced integration with the full-capacity DeepSeek R1, shifting from relying solely on self-developed models to a multi-model product strategy. This strategy continues today, and before the Spring Festival, market rumors suggested DeepSeek would launch its V4 version during the holiday.

Thus, amid massive traffic and festive excitement, combined with the anticipated DeepSeek update, Tencent aimed to ensure robust technical support, leading employees into an overtime "battle mode."

Tencent Yuanbao was not alone in requiring overtime. Alibaba's AI team also remained operational during the Spring Festival. On Lunar New Year's Eve, February 16, employees worked overtime to release the new-generation model Qwen3.5-Plus, offering million-token input for as low as 0.8 yuan.

ByteDance was equally active—Doubao conducted three rounds of giveaways totaling 100,000 prizes during the Spring Festival Gala broadcast. Simultaneously, as a key entry point for ByteDance's video generation model Seedance 2.0 and image generation model Seedream5.0, Doubao undoubtedly faced high-frequency demand during the holiday. Reports indicate that as early as one week before the Spring Festival, some ByteDance teams traveled to Beijing headquarters to ensure Doubao could handle high-load operations smoothly during the Gala and holiday period.

Only after the traffic surge subsided a few days into the holiday could core employees in major tech AI departments finally relax.

Over the past four years, AI has consistently made headlines during Spring Festival. This year was no exception, with activities like Tencent Yuanbao's cash giveaways, Qwen's fee waivers, and Doubao's red envelopes dominating public attention. On the product side, Doubao Seedance 2.0 and Doubao's large model 2.0 were successively launched, while Alibaba's Qwen3.5 was open-sourced on New Year's Eve... all requiring continuous efforts from employees.

Beyond major tech firms, prominent companies also maintained a brisk pace during the holiday: Zhipu AI released its new flagship model GLM-5, focusing on complex programming and long-range agent tasks, while MiniMax launched its flagship programming model M2.5, positioned as the world's first production-grade model natively designed for Agent scenarios.

Subsequently, a surge occurred—after consecutive gains before the holiday, on the first trading day after the break (February 20), Zhipu and MiniMax's market capitalizations both surpassed the 300 billion Hong Kong dollar mark. Thus, within two months of listing, these two large model companies exceeded the market caps of JD.com, Trip.com, and Kuaishou.

Recalling the 2025 Spring Festival, a week before the holiday, Hangzhou-based DeepSeek released its reasoning model DeepSeek R1. Through free access, open-source availability, and leading capabilities, it caused significant ripples across China and Silicon Valley.

At that time, the scenario of major tech employees being urgently recalled for overtime work remains vivid.

Earlier, during the 2024 Spring Festival, Sora took center stage. This text-to-video model broke previous coherence limits of around 10 seconds, accurately simulating physical laws while demonstrating finer image quality and consistency across multiple angles and shots. This heralded the "first year of AI video generation."

Then came the 2023 Spring Festival. Before the year began, ChatGPT emerged, quickly gaining global popularity with its exceptional text generation and dialogue capabilities, reaching 100 million users within two months. Thus, a significant branch in human history—the AI revolution—truly arrived.

Such breakthroughs during the Spring Festival have seemingly become a hallmark of blockbuster AI products.

What differs is that reviewing these memorable AI milestones in recent years reveals a profound and clear trend: from ChatGPT to today's Doubao, Qwen, Yuanbao, MiniMax, and Zhipu... the leading players in AI are increasingly Chinese tech companies.

The next major challenge awaits. After the 2026 Spring Festival, the AI era has truly arrived.

Whether ByteDance, Alibaba, or Tencent, all point toward a common goal: integrating AI deeply into users' daily lives.

Relevant data illustrates this: on New Year's Eve alone, Doubao recorded 1.9 billion AI interactions; during the Spring Festival period, over 130 million people used Alibaba's Qwen app to order milk tea, stock up on holiday goods, and purchase movie tickets; Tencent Yuanbao's main event page saw over 3.6 billion lottery draws and completed more than 1 billion AI creations.

Thus, we witnessed scenarios during the holiday such as "unregistered elders becoming sought-after assets," "uncles in their fifties posting AI-generated videos on Douyin," and "using Doubao and DeepSeek to write group holiday greetings on the first day of the new year"... all unique memoirs under the 2026 AI battle.

It is foreseeable that after the 2026 Spring Festival, AI applications will further penetrate, spreading from first- and second-tier cities to third- and fourth-tier cities, with adoption rates increasing nationwide. Consequently, the real challenge may have just begun—after attracting users, how can they be retained long-term? Major tech companies' capabilities in building ecological closed loops will face stricter tests after the holiday.

Similarly, after the traffic frenzy, embodied AI robotics companies also require冷静 reflection.

This year's Spring Festival Gala featured products from four Chinese robotics firms—Yushu Technology, Galaxy General, Songyan Power, and Magic Atom—each appearing in distinct ways. Yushu, a Gala veteran compared to last year's秧歌 performance, presented over a dozen G1 humanoid robots performing martial arts, nunchaku, and drunken boxing with such fluidity that viewers exclaimed, "Yushu ended the competition."

However, the Gala is not the end goal. After massive exposure, practical implementation and scalable commercialization must eventually be addressed.

After all, industry competition is a marathon, not a sprint for fleeting traffic victories. As Wang Xingxing noted in a post-Gala interview, "It will take more time for humanoid robots to enter the mass market."

Whether for AI or embodied robotics, this window of opportunity is becoming increasingly precious and urgent.