DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China’s AI industry, are adopting vastly different strategies. On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open-weight model that anyone can tinker with. Both ByteDance and DeepSeek have AI apps with over 140 million monthly users. Instead, DeepSeek released V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale, which are better-optimized versions of its previous model V3.2-Exp, released in September. “At the end of the day, we can't keep up with all these hairline differences between different models, different releases,” Zhu says.