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Tencent testing DeepSeek to add China’s hottest AI technology to its Weixin super app
Tencent Holdings said it is testing the integration of DeepSeek’s service on Weixin, as the operator of China’s most popular super app looks to artificial intelligence (AI) to power its suite of services from social networking to e-payments and ride-hailing.
In the current beta test, users can click an “AI Search” option on the search bar within Weixin to access DeepSeek, in addition to Tencent’s Hunyuan foundational model, a company spokesperson said on Sunday. The feature is currently unavailable in WeChat, as the overseas version of the app is called.
Users can access “the full version of the DeepSeek-R1 model for free to [enjoy] a more diverse search experience”, the Tencent representative said.
DeepSeek-R1 is an open-source reasoning model released by the Hangzhou-based start-up on January 20, which made waves in China and abroad as it showed capabilities comparable to those of more advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, but also with significantly lower training costs.
The integration of DeepSeek into Weixin would put AI in the hands of 1.3 billion active users who engage with the super app every month, using it to chat, share documents, watch videos, remit funds and shop.
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