Tencent's WeChat, Baidu Search and Ernie AI Agent Embrace DeepSeek

TMTPOST -- Two Chinese internet giants Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu, Inc. are jumping on the bandwagon to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) upstart DeepSeek’s model into their offerings.

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Tencent’s popular social media platform WeChat is launching a small-scale testing to integrate DeepSeek’s reasoning model R1, Tencent confirmed to multiple Chinese news media outlets at weekends. Selected users in the beta test have the access to the full version of DeepSeek's R1 for free if they click the "AI Search" label at the top of the search bar and choose the “Deep Thinking” mode, Tencent said. The test is only on Chinese WeChat app, or Wexin, rather than the WeChat app that targets overseas users.

The search service involves the provision and deployment of DeepSeek’s open-source large AI models, according to WeChat’s page of introduction to features. The response DeepSeek-R1 provided, featuring a chain-of-thought inference process, quoted content both from posts of official WeChat accounts and web page information, and users can forward it to their WeChat friends and groups.

The DeepSeek-backed WeChat AI search feature not only integrates information sources within the Tencent ecosystem such as WeChat public accounts and video accounts, but also supports online search, which can provide more comprehensive, real-time and accurate answers, Tencent said.

Tencent noted the new feature only integrates official accounts and other public information on the internet, and vowed not to pose privacy risks as the feature will not take advantage of users' personal information or related private information. Tencent will continue to optimize the feature that is under the test based on user experience and feedback.

A number of Tencent’s products, including Tencent Cloud's AI code assistant and Yuanbao, an AI assistant powered by Tencent’s flagship model Hunyuan, are exploring integration with DeepSeek to offer users a richer experience and enhanced services, the company said.

Baidu announced at weekends that its search engine Baidu Search and the large language model (LLM) platform Ernie AI Agent will fully connect to DeepSeek. Baidu will bring the deep search capabilities of DeepSeek service and the Ernie model at no cost for search users, and developers on the Ernie AI Agent platform will also be able to make use of the DeepSeek model for free at any time to create and fine-tune their AI agents.

The free DeepSeek application stunned both Silicon Valley and Wall Street and went viral overseas since late January. DeepSeek’s popular chatbot service app powered by its AI models jumped to the No.1 spot in app stores on January 27, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in U.S. on Apple Inc.'s App Store, and has maintained its lead since. DeepSeek also topped the global Apple App Store download charts the same day and held the No.1 position since, according to Appfigures data that excludes third-party app stores in China. DeepSeek app was downloaded 16 million times in its first 18 days, surpassing the 9 million downloads recorded by OpenAI's ChatGPT app in the same timeframe, data from Sensor Tower shows. DeepSeek's AI assistant is also the leading free download in Google's App Store, a position it has held since January 28.

As DeepSeek's low-cost, high-efficiency model gains traction, many tech heavyweights accelerated the iteration of their proprietary AI models or pivoted to open-source their AI models.

Google launched its flagship AI model, Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, in early February, alongside Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Gemini 2.0 Pro can now access Google Search and execute code on behalf of users. It also features a 2-million-token context window, allowing it to process around 1.5 million English words in a single prompt—enough to read all seven Harry Potter books with 400,000 words to spare.

ByteDance's Doubao AI Foundation team on Wednesday unveiled a new UltraMem sparse model architecture, which improves inference speed by 2–6 times compared to traditional Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures, while reducing costs by up to 83%. This breakthrough has been accepted by ICLR 2025, a top-tier AI conference, offering new insights into improving AI inference efficiency and scalability.

OpenAI will release GPT-5 in both ChatGPT and its API, and free ChatGPT users will get “unlimited chat access at the standard intelligence setting”, though subject to abuse thresholds, the CEO Sam Altman announced in a post on social media platform X on Wednesday.

Baidu on Thursday said it will make its AI chatbot Ernie Bot for free to use starting April 1. Besides, the Chinese leading search engine operator plans to release an advanced search function on the same day. That function, which is said to include upgraded reasoning capability, will also be available to users at no cost.