Yuanbao and Tencent's Main Battleground

Originally published in Chinese on March 2, 2025. Yuanbao is Tencent's AI assistant. In the weeks after DeepSeek's models took off in China, it added DeepSeek and pushed itself through nearly every channel Tencent owns. Catching the DeepSeek overflow Yuanbao is using almost every channel to catch the demand that overflowed from DeepSeek. If it holds on to that wave of users, its cold start is essentially done, because the basic resources are all in place: distribution channels, technology, and product capability, which have to work together.