Chinese Food Delivery Giant Meituan Unveils Powerful AI Model Rivaling Top Contenders

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), China is steadily establishing itself as a dominant force. One recent addition to this burgeoning sector is the Longcat Flash model, developed by the Chinese food delivery giant Meituan. This model exhibits comparable performance to top-tier AI models such as DeepSeek V3.1, Qwen3, Kimi K2, GPT 4.1, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

The Longcat Flash model boasts an impressive Mixture of Experts architecture, featuring a whopping 560 billion parameters with 18B-31B activated parameters. This open-source model, released under the MIT license, has garnered significant attention within the developer community due to its innovative design and exceptional performance.

Meituan’s Hugging Face page describes Longcat-Flash as a “powerful and efficient language model” that employs a dynamic computation mechanism to optimize computational efficiency and performance. The shortcut-connected architecture expands the computation-communication overlap window, achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for cost-effective inference.

What sets Longcat Flash apart is its origins within a non-AI company. Founded in 2010 as a group discount website, Meituan has since expanded into various consumer services, including food delivery, hotel and travel bookings, ride-sharing, bike-sharing, micro-lending, community e-commerce, and grocery delivery. With over 770 million annual transacting users and millions of merchants, Meituan aims to enhance the quality of life for its customers through its diverse offerings.

The release of Longcat Flash further underscores the depth and breadth of China’s AI ecosystem. Since the introduction of DeepSeek, numerous capable AI model companies have emerged in China, each contributing unique models to the field. Notably, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba are also venturing into AI development, with their own models that extend beyond core business interests.

The open-source nature of these Chinese AI models has generated considerable buzz within the developer community. In contrast, there is a notable absence of such prolific model releases from American, European, or Indian non-AI companies. China’s lead in open-source AI technology may already be insurmountable for competitors in the near future.