Tencent’s messaging app Weixin launches beta testing with DeepSeek

Tencent said its Weixin app’s search function is beta testing access to DeepSeek, a major move by the country’s dominant messaging app as firms race to link up with China’s rising artificial intelligence start-up.The search function on Weixin, China’s largest messaging app, has recently started beta testing access to DeepSeek, a Tencent spokesperson said on Sunday.According to Chinese media, 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.The DeepSeek service would display its “thinking” process as it generates its answer to a user’s query, similar to other platforms, according to a report by the Chinese media outlet Jiemian. Tencent has also embraced the DeepSeek-R1 model in its own AI chatbot app Yuanbao, rolling it out this week as a new option for users alongside its own Hunyuan model.The move comes as Chinese firms, from cloud-computing platforms to telecommunications operators, are rushing to deploy the latest and hottest AI products from DeepSeek.In a bid to “promote the universal application of latest AI technologies”, China’s three major telecoms operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have integrated DeepSeek’s models into their scenarios and products, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said earlier this month.DeepSeek’s new models have also spurred a new wave of AI upgrades among Chinese handset brands. Huawei said earlier this month that it was using the DeepSeek-R1 model to support Xiaoyi, the AI ​​assistant in the latest version of its home-grown mobile operating system, HarmonyOS Next. Oppo, Honor and Vivo have also made similar announcements to embrace DeepSeek-R1 in their handsets.