Chinese delivery giant Meituan unleashes open-source AI model to take on Alibaba, DeepSeek



On-demand local services giant Meituan has become the latest Chinese Big Tech company to release an open-source large language model (LLM) to market, more than two years after it acquired mainland AI start-up Light Year for US$281 million.
Beijing-based Meituan, the long-standing leader of China’s food delivery market, on Monday released and open-sourced its own LLM, called LongCat-Flash-Chat, via artificial intelligence developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as the model’s official website.

According to the model’s technical report, LongCat-Flash-Chat features 560 billion total parameters – the variables used to define and manipulate the input and output of models – and the so-called Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. MoE architecture divides the model into separate sub-networks, or “experts”, that specialise in a subset of the input data to jointly perform a task.

Meituan’s foray into open-source models reflects its efforts to establish a viable AI business since acquiring Light Year, which was established by a co-founder of the food delivery services giant.

It also showed how Chinese AI companies are continuing to narrow the gap with their US peers through the open-source approach, which makes the source code of AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.

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