BRAVE MAG

By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING, Feb 14 (Reuters) - As China prepares for Lunar New Year holidays starting on Sunday, rivals to DeepSeek are scrambling to releaseartificial-intelligencemodels a year after it burst onto the scene with its game-changing R1 and V3 models.

With DeepSeek set to launch ‌its next-generation V4 model soon, according to tech news site The Information, many other Chinese AI firms have released or are preparing to launch ‌their own models in the hopes of stealing the spotlight - or at least avoid being off-guard again during this year's Spring Festival.

Below are the companies and models looking to make a Spring Festival splash:

The ​Hangzhou-based startup's V4 would replace last year's V3 model, which powered the AI assistant app that overtook ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available onApple's App Store in the U.S. Investors and industry insiders are also on the lookout for R2, successor to the R1 model.

This week DeepSeek fuelled anticipation when its web and mobile chatbot upgraded its "context window" - the amount of information it can remember and handle in a single task, from 128,000 to 1 million tokens, the unit of data processed by ‌the AI model.

This means the chatbot can now process ⁠book-length passages of text to answer a single user command.

The makers of short-video platform TikTok are soon expected to release an upgrade of Doubao, China's most popular AI chatbot, in terms of active users.

Thursday's release of video-generation AI model Seedance 2.0 has generated ⁠comparisons to DeepSeek's global rise, going viral on Chinese social media and drawing widespread praise on X, including from the platform's owner, Elon Musk. Seedance 2.0 can produce high-quality cinematic videos based on a few prompts, or even one.

The tech giant released picture-generation model Seedream 5.0 Lite on Friday.

Alibaba, the first Chinese firm to respond to DeepSeek's viral ascent last ​year, ​with Qwen 2.5-Max, is preparing to launch Qwen 3.5.

The e-commerce giant's Qwen app is riding ​a wave of growing domestic usage after it spent 3 billion ‌yuan ($400 million) last week on a coupon giveaway campaign to promote "agentic commerce", where AI handles consumers' online shopping.

This drove more than 120 million consumer orders in the six days through Wednesday, the company said.

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Zhipu AI released its open-source GLM-5 model on Wednesday, with enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running agent tasks.

Zhipu is considered one of China's "AI tigers" - promising startups vying with the U.S. to win the AI race. Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last month, alongside rival MiniMax, another AI tiger.

Both stocks have rallied strongly as investors bet on the companies benefiting from China's AI boom. Zhipu plans a secondary listing in Shanghai, ‌a regulatory filing on Friday showed.

MiniMax released its M2.5 open-source model on its overseas agent ​website on Wednesday. The company's Hong Kong listing raised HK$4.8 billion ($620 million), higher than Zhipu's $558 million.

Shanghai-based ​MiniMax has developed popular apps like Hailuo AI, a video generation tool, ​and Talkie, a character interaction app that enables users to engage with AI-powered virtual personas.

Tencent's Hunyuan team on Tuesday released a ‌low-storage, compressed AI model, HY-1.8B-2Bit, designed to be used on consumer ​hardware including mobile phones.

iFlytek on Wednesday released ​Spark X2, trained entirely on Chinese-made chips. The company said the upgrade focuses on practical deployment in sectors including education, healthcare, automotive and agent-based applications.

NETEASE YOUDAO

NetEase Youdao on Wednesday launched LobsterAI, a desktop-level personal assistant agent that can perform tasks such as information retrieval, scheduling and data analysis by executing ​workflows locally on a user's computer after authorisation.

The product ‌supports mobile and PC connections and allows remote interaction via enterprise apps popular among Chinese companies such as DingTalk and Feishu.

Embodied-intelligence startup Dexmal on ​Tuesday unveiled DM0, an AI model designed for robot-related scenarios. DM0 integrates multimodal internet data with driving, navigation and robotic operation data, ​and was trained across multiple robot platforms.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by William Mallard)

JC Olivera/Getty

Stephen Amellis going from the courtroom to the beach.

TheSuits LAstar has been cast in the series regular lead role of Hobie Buchannon in Fox and Fremantle's upcomingBaywatchreboot, which is slated to surf on to Fox as part of the 2026-2027 season.

"From the first conversation, Stephen Amell brought exactly what this new chapter ofBaywatchdemands: heart, intensity, and that undeniable hero energy," executive producer and showrunner Matt Nix said in a statement. "He's the kind of lead who can sprint into danger, carry the emotional weight, and still make it feel fun. We're so excited to get started."

In the reboot, the wild child from the original series (played byJeremy Jacksonfrom 1991-1999) is all grown up. He's now a Baywatch captain, following in the footsteps of his legendary father, Mitch (played byDavid Hasselhoffin the original). Hobie's world is turned upside down when Charlie, the daughter he never knew, shows up on his doorstep, eager to carry on the Buchannon family legacy and become a Baywatch lifeguard alongside her dad.

Cindy Ord/Getty;Corbis via Getty

The series is said to begin shooting this spring at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, as well as on the Fox Studio Lot in Century City. Additional casting details are not known at this time.

The originalBaywatch, which first debuted in 1989, would eventually become the most-watched show in the world, airing in over 200 countries, and at its peak, reaching more than a billion viewers every week. The beachy series starred Hasselhoff as Mitch, the dedicated leader of a group of lifeguards at Malibu Beach. In addition to the Hoff, the show helped launch the careers of international superstars from Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra to Jason Momoa and Yasmine Bleeth.

Per a release, "The new series will celebrate the franchise's enduring legacy, while re-energizing it for today's global audience. Fans can expect all the adrenaline-fueled rescues, tangled relationships, complicated chemistry and beachside heroics that defined the original — now with an entirely new cast, contemporary trappings, tensions and challenges, and a renewed mission to protect Southern California's shoreline."

It's not known yet if Anderson or Hasselhoff or other familiar faces will have a part to play in the upcoming reboot, but if asked, Electra has previously said she'd be interested.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with ourEW Dispatch newsletter.

"It could be fun" to join the cast of the reboot, which she said she's currently in talks over, ElectratoldTMZlast year. But she does have one stipulation: "I don't know if I'd want to be in the water."

"It's the ocean, you know?" Electra said, explaining, "I love being around the ocean. Working in it is very different. When you're working in the ocean, it is very complicated."

Baywatchis co-produced by Fox Entertainment and Fremantle with Nix (Burn Notice,TheGifted) serving as showrunner and executive producer alongside executive producers McG, Michael Berk, Greg Bonann, Doug Schwartz, Dante Di Loreto, and Mike Horowitz. McG will direct the series premiere episode.

Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly

An Arizona sheriff defended sending evidence in the disappearance ofNancy Guthrie, the mother of "Today" show co-hostSavannah Guthrie, to a lab in Florida for DNA testing over the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos also said the results that investigators have received from DNA testing so far haven't led to a suspect. Authorities believe Nancy Guthrie was forcibly taken from her Tucson home during the middle of the night nearly two weeks ago.

Nanos told CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti in an interview Friday that his agency has been sending evidence to a Florida lab for years, and he doesn't want samples sent to two different facilities.

"It adds a step that's not needed," Nanos said. "If you have two labs you're looking at, and one's bad or one's better, that's fine. That's not the case here, nobody's saying that."

Nanos said the Florida lab has samples taken from the Guthrie family and people who have worked at Nancy Guthrie's home to compare against the evidence that has been gathered during the investigation.

"Let's just use one lab, they have it all, the reports are generated, those reports are shared between both agencies, and we keep moving," Nanos said.

The sheriff didn't provide details about what results investigators have gotten back from the lab amid the ongoing investigation.

"We did get some DNA back, and we are looking at all those things," Nanos said.

Asked if the results have led to a suspect, Nanos said, "Boy, I wish it did.  Not yet. We've got DNA, and it's still working, that's all I can tell you."

DNA that wasn't Nancy Guthrie's or that of those in close contact with her was collected from the property, the Pima County Sheriff's Department said in an update Friday afternoon. Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to. The department isn't disclosing where the DNA was found on the property.

Meanwhile, while Nanos said they haven't received proof of life, he also added that "there has been no sign of death." When asked if the suspect should be afraid, he responded: "I think the suspect should be afraid every night. We're going to find you."

The FBIreleased a descriptionThursday of a person it referred to as a suspect who wasseen on videofootage from Nancy Guthrie's Nest home security camera on the morning of her disappearance.

The bureau described the individual as a male who is about 5 feet, 9 inches to 5 feet, 10 inches tall with an average build. In the footage, the person is wearing a ski mask, gloves and what the FBI said was a black, 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack.

CBS News has learned the backpack is sold exclusively at Walmart. Sources with knowledge of the investigation told CBS News that law enforcement officials reviewed video at one Walmart location in Tucson. CBS News reached out to Walmart corporate offices, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

In addition to the description, theFBI doubled its rewardto up to $100,000 for information leading to Guthrie's location or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance. Guthrie was also added to the bureau's list of itsmost wanted missing persons.

Investigators have issued a wider call for video footage from Guthrie's neighbors. The Pima County Sheriff's Department asked people who live within 2 miles of her home to provide authorities with all footage of vehicles, people or anything that seems out of the ordinary from New Year's Day to Feb. 2, the day after Guthrie was reported missing.

Investigators recently found a pair ofblack glovesthat are being tested for DNA, sources close to the investigation confirmed to CBS News. Nanos told CBS News on Friday that the gloves have been sent out for testing.

In its update Friday, the sheriff's department said "several" gloves have been found during the investigation, and that the closest gloves were found about 2 miles from Nancy Guthrie's home. A glove seen in imagesfrom the New York Postresembles those seen in the security camera footage authorities released earlier this week.

The FBI said Wednesday that agents were conducting an "extensive search" along multiple roadways in the Catalina Foothills area where Guthrie lives.

On Thursday, Savannah Guthrie posted a message to social media featuring clips of a family home movie when her mom was younger, writing, "We will never give up on her."

White tent set up on Nancy Guthrie's front porch

New details from FBI on Nancy Guthrie kidnapping investigation

More potential evidence in Nancy Guthrie case discovered