China’s overlooked internet army is quietly embedding AI into everyday businesses

While China’s new “AI tigers” have captured global attention for challenging Silicon Valley front-runners, a quieter wave of domestic technology companies is building in-house artificial intelligence systems serving everyday users. Beyond pure-play AI labs like DeepSeek, Z.ai (also known as Zhipu AI), Moonshot AI and MiniMax, consumer-facing platforms that span e-commerce, video gaming, social media and travel are developing foundation models tailored to their own business ecosystems, in efforts that have drawn far less attention. Its AI research arm, Dots Studio, introduced Dots3-Note Preview, a 280-billion-parameter open-weight model. Citing benchmark tests, the company said the system matched or outperformed models…