Chinese on-demand services giant Meituan has joined the open-source AI race, releasing its very own large language model (LLM) called LongCat-Flash-Chat. This move comes more than two years after Meituan acquired AI start-up Light Year for US $281 million.
Available on Hugging Face, GitHub, and More
The Beijing-based leader in China’s food delivery market announced the launch on Monday. The LongCat-Flash-Chat model is now available through Hugging Face, GitHub, and the model’s official website, making it accessible for developers everywhere.
A Powerful, Fast Model
According to the technical report, LongCat-Flash-Chat packs a punch with 560 billion parameters and uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This setup splits the model into “experts” – smaller networks that handle specific tasks — allowing it to work more efficiently.
The report highlights impressive performance in training and inference speeds, achieving over 100 tokens per second and keeping output costs as low as 5 yuan (about 70 cents) per million tokens.
Performance on Par With Global Players
Benchmark tests show LongCat-Flash-Chat performs on par with:
- DeepSeek’s V3.1
- Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen3 models
- Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2
- US-based models like Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash
This positions Meituan firmly among global leaders in the open-source AI arena.
Part of Meituan’s Bigger AI Push
This release reflects Meituan’s aggressive shift toward AI since acquiring Light Year. It also shows how Chinese AI companies are closing the gap with US competitors by embracing open-source development, which lets third-party developers freely use and adapt the models.
Before launching LongCat-Flash-Chat, Meituan rolled out multiple AI-driven tools, including:
- NoCode – an AI coding assistant
- Kangaroo Consultant – a business decision assistant
- Meituan Jibai – an AI agent
Competition and Market Moves
LongCat-Flash-Chat is also seen as Meituan’s direct challenge to Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen model family, which currently leads the global open-source AI ecosystem.
Interestingly, the launch came just days after Alibaba voiced confidence in winning China’s instant commerce battle against Meituan and JD.com.
Despite the buzz, Meituan’s shares closed 1.84% lower at HK\$101.10 on Tuesday, continuing a slide that has seen the stock drop 16% since reporting disappointing Q2 earnings.
A Proactive AI Strategy
In March, CEO Wang Xing emphasized Meituan’s aggressive stance on AI adoption, saying:
> “AI will disrupt all industries, and our strategy is proactive offence rather than passive defence.”
With LongCat-Flash-Chat now in the wild, that strategy is clearly in motion.
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