On the last day of 2025, DeepSeek published a new technical paper, with founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng among the 19 co-authors, about “manifold-constrained hyper-connections” – a general framework for training artificial intelligence systems at scale, which suggested “promising directions for the evolution of foundational models”. That release was a fitting reminder to the world, especially during the peak of the Christmas holiday season, about Chinese AI companies’ sharpened focus on innovation...