The 2025 Global Developer Conference (GDC) is gearing up to kick off from Feb 21 to 23 in Shanghai's Xuhui district.

Organized by the Shanghai AI Industry Association (SAIA), the conference is set to host around 100 developer communities from around the world, including Hugging Face and Microsoft Developer Community. The event will feature an array of activities, including an opening ceremony, networking sessions, enterprise forums and developers' activities, fostering collaboration and innovation among top young developers.

One of the key highlights of this year's conference will be the participation of the DeepSeek team, renowned for their groundbreaking open-source large language model (LLM), which has earned global recognition. SAIA has confirmed that the team will actively engage in the event.

Two leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies, SenseTime and MiniMax, will also participate.

Jia Anya, the product director at SenseTime, emphasized the transformative power of AI in enhancing productivity and user experiences. SenseTime, established in 2014 and headquartered in Hong Kong, has been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge AI software platforms aimed at driving sustainable growth and seamless interactions.

In a bid to further solidify its position in the AI landscape, SenseTime recently unveiled SenseNova 5.5, its most advanced LLM featuring real-time multimodal interaction capabilities and integration of diverse data types. The upcoming conference will witness the debut of Raccoon 2.0, an intelligent software development assistant, and LazyLLM, an open-source agent application development framework, showcasing SenseTime's commitment to innovation.

MiniMax, another standout player in China's AI scene, has been making waves with its expertise in multimodal LLMs processing text, audio and video. The company, founded in 2021, has been a trailblazer in integrating linear attention with MoE (Mixture of Experts) in LLM development, culminating in the release of the MiniMax-01 series model earlier this year.

Liu Hua, the vice-president at MiniMax, highlighted the recent buzz surrounding DeepSeek's success and its impact in reshaping perceptions of China's LLM capabilities on the global stage. With a young and dynamic research and development team, MiniMax is poised for further growth and expansion, leveraging the talent and innovation of its workforce to drive advancements in the AI domain.

Li Junfeng contributed to this story.