China's DeepSeek frenzy enters the home as TV, vacuum cleaner makers adopt its AI models

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's joyful embrace of DeepSeek has gone one step deeper - extending to TVs, fridges and robot vacuum cleaners with a slew of home appliance brands announcing that their products will feature the startup's artificial intelligence models.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek's large language models upended the AI sector this year, rivalling Western systems in performance but at a much lower cost. That's resulted in much pride and glee in China, with DeepSeek held up as proof that U.S. efforts to contain tech advances in China will ultimately fail.

DeepSeek's founder Liang Wenfeng has been feted by Chinese authorities, and the company plans to release R2, the successor to its R1 reasoning model, soon, sources have said.

Over the past two weeks, home appliance manufacturers such as Haier, Hisense and TCL Electronics have joined automakers and tech heavyweights like Huawei and Tencent in saying they will be using DeepSeek's models.

Many of these home goods are already smart devices that respond to voice-activated commands. But DeepSeek's models will allow for far greater precision.

Liu Xingliang, a Beijing-based independent industry analyst, said that a robotic vacuum cleaner, could, for example, leverage the semantic parsing capabilities of DeepSeek-R1 to position itself and avoid obstacles with more speed and sophistication.

"The device will be able to comprehend complex instructions such as 'Gently wax the wooden floor in the master bedroom but avoid the Legos'," said Liu.

(Reporting by Sophie Yu and Brenda Goh; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)