The headline number behind Meituan’s latest open-source model, LongCat 2.5, published on Hugging Face, is 1.6 trillion parameters. Our judgment is that Meituan is moving large models from back-office tools into an open ecosystem, but parameter count alone does not demonstrate application value.
What this is
LongCat 2.5 is a multimodal large model capable of processing different forms of information, including text and images, simultaneously. Multimodality—the ability of a single model to understand or generate text, images, and other content—has become a standard feature of foundation models. When platform companies open-source models, they typically aim to attract developers to their toolchains, cloud services, and broader ecosystems.
The most striking detail in the release is the 1.6 trillion parameters. More parameters primarily indicate greater model capacity; they do not necessarily mean more accurate answers, lower costs, or more stable operation. Whether the model is genuinely usable also depends on the degree of weight access, inference resources, licensing terms, and third-party evaluations.
Industry view
Open-source large models offer Meituan three potential benefits: strengthening its technical credibility, providing model capabilities for services to merchants and consumers, and expanding the platform’s influence through its developer ecosystem. For enterprise customers, having another selectable, privately deployable model also means reducing dependence on a single vendor.
The risks are equally clear. Even when an ultra-large-parameter model is open-sourced, the GPUs, storage, and engineering optimization required for inference remain expensive, making direct deployment difficult for most enterprises. If performance does not improve materially in a given use case, the model’s enormous scale may amount to nothing more than a cost burden. Open weights also do not automatically guarantee unrestricted commercial use; licensing remains the decisive factor in business adoption.
Impact on regular people
For enterprise IT: Meituan’s ecosystem is extending into the open-model market, and enterprises can include LongCat 2.5 in a multi-model evaluation. But they should first calculate compute, licensing, deployment, and operations costs rather than focus only on parameter count.
For individual professionals: As multimodal capabilities mature, workflows spanning documents, images, and spreadsheets may become more seamless. In the near term, improving model capabilities is more likely to reorganize tasks within roles than to eliminate entire jobs.
For the consumer market: If LongCat 2.5 is later integrated into Meituan’s products, search, merchant services, and local-life recommendations may become better at understanding images and complex intent. But model quality, response speed, and API pricing will determine whether it delivers a real user experience or remains a marketing claim.