AI Coding in 'Hours'? The Future Shaped by 'LongCat-2.5'

Imagine this: This morning, you tell your AI assistant, “Read through our team’s meeting transcripts and market reports from the past month, analyze the problems with the current project, and write the code for the solutions.” While a traditional AI might have finished after providing a response in a few minutes, the AI now begins a complex journey of writing code for several hours, fixing errors it encounters along the way, and analyzing the necessary data.

The new AI model, ‘LongCat-2.5,’ recently unveiled by the Chinese tech company Meituan, has arrived to further accelerate this era of ‘Agents’ (tools where AI judges and achieves specific goals on its own) Source: Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5, a 1.6 Trillion-Parameter …Source: Meituan launches LongCat-2.5 multimodal AI model for extended ….

Why does this matter?

Many of the AI tools we have used until now were closer to chatbots that ‘answer when asked.’ However, ‘agentic models’ like LongCat-2.5 are different. They are designed to wrestle with massive projects assigned by humans for several hours, rather than engaging in short conversations Source: Meituan launches LongCat-2.5 multimodal AI model for extended ….

Understanding it simply

I will explain the core of LongCat-2.5 with two analogies.

First, ‘Parameters’ (numerical values that determine the size of the AI’s brain). LongCat-2.5 has a total of 1.6 trillion parameters Source: Introducing LongCat-2.5. This massive number, about 30,000 times the population of South Korea, shows how much vast knowledge the AI has learned. However, it does not use all of this brainpower every single moment. About 48 billion parameters are activated each time it generates a response Source: Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5, a 1.6 Trillion-Parameter …. Much like how we use specific parts of our brain when having a casual conversation, the AI also uses its energy efficiently.

Second, ‘Native Multimodal’. Simply put, this means the AI does not understand text, images, and video by going through different translators; it is designed to understand all this information directly as a single language from the start Source: Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5, a 1.6 Trillion-Parameter …. This is why it is much better at tasks like looking at complex design blueprints (images) and immediately writing code (text). It is evaluated as having significantly advanced visual understanding and coding abilities compared to the previously released LongCat-2.0 Source: Introducing LongCat-2.5.

How far have we come?

Meituan officially announced this model on November 2nd Source: 美团发布LongCat-2.5大模型，“国模国芯”实现新突破. Interestingly, the entire training process for this model was completed using ‘domestic computing resources’ Source: 美团发布LongCat-2.5大模型，“国模国芯”实现新突破. This demonstrates that they are building the hardware infrastructure necessary to train large-scale AI models on their own.

What will change?

The emergence of models like LongCat-2.5 signifies that AI has entered a stage where it contemplates ‘how to do it’ by itself. Moving forward, AI will evolve beyond a simple assistant into a coworker who completes projects with us over several hours.

For the time being, users will be able to experience this powerful coding agent via API at an affordable price (about $1.2 per million output tokens) Source: 1.6T Native Multimodal, $1.2 per Million Output Tokens: What …. The day is not far off when, instead of simply telling AI to “write this,” we will say, “please complete this entire project.”

MindTickleBytes AI Reporter’s Perspective

The arrival of LongCat-2.5 is not just news about an increase in AI parameters. It is highly encouraging that it is directly challenging a core competence of agentic AI: ‘Can AI endure time and solve problems by itself?’ As AI with long-range focus permeates our daily lives, the definition of what we consider ‘work’ will change completely.

References

1. Introducing LongCat-2.5
2. LongCat - AI Coding Agent
3. LongCat-2.5 Released: 1.6T Native Multimodal Agent Model

4. [LongCat-2.5

   1.6T Native Multimodal Model for Agentic Tasks](https://www.longcatai.org/models/longcat-2-5)

5. 1.6T Native Multimodal, $1.2 per Million Output Tokens: What …
6. Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5: A 1.6T Parameter Native …
7. 美团发布LongCat-2.5大模型，“国模国芯”实现新突破
8. Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5, a 1.6 Trillion-Parameter …
9. Meituan launches LongCat-2.5 multimodal AI model for extended …