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iFlytek

iFlytek is a Chinese information technology company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Hefei. It is known for speech technology and for its Spark large language models, first released on 6 May 2023.

Founded 1999Website iflytek.com Era Statistical learning

2024 · 4 20082026
Events per year
12Models & products16Events1People

What it is

iFlytek is a Chinese information technology company. It was established in 1999 by Liu Qingfeng, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Science and Technology of China, and it is headquartered in Hefei, Anhui.[1] In July 2024 the company set up its global headquarters in Hong Kong.[1]

Origins

iFlytek went public in 2008 and is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under the ticker 002230. The company is described as partially state-owned, and the state-owned China Mobile is its largest shareholder.[1] Liu Qingfeng has been its president and, since April 2009, also its chairman.[2]

Among its long-standing products is the iFlytek Input keyboard, released in 2010.[1]

In October 2019 the U.S. government placed iFlytek on a blacklist. The reason given was the alleged use of its technology for surveillance in Xinjiang.[1]

Main features

The company's large model, the iFlytek Spark (讯飞星火) model, was officially released on 6 May 2023. Its seven core capabilities at launch were text generation, language understanding, question answering, logical reasoning, math, coding and multimodal tasks.[1][3]

Since Spark X1 in January 2025, iFlytek has stressed that its flagship models are trained on domestic computing power built with Huawei.[14][15][10]

On 24 October 2023 iFlytek and Huawei launched the FlyingStar One (Feixing No.1) computing platform. It is a 10,000-card cluster described as the first fully domestic computing platform in China. Spark V3.5, released in January 2024, was the first Spark model trained on it.[3][4]

On 24 October 2024 iFlytek, Huawei and Hefei Big Data Asset Operation Co. launched the larger Feixing No.2 domestic intelligent computing platform.[5]

Spark model timeline: V1.0 on 6 May 2023, V2.0 on 15 August 2023, V3.0 on 24 October 2023, V3.5 on 30 January 2024, V4.0 on 27 June 2024, 4.0 Turbo on 24 October 2024, X1 deep reasoning on 15 January 2025, X1.5 on 6 November 2025, X2 on 11 February 2026, X2.5 on 7 September 2026 and X2.6 on 22 October 2026.[3][6][7][4][5][8][9][10][11][12]

Position in development

In its January 2024 preliminary results, the company forecast 2023 revenue above RMB 20 billion, up about 7%.[4]

By the end of October 2025 its open platform had 9.68 million developers, 2 million of them added in the previous year.[9]

A 2025 report on Chinese large-model tenders ranked iFlytek first by both the number and the value of winning large-model bids in 2025, with RMB 2.316 billion in contracts.[13]

CapabilitiesLarge language models

ApplicationsEnterpriseEducation

Ecosystem & regionChina

20263

  1. ReleaseiFlytek releases device-cloud Spark X2.6

    On 22 October 2026 iFlytek released Spark X2.6, a device-cloud model series, at its developer festival in Beijing. The same event also launched a speech foundation model and a digital-employee platform.

  2. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark X2.5

    On 7 September 2026 iFlytek released Spark X2.5, a 293B-A30B mixture-of-experts model trained and served on domestic compute, focused on code and agent tasks, with open-source on-device models supporting up to 1 million tokens of context.

  3. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark X2

    On 11 February 2026 iFlytek released Spark X2, a large model trained entirely on domestic computing power and aimed at education, healthcare, automotive and agent use cases.

20252

  1. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark X1.5

    iFlytek released Spark X1.5 on 6 November 2025 at its 1024 Developer Festival. The MoE model has 293 billion total parameters, doubled inference efficiency over X1, and claimed 95% of GPT-5's overall level.

  2. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark X1, a reasoning model trained on domestic compute

    On 15 January 2025 iFlytek released Spark X1, described by the company as China's first deep reasoning model trained on fully domestic compute, built with Huawei and used first in education and healthcare.

20244

  1. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark 4.0 Turbo

    On 24 October 2024 iFlytek released Spark 4.0 Turbo at its Global 1024 Developer Festival, claiming gains over GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o, and announced a jointly built computing platform and plans for a reasoning model.

  2. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark V4.0

    On 27 June 2024 iFlytek released Spark V4.0, a large model it said was trained on a domestic 10,000-card cluster and beat GPT-4 Turbo on most measures while trailing on coding and multimodal work.

  3. UpdateiFlytek makes Spark Lite API free in China's model price war

    On 22 May 2024 iFlytek made its Spark Lite API permanently free and opened Spark API capabilities for free, while pricing its top-tier Spark3.5 Max at RMB 0.21 per 10,000 tokens, in the same weeks that ByteDance, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu and Tencent cut model prices.

  4. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark V3.5, trained on domestic compute

    On 30 January 2024 iFlytek released Spark V3.5, which it described as the first Spark model trained on the fully domestic FlyingStar One platform and which it compared with GPT-4 Turbo across several benchmarks.

20233

  1. ReleaseiFlytek releases Spark V3.0 and claims it beats GPT-3.5 in Chinese

    On 24 October 2023 iFlytek released Spark V3.0 and claimed it beat GPT-3.5 in Chinese across six areas, unveiled a Huawei-built computing platform the same day, and saw its stock fall to the daily limit.

  2. ReleaseiFlytek releases SparkDesk V2.0 and iFlyCode

    On 15 August 2023 iFlytek released SparkDesk V2.0, upgrading its large language model's coding and multimodal abilities and launching the iFlyCode programming assistant. The launch was followed by an 8.63% fall in the company's shares.

  3. ReleaseiFlytek unveils the SparkDesk large language model

    On 6 May 2023 iFlytek unveiled SparkDesk, its answer to ChatGPT, aimed at education and enterprise uses. Chairman Liu Qingfeng claimed it already beat ChatGPT in several areas and promised parity in English by October 2023.

20191

  1. PolicyUS adds 28 Chinese entities including AI firms to the Entity List

    On 7 October 2019 the US Commerce Department added 28 Chinese organisations, including facial-recognition and AI firms such as Hikvision, Dahua, iFlytek, Megvii and SenseTime, to its Entity List, restricting their ability to buy US products.

20112

  1. MilestoneiFlytek's voice cloud passes ten million users

    In December 2011, iFlytek said its voice cloud passed ten million total users, after its cloud-based voice input method won awards and received MIIT recognition as a secure, controllable cloud computing solution.

  2. ReleaseChina's National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing is unveiled

    On 27 September 2011 the National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing was unveiled at USTC, jointly built with iFlytek to connect speech research, product testing and standards work.

20081

  1. FundingiFlytek lists on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange

    On 12 May 2008 iFlytek, a speech-technology company founded by university students, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's SME board, becoming China's only listed intelligent-speech firm at the time after choosing the A-share market over Nasdaq.

Models and products over time

12
  1. 2016
    • Jul 2016 iFlytek XiaoYi / iFlytek Translator Product

      A handheld machine translation device from iFlytek, first released as Xiaoyi Translator in 2016, which the company's brand history describes as creating the AI translator product category.

  2. 2023
    • May 6, 2023 iFlytek Spark (V1.0) Model

      SparkDesk is iFlytek's cognitive large model, unveiled on 6 May 2023 as the company's answer to ChatGPT in education and enterprise uses, built on Huawei Ascend chips and followed by rapid version updates through 2024.

    • Aug 15, 2023 iFlytek Spark V2.0 Model

      SparkDesk V2.0 is the second version of iFlytek's large language model, launched on 15 August 2023 with upgraded coding and multimodal abilities, and released alongside the iFlyCode 1.0 programming assistant.

    • Oct 24, 2023 iFlytek Spark V3.0 Model

      iFlytek's Spark V3.0, released on 24 October 2023, is a large language model the company said beat GPT-3.5 in Chinese; it arrived with a domestic Huawei-built computing platform and twelve industry models.

  3. 2024
    • Jan 30, 2024 iFlytek Spark V3.5 Model

      Spark V3.5 is a large language model that iFlytek released on 30 January 2024. It was the first Spark model trained entirely on the domestic FlyingStar One computing platform, and iFlytek compared it with GPT-4 Turbo.

    • Jun 27, 2024 iFlytek Spark V4.0 Model

      iFlytek's large language model released on 27 June 2024 and trained entirely on a domestic platform co-built with Huawei; iFlytek presented it as reaching GPT-4 level while acknowledging weaker coding and multimodal abilities.

    • Oct 24, 2024 iFlytek Spark 4.0 Turbo Model

      A large language model released by iFlytek in October 2024 and upgraded in January 2025, trained and served on the domestic Feixing No.1 computing platform; iFlytek reported it leading several Chinese and English benchmarks against GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o.

  4. 2025
    • Jan 15, 2025 iFlytek Spark X1 Model

      iFlytek Spark X1 is a Chinese deep-reasoning model released in January 2025 and trained entirely on domestic computing hardware, with later upgrades benchmarked against OpenAI's reasoning models.

    • Nov 6, 2025 iFlytek Spark X1.5 Model

      iFlytek's Spark X1.5 is a deep reasoning model released in November 2025 that runs on a domestic computing platform built with Huawei, using a 293-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts design.

  5. 2026
    • Feb 11, 2026 iFlytek Spark X2 Model

      A large language model released by iFlytek on 11 February 2026, trained entirely on domestic computing power and aimed at practical use in education, healthcare, automotive and agents.

    • Sep 7, 2026 iFlytek Spark X2.5 Model

      iFlytek Spark X2.5 is a 293B-A30B mixture-of-experts language model released on 7 September 2026, trained and served entirely on domestic computing power, with a 256K context window and support for more than 200 languages.

    • Oct 22, 2026 iFlytek Spark X2.6 Model

      iFlytek's Spark X2.6 is a device-cloud model family unveiled in October 2026, pairing a 293-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts cloud model with smaller on-device models and a router that decides where each task runs.

People1

Liu Qingfeng1999–

Notes and sources

  1. iFlytekhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFlytek
  2. 刘庆峰https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/刘庆峰
  3. iFLYTEK named to Fortune's first list of China's 50 most influential technology companies (news, 11 September 2024)https://www.iflytek.com/en/news-events/news/214.html
  4. 基于全国产化算力平台 科大讯飞发布星火大模型V3.5https://www.stcn.com/article/detail/1109570.html
  5. iFLYTEK releases XF Spark 4.0 Turbo at the 2024 Global 1024 Developer Festivalhttps://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3007559606199557
  6. iFlytek unveils updated LLM SparkDesk V2.0 and new product iFlyCode 1.0https://technode.com/2023/08/16/iflytek-unveils-updated-llm-sparkdesk-v2-0-and-new-product-iflycode-1-0/
  7. Iflytek says its upgraded AI model outperforms ChatGPT in Chinesehttps://www.caixinglobal.com/2023-10-25/iflytek-says-its-upgraded-ai-model-outperforms-chatgpt-in-chinese-102120307.html
  8. China releases Spark X1 deep reasoning model that packs a punchhttps://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-01-15/China-releases-Spark-X1-deep-reasoning-model-that-packs-a-punch-1AbIq8PzzEI/share_amp.html
  9. 科大讯飞发布星火X1.5深度推理大模型https://m.jiemian.com/article/13604735.html
  10. 讯飞星火X2发布：基于全国产算力、直面行业刚需硬核升级https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202602113647766138.html
  11. 科大讯飞星火 X2.5 模型正式发布：293B-A30B MoE，全国产平台训练https://stock.10jqka.com.cn/20260907/c679649499.shtml
  12. 科大讯飞发布端云一体讯飞星火X2.6大模型 让敏感数据留在端，把复杂任务交给云https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8xS8R6O69ag
  13. 科大讯飞发布基于全国产算力训练的星火X2大模型https://stock.10jqka.com.cn/20260212/c674744993.shtml
  14. 科大讯飞发布基于全国产算力的深度推理大模型星火X1https://www.cs.com.cn/ssgs/gsxw/202501/t20250115_6468817.html
  15. iFlytek upgrades Spark X1 deep reasoning model trained on domestic computing powerhttps://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202504/21/WS68060e40a3104d9fd3820aa6.html

Cite this page: iFlytek. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/iflytek. Updated 2026-11-08