The internet is hard at work to uncover the origins of a mysterious model.
Last week, a new model named Ox Alpha popped up on OpenRouter. The model — uploaded by an anonymous third-party provider — is temporarily free with near-unlimited usage. Early tests from developers suggest it performs well on coding and long-running AI agent tasks.
Now, people on the Chinese internet are looking at a weird, low-budget Chinese film about a cow — and wondering if the model’s name could be a dead giveaway about its origins.
Over the weekend, users on Weibo, China’s version of X, pointed out that the model’s name contains the word “Ox.” That led other people on the platform to nickname the model “Niu Lai,” the title of a Chinese animated movie that became one of the country’s biggest internet memes this summer.
The movie, released on August 5, has a title that translates to “Here Comes the Ox.” The bizarre flick — voiced and produced by a mother-son duo — is about a timid newborn calf that follows a songbird into an abstract dream sequence. Its rudimentary 3D animation and odd plot put some of its early viewers off; fewer than 300 tickets were sold during its first 10 days in theaters, according to local media reports.
However, as clips and jokes about its unpolished quality exploded online, the movie turned into a nationwide sensation, with filmgoers flocking to cinemas out of sheer curiosity about how bad it could be.
The cow memes — including an unintentionally hilarious moment in which the calf bellows plaintively for its mother — have since flooded Chinese social media.
And that’s meant big money for the movie, too. By Monday, Niu Lai had grossed 45 million yuan, or roughly $6.7 million, at China’s box office, according to Chinese box office figures.
‘Codename Ox’
China’s internet, meanwhile, has wasted no time drawing a link between the powerful AI model and the viral movie.
“There’s a Chinese movie in theaters called 牛来 (Niu Lai) which roughly translates to ‘bull is coming’ or ‘ox coming,'” one user wrote on X on Sunday. “I don’t see why any American/EU lab would use codename Ox?”
The speculation surrounding the model and the movie’s name also sparked discussion on Weibo.
Some Weibo users posted about the model as being of Chinese make, calling it the “Bull Demon King,” a reference to the famed Chinese literary classic “Journey to the West.”
Still, the Chinese internet was none the wiser about which lab or company could have created it, with some tech bloggers floating Xiaomi or Z.ai as options.
“The mysterious Ox King is shaking up Silicon Valley and kicking off a ‘guess the father’ competition,” one tech blogger from Beijing wrote. “Whose ‘masterless bull model king’ is this? The answer may already be written in the code fingerprint.”
Other web users just found it funny, if a little nonsensical — but ran with the “Niu Lai” nickname anyway.
“All things said, calling Ox Alpha the ‘Niu Lai Model’ is weird,” wrote one Weibo user from Sichuan on Friday.
Over on Reddit — in a popular AI subreddit called r/singularity — people said Ox Alpha’s responses on politically sensitive Chinese topics made a Chinese origin unlikely.
Some commenters on Reddit said Ox Alpha’s willingness to discuss politically sensitive Chinese topics made a Chinese origin less likely. Due to tight regulation and self-censorship, chatbots developed for the Chinese market tend to provide government-aligned answers to questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and Taiwan’s political status, while refraining from criticisms of China’s politicians.
Other researchers, however, reported that the model sometimes gave official-line responses and identified technical similarities with Z.ai’s GLM models.
Adding to the online speculation, dozens of Google employees joined the fun with tongue-in-cheek posts about Ox Alpha over the weekend.
“What if the Ox Alpha was the friends we made along the way,” wrote Evan Otero, a technical staffer at Google DeepMind.
No company has claimed Ox Alpha at press time.
China’s AI industry has seen explosive growth in the last two years, with labs including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Tencent releasing increasingly powerful and often open-weight models. Chinese models have rapidly narrowed the gap with their US rivals, with users touting them for their capabilities and lower costs than OpenAI and Anthropic models.
