Chen Danian returns with a 27B local model that trails DeepSeek-V4-Pro by only 1.3 points in CAICT's MCP benchmark

A dark horse enters China's AI race: StartLux

Chen Danian is back with StartLux, a company betting on local models. Its first release, StartLux-V1.0-27B-Preview, scored 39.25% in CAICT's MCP benchmark—second place, just 1.3 points behind the 1.6-trillion-parameter DeepSeek-V4-Pro. The 27B model runs on consumer PCs without the cloud and ranked first in location navigation, financial analysis, and browser automation. Two case studies: when calculating a two-year Microsoft stock return, Claude Sonnet 4.6 misidentified a trading day due to missing raw data; StartLux backtracked and got it right. Asked to search flights in a browser, Claude said it couldn't open a browser. Chen has publicly claimed local models will catch up with Claude in three years and take 80% of the market—StartLux is his bet on that thesis.

Why it matters: Chen Danian's first model lands second in CAICT's MCP benchmark, with a 27B parameter count that runs on consumer hardware and three first-place sub-scores — a concrete signal for the Agent space. Score capped at 82 because only benchmark results are available; the model isn't...