The Belt 
A Chinese bearing manufacturer that supplies wheel hubs to carmakers has just won a robot order worth roughly RMB 300 million, in a year when its net profit fell by more than 90 per cent. Both facts belong to the same strategy. Bearings, lead screws and joint modules share heat treatment and precision grinding processes, … Read more
Swancor Advanced Materials earned RMB 63.51 million from its core chemicals business in the first three quarters of 2026, up 4.91 per cent. In the same period it spent RMB 384 million on research and development, an increase of 1,182 per cent, and RMB 360 million of that went to robots. The company has also … Read more
China’s most expensive private humanoid company has a number problem, and it is not the valuation. Galaxea, the Beijing embodied-AI builder founded in September 2023, has been reported at a valuation above RMB 20 billion after two funding rounds in the first half of 2026, placing it at the top of the country’s unlisted robotics … Read more
Set a task: you are a forensic assistant and the audio contains several overlapping sound sources. Work out where the child in the recording is. iFlytek’s SparkAudio 1.0 answered within seconds. Regular mechanical noise from heavy equipment surrounded the child, so a train or a subway car was plausible. What matters is the reasoning path. … Read more
Muse made the personal agent legible to the market this year, and every large platform has since been asked what its version looks like. Ant Group’s answer arrived on 27 October as Lingguang 2.0, repositioned from an assistant that generates answers and small apps to something the company calls a personal assistant that manages affairs. … Read more
Recursive self-improvement became the internal scoreboard every Chinese model lab wanted to show in 2026, and one of the hottest themes in domestic venture capital. A business plan carrying the phrase self-training is reportedly worth a valuation premium of at least 20 per cent. Real RSI is supposed to mean more than AI improving AI. … Read more
GLM-Omni appeared first in a paper, not a product launch. The work is a joint effort between Tsinghua University and Zhipu AI, with Tang Jie as corresponding author, and it has already been attached in public discussion to the GLM-5.5 name, though the paper makes no such claim. What it does provide is the technical … Read more
On 28 September, AMD said it would buy World Labs for about USD 8.2 billion in stock. It is the second-largest acquisition in AMD’s history, behind the roughly USD 50 billion paid for Xilinx in 2022. Xilinx was a chip company more than thirty years old. World Labs is two. The obvious reading is that … Read more
At a media day this week, Iluvatar CoreX put its latest Tianyao 300 next to an Nvidia H200 and let the machines run. The headline number is narrow but real. In third-party testing completed this year, under a typical prefill-decode disaggregated deployment, the Tianyao 300 reached 1.05 times H200’s end-to-end throughput when normalised to a … Read more
At the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Qiyuan Robotics chief executive Tian Hua said the company’s consumer robots had been connected to Tencent WorkBuddy, alongside a strategic cooperation agreement to build a cloud-edge-device consumer robot line. The chain is straightforward to describe. A user speaks an instruction. WorkBuddy parses the intent and breaks it … Read more