China’s two flagship AI model startups are rebuilding themselves as token merchants. A model-industry headhunter told the Silicon Lab research desk that both Zhipu and MiniMax are hiring B2B token salespeople at home and abroad, asking for three-plus years of experience at a cloud vendor or MaaS platform, ideally with coding skills of their own. … Read more
The world’s oldest consumer-electronics fair opened in Berlin on 4 September looking less like a gadget show and more like a parade of Chinese physical AI. Of roughly 2,000 exhibitors at IFA 2026, more than 932 came from mainland China, a number that tops 1,000 with Hong Kong and Taiwan firms included, close to half … Read more
On 17 August, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B became the most popular model on Hugging Face. The response from the global AI community was striking less for the ranking itself than for what the model represents: a 27-billion-parameter open-weights model, small enough to run on a single consumer GPU, posting coding and agent scores that sit on the … Read more
Two announcements landed within hours of each other in early September, and together they frame the next fight in AI: who defines consumer computing once models run on the desk instead of in the cloud. On 1 September Tim Cook stepped down as Apple chief executive to become executive chairman, handing the company to John … Read more
Meta launched Muse Spark 1.3 on 3 September, its fourth flagship model release in five months, and within hours the new model had leapfrogged the Gemini 3.8 Flash that Google had unveiled the same day. The duel marks the fastest cadence of frontier releases the industry has seen, with model rankings now turning over in … Read more
On 12 August, Tencent reported a second-quarter result that split the market. Revenue reached 204.785 billion yuan, up 11 per cent and past 200 billion for the first time, but capital expenditure hit 52.784 billion yuan, up 176 per cent year on year and 65 per cent quarter on quarter, far above the 32.1 billion … Read more
On 23 August, Bloomberg reported on Saturday that some of Nvidia’s largest customers have been told that servers containing its artificial-intelligence chips will in many cases rise more than 15 per cent, because memory-chip costs are surging. The price increase takes effect from the start of next year and covers systems built on the flagship … Read more
Bloomberg reports Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who led the Vision Pro team, is leaving to join OpenAI’s hardware group. The move follows a contested reorganisation after John Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as the next CEO and promoted Johny Srouji to chief hardware officer. Srouji rebuilt hardware engineering so Meade and several other VPs … Read more
AI large models are evolving from a product into the infrastructure a company runs on. Xiaomi recently reorganised XiaoAI and its AI business: the near-decade-old assistant is shifting from a standalone team to one backed by the base-model team, a cloud engineering team and an on-device OS team. Reporting says the MiMo base-model team led … Read more
Before Groq’s LPU rode Nvidia’s spotlight to fame, Yuanchuan Micro founder and CEO Yang Bin was already sketching an inference chip. LeiFeng Net has learned exclusively that the LPU start-up has closed a several-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A round led by IDG Capital, with Futong Capital, JK Venture, Shangqi Capital, Shunxi Fund and Xuhui Sci-Tech Innovation Investment joining. … Read more