Counterpoint Research reports that global smartphone SoC shipments fell 15 per cent in the first half of 2026, hit by surging memory prices, cautious inventory control and longer replacement cycles. MediaTek held the top share at 32 per cent, Qualcomm was second at 22 per cent, Apple 19 per cent, UNISOC 13 per cent and … Read more
Calls and downloads ‘Calls’ mean individuals who lack local deployment pay per token to use a model online. ‘Downloads’ are organisations, banks, governments and energy firms pulling models in to embed in their own systems, the core ‘AI plus’ indicator, and China leads there as well. Across Africa, with 1,500 to 3,000 languages, many local-language … Read more
The forerunner’s bet Liao frames the past 30 years as two vertical lines, the processor line from CPU to AI and the connectivity line from telephone to mobile network, with a counter-intuitive proposition: the more successful and monopolised the application layer, the more the underlying chip withers, because a dominant customer sets direction and a … Read more
The US has issued another ban, this time aimed at robots. On 29 July the Federal Communications Commission placed foreign-produced advanced mobile robots on a controlled list, effective immediately, with exceptions only for products granted conditional approval by the US Department of War. Two words matter: ‘foreign-produced’ and ‘advanced robot equipment’. The FCC defines the … Read more
XtalPi Science is billed as the world’s first AI-for-Science platform integrating LLMs, agents and automated experiment robots, packaged as on-demand ‘Science Tokens.’ Genius Agents orchestrate cross-disciplinary long-horizon tasks, cutting hallucination and closing a loop from digital hypothesis to physical verification. The failure-data edge XtalPi’s chief scientist Zhang Peiyu notes the platform’s rarest asset is failure … Read more
Not alone Alibaba and Tencent moved within weeks. Alibaba consolidated three agent lines, QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun, under QoderWork, led by DingTalk’s Chen Yusen. Tencent moved QClaw into the unit that houses WorkBuddy. All three stopped internal horse-racing and converged on one AI front door. Why the rush On the surface it is cost control. … Read more
This year at WAIC, the embodied-AI booths shared one unexpected keyword: touch. Two years ago tactile sensing barely registered; now, from sensor vendors to whole-robot companies, “touch” is on every placard, with some declaring it more important than vision. The race is not just over sensors but over the models, data and even the chips … Read more
Xiaomi has restructured its AI around the MiMo base model, splitting the technology behind its decade-old voice assistant XiaoAI into three pillars: the MiMo base-model team led by Luo Fuli, the cloud engineering team led by Luan Jian, and the on-device OS capability pushed down into the phone and car teams. The move signals that … Read more
In July 2026, the Nubia NaviX Ultra drew a crowd at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The phone has a plainer name: the Doubao Phone 2. Eight months earlier, the first Doubao Phone sold 30,000 units at 3,499 yuan and briefly resold for nearly 8,000 on the second-hand market, until the frenzy lasted … Read more
A veteran semiconductor supply-chain consultant who has tracked the industry for decades let a truth slip at a closed-door roundtable: crack open the PCB of a top-tier NVIDIA AI accelerator that speculators have pushed to $40,000 a chip, and you will find a handful of unremarkable components whose origin you cannot escape, Shizuishan, in China’s … Read more