A week after its cheapest-ever model sparked talk of a pricing kill line, DeepSeek announced it will raise API prices. On 6 August the company told its developer platform that pricing would rise soon by a large margin, and users began receiving emails. The message was blunt: keep using after the change and you accept … Read more
Image related to the story. Source: LeiPhone AI large models are evolving from a business and product into the infrastructure a company runs on. Past software and hardware firms organised by product; AI was one feature among many. After models arrived, AI moved into product definition, user interaction and service distribution. Globally, the shifts are … Read more
Image related to the story. Source: OFweek Robotics China is crossing from “manufacturing giant” to “smart-manufacturing power,” and industrial software, CAE simulation, fluid dynamics and electromagnetic EDA, is the core bridge. Domestic tools have advanced fast in algorithms and physics modelling, but at the front line of aerospace, chip design and energy, they hit one … Read more
For most of the past decade, large buyers operated with a dependable lever: if a Chinese supplier would not meet their terms, they could pivot to a Chinese-made alternative anyway, since domestic capacity was abundant and hungry. The threat disciplined pricing on both sides, and almost always against the local supplier. ChangXin’s refusal inverts that … Read more
Why now, and why the office The trigger looks like a Morgan Stanley note from 30 July: AI investment has entered ‘halftime’, and the market is shifting from chasing upstream compute chips to two new fronts, AI applications and supporting resources. The real reason is simpler. Tencent, long mocked as behind in AI, is now … Read more
The barrier is falling Until 2024, training a usable coding base model cost tens of millions of dollars in corpus cleaning and pretraining. Today, with Meta’s Llama 3, Kimi and DeepSeek open models, general code ability has been commoditised. A startup no longer reinvents the wheel: take a strong open base, feed cleaned code and … Read more
Why helium is the acute risk In front-end processing, steps including cleaning, film deposition, lithography, dry etching and inspection repeat 50 to 100 times or more per silicon wafer, sometimes over 1,000 steps in total. Helium and naphtha are the two materials a fab cannot do without. In dry etching, intense heat passes from plasma … Read more
The old rule is breaking For two years Nvidia became one of the most watched tech names on a simple premise: as long as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta kept buying chips, servers and equipment, the upstream supplier kept benefiting. The market watched how much these buyers pledged to spend, because more spend meant more … Read more
From platform to physical world Yu joined Zhongguancun Kejin as president in September 2024 and is credited with productising its large-model platform and capturing the enterprise opportunity of ‘platform plus application plus service’, improving the company’s product capability, business scale and visibility. His departure marks another senior operator stepping from internet platforms and scaled AI … Read more
What the evaluation found The panel concluded the project fills a core gap in China’s domestic multi-modal AI databases and offers a new paradigm for modernising basic-software architecture and fusing AI with the data layer. Targeting the strategic need for local substitution in critical fields, it tackles entrenched industry problems: rigid sharding in distributed databases, … Read more