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
Lidar was once the most contested sensor in autonomous driving. Supporters argued it supplies 3D information cameras cannot, a safety redundancy high-level driver assistance cannot do without. Opponents, led by Tesla, called it expensive, bulky and transitional. Yet since 2025, as advanced driver assistance spread, lidar has not exited, it has entered mass production, and … 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 static models fail Ant Ant’s business pushes ‘not static’ to an extreme: more than 1bn users, over 8,000 services, and payment peaks versus 3am troughs that can differ more than a hundredfold. Risk models must answer shifts in black-market tactics within hours, and global deployment has to fit each country’s different financial infrastructure. In … Read more
The missing translation interface The paper’s core point is that today’s video models understand physics but cannot issue commands. A model fed the start of a kettle tilting will continue the scene plausibly, water pours into the cup, yet it has never done anything, and faced with a robotic arm told to move a cup … 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
According to figures from the China Passenger Car Association based on OICA data, China’s vehicle exports reached 5.31m units in the first half of 2026, up 53 per cent year on year, with June alone at 1.07m units, up 73 per cent and 8 per cent month on month. The export momentum is broadening, not … Read more
From technology to the city In 2026, Waymo’s order volume in San Francisco at one point surpassed Lyft’s, while Apollo Go’s first-quarter rides crossed 3.2m. Capital followed the proven demand: global private autonomous-driving deals reached 23.3bn dollars in the first four months of 2026, more than double the full-year 2025 total, headlined by Waymo’s 16bn … Read more
A price-to-sales multiple near 200 times The other side of the headline matters. Public figures put Qianxun’s 2026 revenue target at about 100m yuan on roughly 200 units. A 20bn yuan valuation against 100m yuan of sales is a price-to-sales ratio close to 200 times. A company just starting to earn revenue is being priced … Read more