The Information reported this week that at a Seed all-hands two weeks ago, Zhang Yiming spoke up in a way he rarely does and ruled out using distillation to catch the frontier large language models. His position was blunt: ByteDance should be willing to sacrifice some short-term interest for the sake of the long-term goal. … Read more
Jeff Dean has left Google. The chief scientist and Google Brain co-founder ended a 27-year run on 5 August 2026, and announced that he is starting a company. Alphabet shares moved sharply on the news. Dean joined in 1999 as employee number 30. The company had 25 people then, he recalled, and more than 190,000 … Read more
China’s steel sector has been pushing into high-end precision materials this year, and a cluster of new products is quietly underwriting electronics, new energy and advanced equipment. The headline act is Cicada Wing Steel, also called 5G steel, at its thinnest just 0.07 millimetres, about the width of a hair and slimmer than a sheet … Read more
OpenRouter, the leading large-model API aggregator, is reported to be seeking a buyer and talking to several technology giants. The twist: just two months earlier it closed a 113 million dollar Series B led by Google’s CapitalG, with Nvidia, Snowflake, Databricks and ServiceNow alongside, at a 1.3 billion dollar post-money valuation, processing over 100 trillion … Read more
Amid a humanoid sector where valuations inflate faster than deployments, one American company is pitched as the most commercially successful of the bunch, and it is taking that claim to the public market. On 24 June Agility Robotics signed a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI to list on Nasdaq at a 2.5 billion dollar … Read more
On 30 July Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a family spanning a vision-language-action model, a reasoning model and an on-device model, and for the first time delivering whole-body control of a humanoid. Google’s play is simple to state: own the robot brain layer. In the phone era it sold few handsets but reached most … Read more
One year ago China’s dexterous-hand field was a pile of demos. Capital was thin, most makers were still validating designs, and annual output sat in the hundreds or low thousands, good for trade shows but not for factories or whole robots. That phase is over. Money moved first. Full-year dexterous-hand funding reached 16.88 billion yuan … Read more
On 17 July a whistleblower letter wiped more than 12 per cent off Dobot’s Hong Kong shares in a single day. Song Tao, who describes himself as a co-founder and former chief operating officer, accused the collaborative-robot maker of hiding a stake dispute in its A-share prospectus. The claim is specific. Song says a January … Read more
On 28 July BYD confirmed to Chinese media that its humanoid robot product will officially go to work in August, marking the company’s shift from a carmaker into a broader ecosystem technology group. The same day, the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list landed. BYD displaced Tesla as the world’s top electric vehicle seller and became … Read more
China has finally fixed a date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened public consultation on the approval draft of a mandatory national standard covering safety requirements for automated driving systems. It replaces a recommended standard with a legal floor for L3 and L4, and it is scheduled to take effect on 1 … Read more