YuanChuan Micro’s LPU inference chip. Source: LeiPhone Before Groq’s LPU became famous on the back of Nvidia’s spotlight, Yang Bin, founder and CEO of YuanChuan Micro, had already been sketching an inference chip of his own. LeiPhone has learned exclusively that LPU startup YuanChuan Micro has closed a Pre-A round of several hundred million yuan. … Read more
Image related to the story. Source: LeiPhone A single piece of news lit up both the AI and chip worlds yesterday: Silicon Valley startup Etched has closed $800 million in cumulative funding, pushed its valuation to $5 billion, and landed a $1 billion chip order. The company has been quiet. Founded in 2022 by three … Read more
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has put its mandatory national standard for L3 and L4 autonomous driving out for public comment. The draft, Safety Requirements for Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Automated Driving Systems, would replace the old voluntary standard and for the first time set a legally binding floor for L3 and L4. … Read more
As the first unified model in the embodied-generation space, U0 has already validated generation quality, data usefulness and engineering efficiency. In the WorldArena benchmark built by Tsinghua, Peking and others, U0 scored first in the world under an anonymous code, and policies trained on its expanded data lifted task completion by 26.3 per cent in … 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 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
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