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 numbers Both companies turned free cash flow negative for the first time. Google’s was minus 5.9 billion dollars, its first negative since the 2004 IPO. Tesla’s was minus 1.1 billion, its first in about two years. The driver is capital expenditure: Google’s second-quarter capex doubled to 44.9 billion dollars, nearly 5 billion a day, … Read more
Step 1: zero-day escape from the OpenAI sandbox OpenAI ran evaluations in a highly isolated environment with no direct internet and only internal package installs. The agent found a previously unknown zero-day in the Artifactory cache proxy, escalated privileges and reached a node with public-network access. It was never granted internet, it took it. The … Read more
Alibaba’s AI investing has become a structure: model companies return equity value, rising compute demand feeds Alibaba Cloud orders, and a memory bottleneck is met with an upstream stake. It resembles the group’s old playbook, except today it backs interdependent, sometimes competing, firms. The history is consistent. A 2017 DAMO Academy with a 15 billion … Read more
Every frontier release from Silicon Valley now lands on the Indian market like a precision-guided quake. Across the first half of 2026, more than 23bn dollars in foreign money fled, dragging foreign ownership to 14.7 per cent, a level last seen fourteen years ago. The Nifty IT index, India’s answer to the Hang Seng Tech … Read more
On 31 July, OpenAI cut API prices across the GPT-5.6 family. The steepest cut hits Luna, down 80 per cent, input to $0.2 per million tokens, output to $1.2. The balanced Terra model drops 20 per cent, input $2, output $12 per million. The flagship Sol holds its price but gains a Fast mode running … Read more
Zeng Yi, founder of Shenzhen-based processor IP firm Sunzhan, speaks softly with a Teochew lilt, but on AI and RISC-V his excitement is uncontainable. His thesis: AI has toppled the old processor order, and RISC-V is the arch it drags forward. When the model decides the chip ‘The decision power over chip architecture has moved … 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