Most people’s first impression of AI customer service is poor. The parcel never arrived, yet the bot loops ‘delivered.’ The question is half-asked before the system jumps topics and answers the wrong thing. Reach a human at last, and you repeat the whole story from scratch. That fatigue is universal – and it has been … Read more
This past month Silicon Valley shipped GPT-5.6, Fable 5 and Grok-4.5, and China’s developer community lit up with benchmarks and debates. Yet for all the buzz, the country’s homegrown large models remain in a strange state: critically acclaimed, commercially cold. The usage-versus-revenue gap is widening. OpenRouter data for 22-28 June shows Chinese models handled 20.39 … Read more
Zhongji Innolight (stock code 03308) listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 30 July. The company priced at HK$980 per share, sold 54.5 million shares and raised HK$53.4 billion; after listing fees of RMB 519 million, net proceeds came to HK$52.89 billion. With a board lot of 50 shares, a single allocation cost nearly … Read more
ByteDance’s AI push just took its most concrete organisational turn yet. On 30 July, according to Phoenix Tech, the company sent an internal memo announcing that its Feishu (Lark) product team and its Doubao model product team will be merged into a new Doubao product unit, led by Doubao head Zhao Qi, with Feishu head … Read more
Industrial embodied intelligence just cleared a practical hurdle. Topstar, a Dongguan-based smart-manufacturing equipment maker, has built a complete industrial data-iteration loop with Wuwen Zhike, a physical-AI data-platform company — letting embodied robots iterate quickly, reuse standardized components and deploy at batch scale. Wuwen Zhike was among the first in the sector to ship a physical-AI … Read more
Shenzhen’s Chaowei Dynamics, a full-stack embodied-AI company, has entered a deep partnership with Peking University Medical to bring robots into clinical settings. The two will jointly develop data collection, world models and simulation training for embodied intelligence in medical scenarios — building, in their words, a path from “simulated training” to “scenario validation” to “hospital … Read more
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, China’s embodied-AI zone was full of robots making coffee, taking photos and dancing. Sudo Tech’s booth drew crowds for the opposite reason: its robots quietly did unglamorous things — grasping objects, wrapping items in cloth with two hands, inserting parts into matching holes — with conspicuous stability, success rates and … Read more
On June 24th, Shenzhen-based embodied-AI startup RoboScience (机器科学) hosted its official launch event in Shenzhen, unveiling Visics: a general-purpose embodied foundation model built around a novel architecture called VLOA (Vision-Language-Object-Action). The company’s founding team carries unusual credentials. CEO Tian Ye (田野) previously served as Apple’s AI Platform technical lead, where he built infrastructure described internally … Read more
Date Round Amount Key Investors Aug 13, 2019 Strategic Tens of millions RMB CAS Star, Tsinghua University Asset Management, Fortune Capital, Huakong Fund, Jiangmen VC, Turing Ventures Sep 14, 2021 Series A Hundreds of millions RMB Luster LightVision, Xinglian Capital (Z Fund), Beijing Dafan, Tongzhi Investment, Xingtang Tongzhi, Rongpin Investment Sep 26, 2022 Series B … Read more
Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin presenting Kimi Chat’s long-context model capabilities. After DeepSeek, another Chinese model has rattled the United States. On July 22, four things happened in a single day. Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI on X of “large-scale distillation” of American … Read more