Artificial Intelligence

Weifen Zhifei closes several-hundred-million yuan A2 round as capital flows into aerial embodied intelligence

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On 7 September, Gasgoo’s embodied-intelligence channel learned that Weifen Zhifei, a Hangzhou company, has closed an A2 round of several hundred million yuan, led by Puhua Capital, with Huihui Fund and the Yangtze River Delta Digital-Culture Fund following, and earlier backers Five YSource, Shenzhen Capital, Hongtai, Huaying, Huakong, Changshi and Baidu Ventures adding. Proceeds go … Read more

Dyna-2 abandons the VLA mainstream for a world-action model and lifts robot success from 20 to 90 per cent

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In August 2026 Dyna Robotics released Dyna-2, a robot foundation model pretrained on over 1 million hours of first-person human video, about 170 years of continuous waking experience. Across seven benchmarks the WAM architecture hit 1.55 times the success rate of the prior VLA model. High-precision manufacturing success rose from Dyna-1’s 20 per cent to … Read more

Delin Capital dangles RMB 2 million cash and up to RMB 5 million more in equity for AI founders

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The Delin Cup 2026 AI Startup Contest lays out its rewards first. The champion takes RMB 2 million in cash, unconditional and equity-free, a sum that dwarfs the RMB 300,000 to 600,000 typical of domestic AI contests. Up to 15 finalist teams enter a roughly 4,000-square-metre Delin Residency for ten weeks of deep incubation. During … Read more

DeepSeek to deploy 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips for inference as training stays on Nvidia

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Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators in a data centre under construction in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, one of the largest Huawei AI chip clusters known. DeepSeek and Huawei have not commented. The purpose is clear. The chips will run already-trained models, … Read more

Kunlun Wanwei’s Matrix-Game 3.5 tackles object permanence and pushes world models toward robot control

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World models were the soul of this year’s WAIC conference, and the question running through every session was blunt: how does a model actually understand the physical world and step into it? At a dedicated forum on 19 July, Kunlun Wanwei chairman and chief executive Fang Han declared 2026 the first year of the world … Read more

OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra rollout caps two days of launches that made model rankings obsolete in hours

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Two days, three frontier launches, and the fastest overtake took five hours. On 2 September Google and Meta each released a new model: Gemini 3.8 Flash, Google’s third Flash iteration in six weeks, and Muse Spark 1.3, Meta’s fourth Spark in five months. Within hours Meta’s model had overtaken Google’s same-day release on the Artificial … Read more

Zhipu and MiniMax pivot hard to selling tokens as China’s model makers chase the enterprise market

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China’s two flagship AI model startups are rebuilding themselves as token merchants. A model-industry headhunter told the Silicon Lab research desk that both Zhipu and MiniMax are hiring B2B token salespeople at home and abroad, asking for three-plus years of experience at a cloud vendor or MaaS platform, ideally with coding skills of their own. … Read more

IFA 2026 turns into a Chinese physical-AI show as 1,000-plus mainland firms claim half the floor

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The world’s oldest consumer-electronics fair opened in Berlin on 4 September looking less like a gadget show and more like a parade of Chinese physical AI. Of roughly 2,000 exhibitors at IFA 2026, more than 932 came from mainland China, a number that tops 1,000 with Hong Kong and Taiwan firms included, close to half … Read more

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B tops Hugging Face and drags frontier agent skills onto a single consumer GPU

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On 17 August, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B became the most popular model on Hugging Face. The response from the global AI community was striking less for the ranking itself than for what the model represents: a 27-billion-parameter open-weights model, small enough to run on a single consumer GPU, posting coding and agent scores that sit on the … Read more

Apple hands the CEO job to a hardware man as Nvidia moves the AI war onto the desktop

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Two announcements landed within hours of each other in early September, and together they frame the next fight in AI: who defines consumer computing once models run on the desk instead of in the cloud. On 1 September Tim Cook stepped down as Apple chief executive to become executive chairman, handing the company to John … Read more