China’s new-energy vehicle market showed a sharp September split. Six of the ten largest challenger brands posted year-on-year declines, while BYD and Geely did the opposite where it matters most: outside China. Leapmotor led China’s September NEV delivery surge past 105,000 units. (Source: Chedongxi) Leapmotor tops 100,000 again, exports a quarter Leapmotor delivered 105,700 vehicles … Read more
At its Suzhou technology conference on 22 to 23 September, Intel laid out two answers to one shift: AI value is moving from the cloud model race to deployment at the edge and on the factory floor. Dan Rodriguez, vice-president of edge computing, cited a forecast that about 80 per cent of tokens will be … Read more
For two years the “price butcher” of large models was never Claude. DeepSeek drove per-million-token prices to cents and trained Chinese vendors to match. On 8 October the positions flipped. Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, a lightweight model for everyday tasks, at USD 0.10 in and USD 0.50 out per million tokens for requests under … Read more
DeepSeek is close to finalising a new funding round of at least RMB 80 billion, with Tencent and CATL among the largest committed investors, Bloomberg reported on 6 October, in a deal that paves the way for an initial public offering early in 2027. People familiar with the terms said the final total could approach … Read more
WorldArena, the benchmark that has become a reference point for world models, opened its 2.0 challenge at IROS 2026 with two new tracks built to test one thing the field dodges: can the model actually drive a robot, or only generate a pretty video? WorldArena 2.0 adds real-robot and reinforcement tracks to test whether world … Read more
In 2026 the business of robot “skin” began to fork. At IROS 2026, Sharpa launched the D01 robot, the W02 dexterous hand and the AE01 exoskeleton data glove at once. The glove logs an operator’s finger-joint motion with 22 encoders and feeds contact back through five fingertip vibration motors, so one device both teleoperates a … Read more
Shutu Tech has closed a Pre-A round of nearly RMB 100 million, its third raise in a single month, led by CDH Investments’ Baifu arm and the Kunpeng Fund, a national-level big-data vehicle, with Guangzhou Industrial Investment and Yihe Capital joining and existing backer Trend Investment topping up. The money goes straight at the hardest … Read more
On 21 September, word that Tesla’s robot team had flown to Ningbo to audit factories lit another fire under China’s embodied-AI race. The visit was not a courtesy call. Suppliers including Tuopu Group, Sanhua Intelligent and Joyson Electronics had already taken humanoid-robot orders for joint modules, actuators and precision structures, and the audit was a … Read more
Yesterday OpenAI released 722 AI maths manuscripts. Today it has withdrawn three of them, over a single wrong sign. OpenAI Pulls Three AI Maths Papers Over a Single Wrong Sign (Generated editorial image, Robot Belt) The three retracted papers all touch the Hodge conjecture, one of the Millennium Prize problems. The fault sits in the … Read more
At a recent media briefing, Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, shared the latest on terminal business and the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Yu said Huawei once followed a global path, cooperating with US, European, Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese firms, but since 2019, to keep the business alive, Huawei joined domestic supply chains to … Read more