Yuanchuan Micro, a startup building inference chips, has closed a Pre-A round of several hundred million yuan. The round was led by IDG Capital, with Futong Capital, Jiukun Venture, Shangqi Capital, Shunxi Fund and Xuhui Science City Investment joining. It is the firm’s fourth raise since the start of 2026, and the money will go … Read more
Sunzhan, founded in 2022 and still around twenty people, builds custom RISC-V processor cores (CPU, DSP, NPU) for domain-specific architectures. Founder Zeng Yi argues that AI has moved the decision over chip architecture out of the chip company and into the AI company: the model now dictates the silicon, and RISC-V’s freedom to add custom … Read more
Reuters reports that Apple is training a China-specific large language model with Alibaba, which supplies compute and localisation support. The model is trained independently for the China market rather than translated from an overseas version, a notable shift in Apple’s China AI strategy. Apple and Alibaba are reported to be co-training a China-specific model. (Source: … Read more
A Zhejiang University and Swansea University team took an unintuitive finding to IJCAI: when fine-tuning a vision-language model on new data, tuning the text tower helps and tuning the image tower can hurt. Their Adaptive Asymmetric Adapter automates that choice, applying the brakes to visual tuning exactly when it would damage the model. The adaptive … Read more
Unitree released a new humanoid, “Superman”, on 17 August, with a 2-metre standing vertical jump and a top speed of 12.66 metres per second on 0.85-metre legs, past the standing-high-jump and running-speed records for any human. The company said the whole machine took just over three months to develop and has room to improve in … Read more
At CVPR 2026 the 3D Gaussian Splatting field stopped chasing prettier renders and started chasing industry. Across eight representative papers, the work closes the pipeline from feed-forward, second-scale generation to GPU-operator rebuilds, noise-robust SLAM and Neural ODE physics, turning 3DGS from a 3D photo album into the physical base of embodied AI and world models. … Read more
Pony.ai showed its fourth-generation autonomous truck in Guangzhou this month and said it plans to operate between 500 and 1,000 self-driving trucks within two to three years. The truck unit started in 2018 from near zero, when a small team bought a Dongfeng rig and rewired throttle, brake and steering themselves. Eight years on, the … Read more
Global humanoid shipments are climbing fast. IDC puts 2025 worldwide volume above 18,000 units, up around 508 per cent year on year, with Chinese makers dominant, and Morgan Stanley has raised its 2026 China forecast from 28,000 to 50,000 units. As the race moves from basic mobility to stable multi-task work in messy environments, tactile … Read more
China has published the world’s first national-level capability-evaluation system covering the full automotive-chip chain. The State Administration for Market Regulation, through the certification and accreditation body CNCA, approved and released five certification and accreditation industry standards that build a structured framework for assessing institutions across the automotive semiconductor sector. China releases the first certification standards … Read more
Storm season is quietly resetting the argument about electric cars and water. When Typhoon White Dolphin made landfall on 9 August, Shanghai recorded close to 300 millimetres of rain and thousands of cars were submerged across several cities. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun used the moment to post a reminder: pay attention to wading ability. Xiaomi’s … Read more