The Economist sent a reporter to Shantou to cover a hit film. What came back was an autopsy. They are wrong about the patient. The piece (”Bottom of the class”, July 23) declares Shantou the special economic zone that failed, the odd one out among four. GDP per person of 54,000 yuan. Growth of 0.1% … 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
Zeng Yi’s office tea was refilled again and again as the conversation unfolded, a typical Guangdong reception: no need to sit stiff, but the matter was clear. He speaks with a Chaoshan accent, not fast, always finishing a sentence with a smile, eyes narrowing, leaning in, easy to relax around. Talk of AI and RISC-V … Read more
AI large models are evolving from a business and product into the infrastructure a company runs on. Past software and hardware firms organised by product, with AI as one function among imaging, voice, recommendation or interaction. After foundation models arrived, AI reached product definition, user interaction and service distribution. Teams once split by product must … Read more
Yesterday OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cyber-security programme and launched GPT-5.6-Cyber, a model built for security scenarios. Notably, GPT-5.6-Cyber splits AI cyber capability into two directions: Daybreak Blue for defence work, and Daybreak Red for advanced security research and attack simulation. This red-blue confrontation is the core drill mechanism traditional security uses to validate system safety. … Read more
How expensive is AI, really? We once measured compute in GPU counts. Now OpenAI and NVIDIA measure it in gigawatts. On 17 August, the PORTS-Pike project disclosure showed OpenAI building world-class AI infrastructure in Ohio. OpenAI said it has secured about 8 GW of IT capacity at the site, with NVIDIA providing credit support for … Read more
In late July, San Francisco startup Tau Robotics launched a humanoid home-cleaning service at US$30 an hour, about RMB 200. It is invite-only, covering the city’s Mission and Noe Valley neighbourhoods. Tau runs three robots named Chelsea, Elon and Tony, in black uniforms with assigned roles. Chelsea tackles kitchen counters and mirror water marks. Tony … Read more
In August 2026, Dyna Robotics released Dyna-2, its new robot foundation model. Pretraining used over 1 million hours of first-person human video, roughly 170 years of continuous awake experience. Across seven benchmarks, the WAM architecture reached 1.55 times the success rate of the previous VLA models. High-precision manufacturing task success jumped from Dyna-1’s 20 per … Read more
Open any tech outlet and humanoid funding looks like a flood. 2026 was crowned the first year of embodied intelligence, capital queuing to pay. Step into an embodied-AI lab and you see something else. No sci-fi autonomy. No elegant conversation. An operator wears a VR headset, motion-capture suit and handheld controller, repeatedly driving an arm … Read more
In 2026, America’s humanoid robot industry stopped showing off and started defending itself. Against whom? The United States now fields at least six serious robot companies: Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility, Apptronik, plus Norway-born, US-landed 1X. Six firms, six completely different technical routes. Rankings are easy to fake. What matters is the choices each company … Read more
Future MCU competition is not just about performance, but who understands the application better, said Yang Ping, marketing director of Nation Technologies, at the Munich Shanghai Electronics Fair. The fair opened on 1 July in Shanghai. Amid the displays, control-chip innovation around robots and AI infrastructure stood out. As an MCU leader in AI, Nation … Read more
Chery’s full takeover of a Nissan factory in South Africa sends a signal: China’s auto exports could top 10 million units and reach 2.5 times Japan’s level. The move shows how Chinese carmakers are not just shipping vehicles abroad but acquiring and operating foreign production assets, a step change in globalisation. For European supply chains … Read more