Companies, products, and big moves
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Thomson Reuters builds its own legal AI instead of renting from OpenAI Thomson Reuters launched "Thomson," its first in-house language model for legal work — built on Alibaba's open Qwen rather than fine-tuning a frontier model from OpenAI or Anthropic, a bet on owning AI
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The funding treadmill keeps spinning, and Nvidia keeps footing the bill. This time the check is reportedly headed to Perplexity, the AI search upstart that has quietly turned itself into one of the sector's fastest-growing revenue stories. Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity at a valuation
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Anthropic's pricing problem is now official: the company's cheapest new frontier model is beating its most expensive one in corporate wallets, less than a month after launch — awkward timing for a $2 trillion IPO. Opus 5, released July 24 at a fraction of Fable 5'
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At the World Robot Conference in Beijing, the founders actually shipping robots — UBTech, Robot Era, Booster Robotics, Jushen Technology and JD's robotics arm among them — delivered a rare public reality check: embodied AI's bottleneck is no longer demos, it's reliability, manufacturing standards, and cold
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A former security guard who says he can't speak English, a high-school junior, and a father-son pair took three of the top prizes at ByteDance's TRAE AI creativity contest in Shanghai — beating roughly 37,000 entrants with apps built almost entirely by describing what
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Two Sunday stories about who gets to own AI's plumbing: the open-source model hub everyone relies on is quietly shopping itself, and Sam Altman is warning that fear could hand AI to a handful of powerful players. Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the
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Chinese creative-software veteran Wondershare just pointed its AI video stack at the most expensive corner of advertising: the TV commercial. Wondershare has launched Filmora.TV globally — an AI-native canvas workspace built for TVC (commercial) production teams, unveiled alongside a brand film created for Chinese tea chain Chayan Yuese.
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Kuaishou's latest earnings painted a brutally split picture: its legacy video, livestreaming, and e-commerce lines barely grew, while its video-generation model Kling AI carried the quarter as the company's only real growth engine. Kling AI's single-quarter revenue surged past 200% year
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A single university lab underpins the two rival forces leading China's push toward the frontier — and the mainland's humanoid-robot boom is quietly reshaping its own venture hierarchy. China's AI leap traces back to one Tsinghua lab. A Wall Street Journal feature traces the
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For a company that historically made its money selling the shovels, Nvidia just bought a pickaxe. The chip giant is taking the extraordinary step of licensing the model-building software of the Paris startup Poolside and hiring 109 of the people who used it — a deal people familiar with the
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The clearest signal yet that Chinese tech is going all-in on AI came from Alibaba's boardroom this morning: a proposed Hong Kong share placement worth roughly US$10 billion (about HK$80 billion), with essentially all of the proceeds earmarked for artificial intelligence. It lands in the
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Personal robots crossed from demo booths into shopping carts this weekend. Swancor New Materials — the listed company humanoid-maker Agibot took control of last year — has thrown open public pre-orders for its Qiyuan Q1 and T1 consumer robots, with the first units slated to ship next month. Shanghai-listed