Xi offers BRICS a China-led open-source AI community
China used its BRICS summit podium on Sunday to propose building the AI stack for the developing world — while two consumer stories showed AI quietly moving into houses and tractors.
President Xi Jinping said China will "pioneer the establishment of a BRICS AI open-source community," in a statement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi. The package goes beyond model sharing: China proposes supporting cooperation on developing and applying large language models, running AI seminars and training courses, standing up a BRICS digital ecosystem cloud platform, and creating an engineer-cultivation alliance plus a youth science-and-technology exchange program. The read: as US export controls fence in chips, Beijing is exporting the software layer instead — open weights, training, and cloud infrastructure sold as South-South cooperation rather than a vendor relationship. It's the same playbook China ran at APEC — China turns APEC into an AI export channel for small business — now aimed at a bloc of ten. Notably absent from the statement: the AI-safety debate raging in Silicon Valley this week, which Xi did not address.
UGREEN launched the HomeAgent HA100 Pro, a home AI hub built around a Chinese compute-in-memory chip. Announced at the accessory maker's global brand event on Saturday, the device packs Houmo Intelligence's M50 — 160 TOPS on a single chip at roughly 10 watts of typical power — into a box that fuses local AI compute, storage, home monitoring and whole-home device management. Cameras, photos and files get understood by models running on the device instead of being shipped to a cloud API. UGREEN had shown the HomeAgent line earlier this month; the M50 edition is the first with dedicated local silicon. Local-first is the pitch every NAS vendor is converging on, and the honest question is which model actually runs well in 160 TOPS and 10 watts.
John Deere says farmers can now fix their own tractors — and almost nobody is doing it. In a WIRED-reported demo, Deere's Operations Center Pro Service software diagnosed a disconnected water-in-fuel sensor on a 5130ML, pulled the matching manual pages by serial number, and cleared the error after a non-mechanic reconnected two wires in about two minutes; Deere recently bolted an AI chatbot called JD onto the tool. But a year after launch, Pro Service has roughly a thousand daily users against about 1.8 million US farms, and plaintiff farmers say cracked dealer software on the gray market is still the practical option — even after Deere's $99 million class payout and its FTC repairability settlement.
What to watch: whether the BRICS open-source community gets funded machinery or stays a communiqué, and whether the HA100 Pro ships outside China.
If a home AI hub kept your camera footage off the cloud but ran weaker models, which would you take? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: CNBC · China Ministry of Foreign Affairs · Economic Times · Leiphone · 9to5Google · heise · Ars Technica · WIRED · The Verge
