China’s artificial intelligence development is expanding beyond general large language models (LLMs) towards a new generation of specialised systems designed to solve real-world industrial problems, according to a leading computer science researcher. Cui Peng, an associate professor at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University, said that specialist systems capable of analysing industrial data, such as factory sensor readings and financial records, could become a crucial part of AI’s next phase in...

DeepSeek’s Harness artificial intelligence agent framework has reached 1.54 million daily active users less than three months after launch, the Chinese AI champion said on Sunday, marking rapid growth in a new battleground between leading Chinese and American AI giants. Users of Harness through the company’s official application programming interface were consuming around 92 trillion tokens a day as of November 4, the Hangzhou-based start-up said. That is equivalent to about 1.1 billion tokens...

The board of US AI chip giant Nvidia has announced an independent investigation as chief executive Jensen Huang said in a memo to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Huang admitted to an extramarital affair and apologised to his family and colleagues in the memo, which the company published on its website on Sunday. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Huang wrote. He apologised and pledged to...

Dong Mingzhu chairs Gree Electric Appliances, a home-appliance giant based in southern China’s Guangdong province. Having worked her way up from a frontline sales job, she is one of China’s best-known figures in manufacturing. As a deputy to the National People’s Congress, she has long advocated for manufacturing innovation, higher incomes and greener consumption. In this interview, conducted when she was named an inaugural “Cool Leader” at an assembly of the UN Environment Programme’s Cool...

Artificial intelligence models will soon be powerful enough to master biology, presenting both benefits and serious risks, Tencent Holdings’ chief AI scientist and former OpenAI star researcher Vinces Yao Shunyu said during a rare public appearance on Saturday. The assessment comes as frontier AI systems are increasingly being applied to medicine and biology, which could accelerate discovery of new drugs and other treatments. However, experts also warn that malicious actors could use AI to...

Humanoid robots represent the next frontier for Pudu Robotics, according to founder and CEO Felix Zhang Tao, as the global commercial robotics leader takes on Elon Musk’s Tesla in the growing sector and explores manufacturing in Europe, its largest overseas market. “It’s definitely a competitor, but a long-term one,” Zhang told the South China Morning Post in a recent interview, adding that Tesla was a “very good” rival whose high profile had driven innovation and broadened market awareness in...

The driver’s seat was empty and the steering wheel was turning on its own. Sitting in the back of a Pony.ai robotaxi in Shenzhen, I felt a flicker of nervousness. But as the car glided into traffic, the initial unease gave way to an appreciation of something far less futuristic: the blissful absence of small talk with the driver. My test rides in two of China’s major tech hubs – with Pony.ai in Shenzhen and Baidu’s Apollo Go in Beijing – offered a first-hand experience of how autonomous vehicles...

Chinese artificial intelligence models led by Moonshot AI’s Kimi family accounted for nearly nine-tenths of estimated global enterprise spending on open-source systems, according to a new study, even though proprietary US rivals continue to capture the vast majority of overall revenue. The report, released this week by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, said Chinese AI systems accounted for 89 per cent of global enterprise spending on open-source models. Kimi led with a 61 per...

Solana, one of the world’s largest blockchain networks, plans to expand in Hong Kong to tap the city’s growing demand for tokenisation, according to a senior executive. “I believe that the biggest opportunity for Solana is actually in [the Asia-Pacific region],” Solana Company chairman and CEO Joseph Chee said in an interview in Hong Kong earlier this week. Founded in the US in 2018, the company is behind one of the most popular cryptocurrencies. With a market capitalisation of about US$53...

China’s pure-play artificial intelligence chipmakers crossed an important milestone in the third quarter as several firms swung into profit, but severe supply chain hurdles and soaring memory costs cloud their long-term growth prospects. Domestic graphics processing unit (GPU) developers including Moore Threads, MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX are racing to fill the market void left by Nvidia, whose high-end processors face strict US export controls. These home-grown firms are competing fiercely to win...