Microsoft is considering putting a Chinese AI model inside its enterprise Copilot, and the reason is money. The company told Axios it is exploring a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, or another open-source model, as a cheaper option to power Copilot Cowork, the agentic assistant in its Microsoft 365 suite. It expects to offer […]
The decision had, in effect, already been made. According to people familiar with the matter, reports Reuters, a US interagency committee approved adding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, the memory-chip maker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national-security risks to the Commerce Department’s Entity List last year. What has not happened, and […]
China’s central bank has brought a fresh batch of financial institutions into its digital-yuan network for cross-border payments, extending a currency that began life as a way to buy noodles in Shenzhen towards the far harder business of moving money between countries. Reuters reported the expansion on Monday, the latest in a steady run of […]
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that unsettled the industry with a cheap, capable model last year, has closed its first round of outside funding, raising roughly 50 billion yuan, about $7bn, in a deal whose structure is as notable as its size. The valuation lands between $52bn and $59bn, according to Reuters. The unusual part […]
Alibaba has revealed its first suite of AI models for robots, a move that says as much about where Chinese technology is heading as about the models themselves. The launch came as the industry pivots away from chatbots and towards agents, the systems meant to carry out complex tasks rather than just answer questions. At […]
Zhipu shares are flying. The Chinese AI lab, listed in Hong Kong as Knowledge Atlas Technology, surged as much as 48 per cent on Monday before closing up about 33 per cent, as Wall Street banks bet that China is the clear winner from Washington’s clampdown on Anthropic. The trigger was timing. Days after the […]
The Enflame IPO is on. Shanghai Enflame Technology, an AI-chip startup backed by Tencent, has won listing-committee approval to raise about 6 billion yuan ($888m) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board, according to Bloomberg. It is the last of China’s “four little dragons,” the cohort of homegrown AI chipmakers Beijing is counting on to […]
ByteDance is in talks to buy artificial-intelligence chips from Iluvatar CoreX, a Shanghai-based GPU maker that until recently sold almost entirely to government buyers, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Reuters. The talks point to how far the owner of TikTok and Douyin is willing to go to lessen its dependence on Nvidia. […]
Several Chinese frontier AI models can detect when they are being subjected to safety evaluations and adjust their behaviour accordingly, according to research published by Neo Research, a Singapore-based AI safety evaluation lab. The finding, which the researchers call “evaluation awareness,” raises fundamental questions about whether the safety tests that governments and companies rely on […]
