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Bottom Line Up Front Tencent released a computer-operating AI model called Hy4 and pledged to publish its weights, the trained parameters that let anyone download and run it. Taiwan's legislature weighed wider mainland export controls at a hearing Monday on a Foreign Trade Act amendment that would extend controls from chipmaking equipment to specific chips, key wafer materials and components. Baidu unveiled an AI-simulated city called Apollo World for testing its Apollo Go robotaxi service, which industry analysts say can log about 100,000 km of virtual road testing a day. Xiaomi's CyberOne 02 humanoid robot worked its first full eight-hour continuous shift in the company's car plant, where Xiaomi says it posted success rates of 94% to 98% across the stations it now works. |
| Tencent releases AI model that operates computers and pledges to publish its weights Tencent's Hunyuan large-model team released Hy4, a large language model it says is the first in its series that can operate a computer through both command-line and graphical interfaces. Tencent pledged to publish Hy4's weights, the trained parameters that let anyone download and run a model, which would let anyone modify a model that works software on its own. The company says a system card will accompany the release and that the release will focus on risks such as cybersecurity and biosecurity. Its own tests put the hallucination rate, the share of answers stating false information, at 7.2%, down from 12.95% for the preview version. |
| Taiwan lawmakers weigh adding chips and wafer materials to export controls on mainland Taiwan's legislature held a hearing Monday on a Foreign Trade Act amendment that would extend export controls on mainland China from chipmaking equipment to specific chips, key wafer materials and components. Mainland chipmakers and electronics makers that buy chips, wafer materials or parts from Taiwan would see those purchases come under control too. Exports of 12 categories of wafer fabrication equipment, including machines that polish wafers flat between processing steps, already need a government permit as strategic high-tech commodities. The draft would also raise criminal penalties for illegal exports to the mainland and for transshipment, routing goods through a third place before they reach their real destination. |
| Baidu unveils AI-simulated city for testing its driverless taxis Baidu unveiled Apollo World, a simulator for its Apollo Go robotaxi service that industry analysts quoted by InfoQ China say can log about 100,000 km of virtual road testing a day. Driverless cars most need testing in rare, dangerous situations that ordinary driving seldom produces. Simulated road users that react to the car let Baidu rehearse those situations in volume off the street. Every simulated car and pedestrian is an AI agentAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. that makes its own decisions, said world-model team head Yang Ze. The system also generates live camera and lidar (laser-ranging sensor) data, so whole trips can be tested with the car's actions changing what happens next. |
| Xiaomi humanoid robot works its first full eight-hour shift in its car factory Xiaomi's CyberOne 02 humanoid robot completed its first full eight-hour continuous shift at a station in the company's car plant, lining up large center-console side panels for final assembly. Eight hours is a full factory shift, the span a robot must run at line pace to cover a station's daily output by itself. Xiaomi says the robot corrected anomalies on its own and posted success rates of 94% to 98% across the stations it now works. The panels are large, irregular and arrive in random positions, which 36Kr reports demands more precise visual positioning and grip control than standard parts. The factory trial began in March with three autonomous hours at a nut-loading station. |
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| ByteDance plans to bar outside AI coding tools such as Claude from sensitive code ByteDance, TikTok's owner, plans to block outside AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex from its most sensitive code and Feishu workplace documents starting this month. AI coding assistants send the code and documents they work on to their makers' servers, so the block keeps that material in-house. The rules, which TMTPost reported from a social media leak, also cover employees' self-paid accounts. Technology Vice President Hong Dingkun wrote internally that a leak of higher-tier content would be very serious and that forcing staff onto in-house tools works poorly. In July, a vulnerability platform under China's industry ministry warned that Anthropic's Claude Code sent users' location and identity data to remote servers without consent. |
| Alibaba's Qwen team says its open AI models have passed 4 billion downloads Alibaba's Qwen team has open-sourced more than 460 AI models over three-plus years, drawing more than 4 billion downloads worldwide, project head Liu Dayiheng said at the World Internet Conference's Wuzhen Summit. Open-weight modelsOpen-weight modelAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download, run and modify it, as opposed to one reachable only through the developer's API. The main policy tension is that open weights spread capability widely and cannot be recalled once released. can be downloaded, run and modified by anyone, so the download count is a rough gauge of how far Alibaba's models have spread into other developers' systems. DeepSeek research engineer Gao Xi said at the same summit that opening new model architectures and training methods brings artificial general intelligenceAGIArtificial general intelligence: an AI system that can do most economically valuable cognitive work at or above human level. There is no agreed test for it, which is why debates about when it will arrive, and what to do about it, are so contentious. sooner than guarding a short-lived lead. Liu said the team opens small and mid-size models so researchers who lack computing powerComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs. can experiment at lower cost. |
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| III | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Robot maker Unitree's CEO unveils plan for robot AI models that train themselves Wang Xingxing, founder and CEO of humanoid and four-legged robot maker Unitree, showed a "Physical AI Robot Self-Evolution V1.0" research plan at the Wuzhen Summit. In it, robot AI models write their own training code, train in simulation or the real world and are scored on test results. Coding and experiments, work engineers normally do, would pass to the models, leaving people to set goals and judge results. Trained robot models can approach 100% success on some single, fixed factory steps, he said, but leading multimodal models' success stays low on precise tasks such as assembling and taking apart a phone or threading a needle. |
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| State aircraft maker AVIC tests laser system against swarms of suicide drones Swarms of suicide drones caught fire and crashed in a recent test in the desert of northwest China of the Light Arrow laser counter-drone system, state newspaper Science and Technology Daily reported. A laser shot costs little compared with an interceptor missile, which makes lasers a candidate defense against cheap drones arriving in large numbers. The system comes from an institute of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the state aviation conglomerate. Lab director Zhou Shuiliang says performance hinges on the system's rare-earth-doped optical fiber, which carries and amplifies the laser energy. Hand tuning of the dozens of settings used to draw the fiber had made production slow and fiber quality inconsistent, and team member Tan Guang proposed replacing it with an algorithm. |
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| Battery maker CATL delivers first units of eight-hour grid storage system for Australia CATL delivered the first batch of its EnerQB storage system to infrastructure investor Quinbrook, in what the report calls the industry's first system lasting eight hours or more to be deployed at gigawatt-hour scale. Storage that discharges for eight hours or more can carry daytime solar output across a full evening, far longer than the 2.5-hour global average duration that research firm Wood Mackenzie reports. EnerQB was designed for a 24 gigawatt-hour portfolio of Australian projects, enough to deliver 3 gigawatts for eight hours. The first units, each holding 5.64 megawatt-hours, will be deployed at the Stanwell power station in central Queensland. |
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