China‘s state-owned defense giant Norinco in February unveiled a military vehicle capable of autonomously conducting combat-support operations at 50 kilometres per hour. It was powered by DeepSeek, the company whose artificial intelligence model is the pride of China’s tech sector. The Norinco P60’s release was touted by Communist Party officials in press statements as an…
China saw a massive uptick in generative artificial intelligence adoption in the first half of the year to 515 million users, with most of the users preferring domestic models, according to a state-run research organisation. The number of users more than doubled in the first six months of the year from the end of December…
The belief that China is a country only good at adopting technologies at scale has been a “misperception”, according to the author of The New Geography of Innovation, a recently published book that maps the rise of new tech powers around the world excluding the US. “The geography of innovation is shifting”, the book, which…
Alibaba Group Holding plans to increase its capital expenditures on artificial intelligence infrastructure from the original 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years, the group’s CEO said on Wednesday. Eddie Wu Yongming, also the chairman of Alibaba Cloud, said at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, that Alibaba’s…
Hangzhou-based Alibaba’s cloud computing unit on Tuesday unveiled its much-anticipated Qwen3 family, consisting of eight enhanced models that range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. In machine learning, parameters are the variables present in an AI system during training, which helps establish how data prompts yield the…
Hangzhou-based Alibaba’s cloud computing unit on Tuesday unveiled its much-anticipated Qwen3 family, consisting of eight enhanced models that range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. In machine learning, parameters are the variables present in an AI system during training, which helps establish how data prompts yield the…
Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma delivered a rare speech to the company’s cloud unit on Thursday, laying out his ideas and vision for a responsible and human-oriented artificial intelligence (AI), as the tech giant pivots to become China’s AI enabler. Ma, 60, made a surprise visit to Alibaba Cloud’s campus in Hangzhou on Thursday,…
Misa Zhu Mingming, an engineer who had worked at Alibaba Group Holding, left in 2014 to found his own venture, Rokid. The start-up, which develops smart glasses, was backed by angel investors that included Vision Plus Capital, formed by Eddie Wu Yongming and others before Wu became CEO of Alibaba in 2023. A decade later,…
Alibaba Group Holding has revamped its web-search and cloud-storage tool Quark into a super artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, signalling the tech giant’s efforts to strengthen its foothold in the emerging field of AI agents. The new version of Quark is powered by Alibaba’s Qwen series reasoning model. It offers advanced capabilities such as a chatbot,…