EastVoice · AI · 2026-09-25 · Issue #78

Editor's Note: DeepSeek is closing a $7.5 billion second round while its annualized revenue passes $1 billion, and Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek are now openly chasing 5 to 10 trillion parameter models. Tencent pulled the plug on QClaw and pushed its users to WorkBuddy. AGIBOT rolled its 20,000th embodied robot off the line. Qualcomm agreed to buy robot software firm PickNik Robotics, and Counterpoint counts 35,000 quadrupeds shipped in the first half of 2026, three quarters of the whole of 2025.

Commentary: Chinese labs spent the week on scale, data quality and internal tooling rather than leaderboard scores. The more telling number is what reached paying customers and factory floors.

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I. AI Foundation Models

1. DeepSeek Nears a $7.5 Billion Round as Annualized Revenue Tops $1 Billion

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24, citing The Information, that DeepSeek has locked in a $7.5 billion round and that its annualized revenue has passed $1 billion (about ¥6.7 billion). Two people familiar with the deal were cited. The company's previous funding came in an open-source model cycle it largely set off itself.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: A lab that ships free weights and still books a billion in annualized revenue is the awkward story for every closed-model pricing deck. The money now buys compute it has spent two years arguing it needs less of.

2. Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek Chase 5-to-10-Trillion-Parameter Models

• Summary: TMTPost reported on Sept 24 that Alibaba's CEO Eddie Wu (吴泳铭) told the Yunqi conference on Sept 22 that the company is preparing a model with 5 to 10 trillion parameters, and that the head of Alibaba's Qwen LLM line made the same case from the token platform side. The piece describes a spending race across the three companies rather than a single product plan.
• Source: TMTPost · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Parameter counts went out of fashion for about a year in China, and price cuts brought them back in a fortnight. Training a model that large is a statement about access to power and chips as much as about capability.

3. Alibaba's DAMO EAGLE Screens for Esophageal Cancer on Plain CT

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Alibaba's DAMO Academy built DAMO EAGLE with Sichuan Cancer Hospital and the Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center. The model reads plain CT scans to flag esophageal cancer, including early and precancerous lesions, without intubation or contrast imaging, and has been validated on more than 80,000 cases across 3 countries. It is Alibaba's fourth cancer-screening model.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Screening tools earn trust in clinics, not on benchmarks, and the no-contrast claim is the part that matters. If a routine scan can carry the screening load, the bottleneck moves to who reads the flag.

4. Xiaomi Details HySparse2, the Architecture Behind MiMo-V3

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Xiaomi's MiMo team published the core architecture for MiMo-V3, called HySparse2, aimed at long-horizon agents. The stated goal is cheaper handling of web pages, files, code and tool-call logs, with more accurate retrieval from a growing task history.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Agent workloads are mostly memory management dressed up as intelligence. Whoever cuts the cost of carrying a long history owns the bills of every assistant running all day.

5. Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Lands Next Month With Three Reasoning Tiers

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24, citing Wccftech, that Moonshot (月之暗面) is preparing Kimi K3.1 with Low, High and Max reasoning settings.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Letting the caller pick how hard the model thinks is honest product design, and it exposes the real cost curve. Buyers will pick the cheapest tier that passes their evals, whatever the demo shows.

6. A DeepSeek Sandbox Paper Carries a Hint About Self-Improving Agents

• Summary: TMTPost reported on Sept 24 on a paper from DeepSeek and Tsinghua University with Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋) listed as the final author. The paper covers the sandbox DeepSeek uses to train its agents; section 6 sketches a loop where an agent builds the environments that then retrain it.
• Source: TMTPost · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Recursive self-improvement is usually a conference talk. Putting the sandbox design into a paper, with the founder's name on it, is a claim that the loop already runs in production.

7. BAT Rework Pretraining Pipelines to Get Rid of Dirty Data

• Summary: Leiphone reported on Sept 24 that a group of Chinese model builders is rebuilding pretraining pipelines, with data cleaning and quality filtering as the main target after a run of models trained on noisy web corpora.
• Source: Leiphone · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Ripping out a data pipeline is expensive and invisible to users. That these teams are doing it anyway says the next scaling gain is in the corpus, not the cluster.

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II. AI Software & Applications

1. Tencent Shuts Down QClaw and Moves Its Users to WorkBuddy

• Summary: TMTPost reported on Sept 24 that Tencent posted a shutdown notice for QClaw, which closes on Dec 24, with a one-click data migration to WorkBuddy. The piece reads it as the first casualty in a broader consolidation, after Alibaba merged three products into Qianwen Office, ByteDance folded TRAE and Coze into Doubao, and Baidu moved Wenxin Kuaima into Baidu Dazi.
• Source: TMTPost · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Chinese platform companies spent two years shipping every AI entry point they could name, and are now cutting them back. Users pay for the experiment in migrations.

2. Huawei Launches Xiaoyi Work With 1,000 Free AI Credits

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Huawei launched Xiaoyi Work, covering market research, document processing, slide generation, data analysis, content creation and code development. First-time users get 1,000 AI credits free for 31 days.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Huawei is bundling the work agent into a phone already in millions of pockets, and giving away a month to build the habit. That distribution beats a superior standalone app.

3. Doubao Denies Layoffs, Calls It a Reorganisation

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Doubao's PR lead Liu Xing (刘星) pushed back on reports that the chatbot team was halved, saying part of the general Session team's remit moved to Doubao's trading and other units, and that the rest was a division-of-labour change.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: A public denial from a PR lead is a sign the internal chart changed under real pressure. Chat assistants are becoming features inside commerce flows, and headcount follows revenue.

4. Accio and the Digital Trade Expo Ship an Agent for 2,000 Exhibitors

• Summary: Leiphone reported on Sept 24 that Accio and the Global Digital Trade Expo launched a dedicated agent inside the Accio app, handling route planning, exhibitor matching, photo-based supplier search and scheduling across more than 2,000 exhibiting companies.
• Source: Leiphone · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Trade shows are a clean test bed, with dense inventory, dated demand and measurable outcomes. Agents that survive a week of B2B matchmaking will find the rest of enterprise sales easy.

5. Qoder Adds Projects and Discussions for People Working With Agents

• Summary: AI Era (新智元) reported on Sept 24 that Qoder shipped Projects and Discussions, letting several people and their agents work in the same space.
• Source: AI Era · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Coding tools are turning into shared workspaces, which is where the seats and the renewal revenue sit. The hard part is permissions, since every agent in the room inherits someone's credentials.

6. Xiaoyuan AI Moves Into Tencent's WorkBuddy to Sell Abroad

• Summary: QbitAI reported on Sept 24 that an export-focused agent called Xiaoyuan AI (小元AI) joined Tencent WorkBuddy. It finds overseas buyers, drafts outreach, negotiates, keeps memory of past trades and is pitched as self-improving.
• Source: QbitAI · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Export selling is exactly the work where a bad agent is expensive and a good one is invisible. Memory of previous deals is the feature that decides whether a factory keeps the subscription.

7. Stripe Brings Its Flagship Event to China for the First Time

• Summary: QbitAI reported on Sept 24 that Stripe Tour ran in Shanghai on Sept 23, its first stop in China, and that Stripe Managed Payments is now fully live.
• Source: QbitAI · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Payments infrastructure is what Chinese AI products need to bill overseas customers without rebuilding compliance per market. The pitch is plumbing, and plumbing is where agent businesses actually break.

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III. Humanoid Robots

1. AGIBOT's 20,000th Robot Comes Off the Line

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that AGIBOT (智元) rolled out its 20,000th general-purpose embodied robot, an Expedition A3 Ultra, at a ceremony in Hengqin and delivered it to Chimelong Group. The company calls it a global mass-production record for the category.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Five-digit cumulative output is the number that separates a manufacturer from a demo company. Delivery to an amusement-park operator, rather than a factory, also tells you where the near-term buyers are.

2. Counterpoint: 35,000 Quadrupeds Shipped in the First Half, 40% for Industry

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Counterpoint Research published findings on Sept 21 showing roughly 35,000 quadruped robots shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, about three quarters of the full-year 2025 total, with 40% going to vertical industrial applications.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Quadrupeds reached commercial volume while humanoids took the headlines, and industrial buyers did the buying. The money is in inspection routes no one wants to walk.

3. EngineAI's T800 Fights a Human Boxer and Wins the Round

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that EngineAI's (众擎) T800 humanoid entered an octagon at the REK robot fighting event in San Francisco on Sept 20 and knocked down a human boxer, the robot's first bout against a person.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: A staged fight proves actuators and balance under shock, which is genuinely hard engineering. It says nothing about whether the machine can work a shift, and the industry keeps blurring the two.

4. Tsinghua and Infinigence Open-Source RLark, a Cloud Platform for Embodied AI

• Summary: QbitAI reported on Sept 24 that Tsinghua University and Infinigence (无问芯穹) open-sourced RLark, a cloud-native platform for embodied intelligence that registers robots in about 5 minutes and starts cross-cluster tasks in 10 seconds.
• Source: QbitAI · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Fleets are already hard to manage inside one lab, and nobody has a good answer at a hundred sites. Open-sourcing the control plane is how you get the whole industry to debug it for you.

5. Qiyuan Puts a Humanoid on Sale for ¥19,999

• Summary: Huxiu reported on Sept 24 that Qiyuan Robotics (启元机器人), under Shangwei Xincai, priced its Q1 and T1 humanoids on Sept 20, with the base version at ¥19,999 (about $2,800), and argued the launch served AGIBOT's listing story more than the buyers'.
• Source: Huxiu · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: At ¥19,999 the robot is priced like a phone and performs like a phone accessory. The interesting question is what the warranty costs when buyers start using it daily.

6. Dongfeng's Humanoid Enters Factory Trial Production in October

• Summary: TMTPost reported on Sept 24 that Dongfeng Motor's chief intelligent-technology engineer Zhang Zhenlin (张振林) said the humanoid Xiaodong enters trial production in October for assembly, sorting, handling, loading and quality inspection, with small-batch pilot runs by the end of the year and a target of matching human capability by late 2027.
• Source: TMTPost · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: An automaker testing its own humanoid on its own line is the only honest benchmark in this industry. The target date is the part to check again next year.

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IV. Autonomous Driving

1. Huawei's ADS 5 Gets a September OTA With AR Car-Finding

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 25 that Huawei's Qiankun intelligent vehicle unit announced the September OTA for ADS 5, upgrading navigation and parking plus group travel, broader navigation search, AR guidance to find your car and real-time two-way talk.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-25
• Editor's Take: The driving stack is now a subscription surface, and OTA notes read like an app changelog. Features that keep a driver looking at the screen are also the ones regulators will ask about.

2. Yijing X9 Launches With the Full Huawei Stack at ¥279,800

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that the Yijing X9, billed as a second-generation family flagship SUV, launched at a limited-time ¥279,800 to ¥359,800 with Huawei's ADS, HarmonyOS cockpit, Chitu platform, vehicle lighting, car cloud and Whale Fin connectivity.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Huawei's smart-car stack is now the default spec sheet of mid-market Chinese EVs, and the carmaker's own brand matters less each launch. That is a durable royalty stream and a durable dependency.

3. Tesla's FSD Draws Complaints in Belgium Over Speeding and Overtaking

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24, citing Reuters, that Belgian road-safety group Johanna.be says testing there showed Tesla's Full Self-Driving system speeding frequently and attempting to pass cyclists on streets where overtaking is banned.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: European approval runs on documented behaviour, not on US fleet miles. Every complaint from a safety group becomes an exhibit in the next type-approval review.

4. Drive-by-Wire Chassis Becomes 2026's Fastest-Heating Car Technology

• Summary: Leiphone reported on Sept 24 that drive-by-wire chassis is the technology track heating up fastest in China's car market this year, with steering, braking and suspension moving to electronic control.
• Source: Leiphone · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Steer-by-wire is the enabling part for both software-defined cars and robots on wheels. Redundancy design, not feature lists, decides which suppliers stay in the chain.

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V. World Models / Physical AI

1. Qualcomm Agrees to Acquire Robot Software Firm PickNik Robotics

• Summary: ITHome reported on Sept 24 that Qualcomm announced on Sept 23 that it has agreed to acquire PickNik Robotics, a robot software company known for motion-planning work used in manipulator control. Qualcomm framed the deal as a step into physical AI.
• Source: ITHome · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Chips alone do not win robots; the software layer that turns a plan into torque does. Buying motion planning is Qualcomm paying for the part it cannot fab.

2. A Closed-Door Panel Asks What a World Model Actually Does

• Summary: Huxiu published an AI100 closed-door session on Sept 24 in which founders were told to cover up the words "world model" and describe the work concretely, against a backdrop of GPT-6, VLA and self-evolution all competing to be the robot's brain.
• Source: Huxiu · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: The terminology has outrun the evidence, and Chinese founders say so in private more often than on stage. Data collection and evaluation pipelines are where the claims get tested.

3. After GPT-6 Learned to Move an Arm, Robot Brains Split the Work

• Summary: Huxiu published an analysis on Sept 24 arguing that GPT-6 Astra driving a robot arm to place blocks into a bowl does not remove the need for robot-specific models. Moving, staying stable and knowing when not to move are described as separate problems.
• Source: Huxiu · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: A general model that can plan a grasp still has to survive contact with a slippery object. The physical layer will keep its own models for a while yet.

4. Qualcomm Says Phones Are Turning Into Agent Hubs

• Summary: TMTPost reported on Sept 24 from Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit that CEO Cristiano Amon described a phone becoming a personal agent hub, with chip design shifting from clock speed and benchmarks toward on-device inference efficiency, multi-engine coordination and memory bandwidth.
• Source: TMTPost · 2026-09-24
• Editor's Take: Moving the agent onto the handset is a privacy argument and a cost argument at once. It also puts Qualcomm in the position of selling the same agent stack to every OEM at the same price.

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