Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Kaushik Basu, a Cornell University professor and former World Bank senior vice president and chief economist, said AI will boost economic growth but reduce demand for some labor and concentrate income among fewer people. Speaking at the 2026 Bund Summit, he said no single country can address the issue alone and called on China and the US to jointly push for global policy coordination, including tax measures to tackle income distribution challenges.

TREE NEWS reports: Videos circulating on social media showing iPhones floating in the Strait of Hormuz after a cargo ship sank were generated with artificial intelligence, an Iranian fact-checking site found. The clips were based on real footage of a sunken Singapore-registered container ship but showed implausible movement of phone boxes and errors in camera views. The original video carried an AI-generated label. Singapore’s maritime authority said on Oct. 14 that two Singapore-registered container ships were hit by “unidentified projectiles” in the strait and one later sank.

TREE NEWS update: WorldOracle, described as the first action-driven world model evaluation platform benchmarked against real robot execution, launched and opened submissions to developers. Researchers from AgiBot, NVIDIA, Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Toronto jointly developed it. The platform compares model-generated prediction videos with real robot operation data to test physical interaction forecasting, and has collected 335 real operation trajectories, about 40% of which contain failed or suboptimal operations.

TREE NEWS reports: Anthropic is preparing to release a new model whose reasoning and intuition capabilities exceed those of models currently on the market, The Information reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The unreleased model is reportedly better at discerning users’ deeper intent and goals even when they provide limited information, and at thinking beyond conventional approaches rather than repeating commonsense advice or solutions.

TREE NEWS update: Modal said Monday that early tests show Nvidia’s new chip doubles the workload AI agents can complete, prompting the AI startup to support Nvidia’s chip design for the first time. The move will require deep software adjustments at Modal, which last week raised $750 million in an Accel-led round at a $15.75 billion valuation and said it expects to reach $1 billion in sales within a year.

TREE NEWS update: AI chip startup Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E round that lifts its valuation to $6.2 billion, more than double the $2.6 billion it fetched in its previous round in 2024. The round was led by Trace Capital, with Innovation X co-leading and SanDisk, T. Rowe Price, Cadence’s venture arm, ARK Invest and Fidelity participating. Tenstorrent opted to raise independently after talks over a potential acquisition with Intel and Qualcomm.

TREE NEWS reports: US stocks are set for a positive start this week after last week’s sharp selloff in chip stocks, with Meta’s earnings report due this week expected to test investor confidence in the AI trade. Tesla also reports results. The sector has slumped recently on concerns over whether companies can sustain rapid profit growth while funding an investment boom increasingly reliant on high-cost debt financing.

TREE NEWS update: Micron Technology said it will hold a technical webinar on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 8 a.m. Mountain Time. President and Chief Technology and Product Officer Scott DeBoer will lead the discussion, which covers innovations in DRAM, HBM and NAND.

TREE NEWS update: MiniMax released its next-generation Flash model M3.1 Flash on the evening of October 19, saying the model delivers across-the-board performance gains, three times the speed of its predecessor and a 70% lower price. The company also confirmed that Space Bunny, a model that had processed more than 200 trillion tokens under an anonymous identity, was an early version of M3.1 Flash.

TREE NEWS update: World, the identity project co-founded by Sam Altman, is extending its proof-of-human IDs to banks, citing a $40 billion AI fraud risk. Bain Capital, VanEck and Pantera Capital are among the design partners for the offering. The product also lets users delegate proofs to AI agents.

TREE NEWS update: AI drug-delivery company Jitai Technology (7666.HK) announced a strategic collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company to research and discover novel lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery solutions, aiming at tissue-specific delivery approaches that support multiple therapeutic modalities. The deal is worth up to $1.1 billion in total.

TREE NEWS reports: Nvidia has asked Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron to produce its custom NVHBM memory using base dies made on TSMC’s 3nm process, with core dies on sixth-generation DRAM, and Samsung has decided to accept the technical requirements. Samsung said on Oct. 19 that it does not comment on customer-related matters.

TREE NEWS update: MiniMax posted a short video on October 19 captioned “Welcome back, Space Bunny,” which is seen as the company officially claiming the anonymous model Space Bunny. Since launching in late September, Space Bunny topped OpenRouter and OpenCode daily token-call rankings within three days, holding the No. 1 spot alongside DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash in the top three. MiniMax also said M3.1 Flash is about to be released.

TREE NEWS reports: Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang posted a selfie on X with Cognition founder Scott Wu and Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan, captioned “Got the HRT gang back together!” The three were classmates in Hudson River Trading’s first internship program about a decade ago. Cognition closed a $2 billion-plus Series E in September at a $48 billion valuation, while Hyperliquid’s team generated over $900 million in profit in 2025.

TREE NEWS update: China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (Standardization Administration) released three national standardization guiding technical documents for AI in the steel industry, covering application scenario classification, technical requirements for steel large-model datasets, and maturity assessment of steel large-model service capabilities. The standards are intended to support companies’ digital and intelligent transformation and help scale AI adoption across the steel sector.

TREE NEWS update: Xiechuang Data’s wholly owned subsidiary Xiechuang Intelligent Computing signed a Computing Power Cloud Service Agreement with a client company, with an estimated total value of no more than 37.49 billion yuan ($5.15 billion). The amount exceeds 100% of the audited revenue from the company’s main business for the most recent fiscal year.

TREE NEWS update: China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on the 19th it will deepen its “AI plus manufacturing” special initiative, stepping up efforts to develop the AI industry and empower manufacturing so as to help upgrade goods consumption. The remarks came at a State Council Information Office press conference on the government’s guidelines for accelerating technology-driven commerce, attended by officials from the commerce, industry and tourism ministries.

TREE NEWS update: MiniMax posted a short video of a carrot-shaped rocket lifting off, which is being read as the company officially claiming the anonymous model ‘Space Bunny’. Since launching in late September, the model has topped daily token-call rankings on OpenRouter and OpenCode within three days, placing it in the top three alongside DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash.

TREE NEWS reports: NetEase’s LobsterAI released its China Office Agent User Behavior Report for September, showing that the average size of a single user task continued to grow, reaching 202,000 tokens in September. The report also covers changes in usage during the National Day holiday and details trends in user scale, task volume, usage habits and model preferences.

TREE NEWS update: Alibaba DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie E908A automotive-grade processor at the RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen on October 19, calling it the first RISC-V CPU IP to meet both ASIL-B and ASIL-D standards, with a single-point fault metric (SPFM) above 90% for the first time in the industry. The academy also released its first product roadmaps for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, with the next-generation XuanTie C950A targeting five times the performance of current automotive-grade RISC-V products.