Flash News

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.

TREE NEWS update: People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng said on October 19 that the central bank will step up financial support for the artificial intelligence industry and will prudently advance AI applications in the financial sector. Speaking at the opening of the 2026 Financial Street Forum, Pan said AI’s rapid global development is profoundly affecting productivity, investment, employment, income distribution and financial stability. The PBOC will closely track and assess AI’s macroeconomic impact, he said.

TREE NEWS update: Unitree Technology will hold the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference on Oct 22, the robotics firm said. The event, themed “Advancing Together, Growing Together,” will draw more than 3,000 guests and feature a 4,000-square-meter main forum area and over 40 exhibition zones.

TREE NEWS reports: Global optical fiber supply will fall short of demand by 180 million core-kilometers in 2026, TrendForce estimates, as AI data centers, cross-datacenter interconnects and high-capacity backbone buildouts drive demand. The shortfall is expected to lift spot prices for finished fiber by 2.8 to 5 times year-on-year, prompting telecom vendors to shift from short-term purchases to long-term contracts to lock in supply. TrendForce said global fiber supply has been tight since late 2025 and the strain will likely last until at least 2028.

TREE NEWS update: The ISO/IEC has published an international standard on brain-computer interface reference architecture, led by Chinese experts. The standard, titled “Information Technology — Brain-Computer Interface — Reference Architecture,” was developed under a Chinese project leader together with experts from Italy, South Korea, the UK, India, the US, Japan, Sweden, Finland, Australia and Germany. It marks another achievement by China in international standardization for brain-computer interfaces.

TREE NEWS update: AlphaEngine (熵简科技) announced on Oct. 19 that it closed a Series C funding round led by Ant Group, with Dongfang Guoxin and Qiaobei Capital participating. After the round, Ant Group and AlphaEngine will deepen cooperation in AI financial agent development and training domain-specific AI financial models.

TREE NEWS reports: Oaktree Capital co-chairman Howard Marks said he does not believe the AI-driven stock market has reached a genuine bubble, arguing that widespread bubble discussion signals investors are not “oblivious” to risk. In an interview, Marks said the S&P 500’s five largest tech stocks trade at about 23 times forward earnings versus roughly 65 times before the 2000 dot-com peak. The Nasdaq 100 fell 5.5% last week after hitting a record high earlier this month.

TREE NEWS update: Nvidia’s GTC conference opens in Berlin on Oct 20 and runs through Oct 22, with CEO Jensen Huang delivering the keynote on Oct 21. The event features more than 100 sessions focused on accelerated computing, agentic AI, physical AI, robotics, open-source models and AI infrastructure, shifting the emphasis from selling GPUs toward selling AI factories.

TREE NEWS update: Elon Musk said on X on October 19 that many people will be “one-shotted” by “super persuasive super intelligences,” adding that he himself may be among them. The post offers no further detail on what the term means or which systems he was referring to.

TREE NEWS update: Daxiao Robot released ACE-Brain-0.6, an embodied foundation model built by supervised fine-tuning on Qwen3.5-9B, focused on improving object recognition, spatial localization and interaction-region judgment. The model was trained on roughly one million spatial anchoring samples and beat OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on six of eight grounding evaluations, Daxiao disclosed. It scored 74.53 on average across seven public benchmarks versus 73.68 for GPT-6 Astra, and 94.13 on its own RobotGrounding evaluation.

TREE NEWS update: Volcano Engine launched an incentive program for premium AI-generated short dramas made with Seedance and released on the Hongguo Short Drama app. Eligible AI titles, including AI comic dramas and AI-simulated live-action dramas, can receive up to ¥200,000 per work after ranking in the monthly top 50 by Hongguo popularity score and passing review.

TREE NEWS update: Sam Altman-backed World has launched biometric verification badges for Zoom enterprise users, aiming to combat AI deepfake impersonation and fraud. The badges confirm a participant is a real person rather than a deepfake. The rollout is targeted at enterprise customers of the video-conferencing platform.

TREE NEWS update: A randomized controlled trial involving the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that introducing artificial intelligence into diabetic retinopathy screening shortened the interval from screening to specialist consultation and helped more patients who needed further eye care receive timely treatment. The findings were released in a bulletin from the school. The trial focused on screening pathways for diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of vision loss in people with diabetes.

TREE NEWS update: Doubao public relations head Liu Xing said about 10% of ByteDance’s total compute is used for training and inference of video generation models, calling a claim that over half of China’s compute is devoted to producing short drama content unreliable. The statement followed widespread discussion of the compute-allocation figure attributed to another company.

TREE NEWS update: China’s ‘AI Plus’ initiative spurred investment and exports in emerging sectors in the first three quarters, National Bureau of Statistics spokesperson Wang Guanhua said at a State Council Information Office briefing. Investment in electronic circuit manufacturing rose 58.7%, integrated circuit manufacturing 14.2% and information services 20.2%, while equipment purchase investment grew 9.7%. Exports of electronic components and wires and cables rose 70% and 25.3%, respectively.

TREE NEWS update: World, the identity project co-founded by Sam Altman, launched a World ID suite for banks and financial institutions, its first industry-specific product. Co-founder Alex Blania announced the suite at the Money20/20 conference; it integrates the World ID app, World ID for Zoom and World ID for Agents (AgentKit) to counter deepfake fraud and AI impersonation. Zoom’s deepfake detection, in testing since April, is now fully available.

TREE NEWS update: Anthropic said it will transfer part of its shares to the newly established Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned entity dedicated to the public interest. The fund will initially hold 5% of the company, with up to 2% more allocated each time valuation grows 50% above an established baseline, subject to board approval, bringing total shares earmarked for public benefit to about 20%. Co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their personal equity, and about half of employees are donating shares under an equity matching program.