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Yiyun Cai

Sand.ai Raises $200M in Series A+, Reaches Unicorn Status

Beijing-based video foundation model startup Sand.ai has secured $200 million in a Series A+ round, cementing its unicorn status and accelerating development of MAGI-2, a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that the company says generates 10-second 1080p video at roughly one-tenth the industry&

Kimi Monetizes Agent Infrastructure While Keeping User Data

Kimi Hosted Agents reframes the AI agent race from model capability to runtime custody, pricing the one thing competitors rarely monetize: the time a task stays alive. Moonshot AI launched Kimi Hosted Agents on November 5, 2026, branding the underlying execution layer as "Harness as a Service"—a

China's AI Shakeout: 38 Tools Shut Down as Models Absorb Apps

ByteDance and Tencent's agent platforms join a sweeping consolidation that exposes the structural limits of China's first-generation AI app economy. ByteDance's AI agent development platform Coze Enterprise Edition will stop accepting new customers on November 30, 2026, with all existing subscriptions mandated to

Agibot Crosses 20,000-Unit Milestone, But the Real Test Is Whether Robots Can Clock In

The Chinese humanoid robot leader is redefining success metrics as factory deployments expose a widening gap between units shipped and units productively working. Agibot, the Shanghai-based humanoid robotics company backed by co-founder Peng Zhihui — better known by his online alias "Zhihui Jun" — has shipped its 20,

ChinaBiz Briefing: Unitree's AI Robot Bet, Apple's China AI Debut, Tencent's 770B Model

China's physical and digital AI stack is compressing timelines simultaneously across five fronts. A humanoid robot ran GPT-6 zero-shot. Apple finally turned on AI for 1.4 billion potential users — only to find domestic rivals had already set the bar. Tencent dropped a 770-billion-parameter

Unitree's Wang Xingxing Sees Physical AI Breakthrough Within Two Years

GPT-6 ran zero-shot on a Unitree humanoid robot, completing open-ended tasks from chess to painting. The CEO says embodied intelligence is approaching its "ChatGPT moment" — yet identifies hardware-software alignment, not model capability, as the defining bottleneck. Wang Xingxing, founder and CEO of Unitree Robotics,

Alibaba's Qwen Turns Siri Into a Gateway to China's App Ecosystem

Apple's long-delayed AI rollout in mainland China enters developer beta via iOS 27.3, powered partly by Alibaba Group's Qwen large language model — but arrives into a market where domestic rivals have already normalized AI-driven smartphones. The developer beta of Apple Intelligence opened to

AI-Powered Games Flood China's Market, But Quality Gap Widens as Platforms Race for Scale

TapTap's first-half 2026 data reveals an 844% surge in new game releases, with over 80% AI-assisted — a gold rush that is simultaneously minting breakout hits and flooding stores with low-grade clones. The Chinese gaming industry is undergoing its most disruptive structural shift in a decade.

Tencent's Hunyuan Hy4 Challenges Open-Source AI With 770B-Parameter Model

Tencent Holdings has formally launched Hunyuan Hy4, a 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that the company claims ranks among the most capable open-source large language models available, backed by measurable reductions in error rates and deep integration across its consumer and enterprise product stack. The release marks

Homocompute Closes Multi-Billion RMB Series B as Compute-in-Memory Race Draws Dense Capital

China's compute-in-memory chip sector is experiencing a capital surge, with Homocompute anchoring the trend after closing a multi-billion RMB Series B — a round that underscores how the shift from one-shot AI queries to persistent agentic workloads is redrawing the semiconductor investment map. The Beijing-