China’s energy storage firms, battered by a three-year price war, have been jolted by lithium battery maker Deegares, which has announced plans to raise prices by 15 per cent, a move that is sparking debate over whether the sector could be the first to break free from the “involution” cycle. Rising lithium costs were the immediate trigger, with at least three other battery makers reported in recent weeks to be planning similar increases. Prices of the metal, crucial to rechargeable batteries,...

Chinese artificial intelligence pioneer SenseTime has open-sourced a “world model” and kicked off its foray into the burgeoning field of embodied intelligence by releasing its first robotic dog. The Hong Kong-listed AI firm’s new venture, Ace Robotics, on Thursday released Kairos 3.0, an open-source model that simulates the physical world, and a developer platform called “KaiWu” that supports embodied intelligence applications. “Ace Robotics will promote the large-scale commercialisation of...

Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), the world’s largest maker of electric vehicle (EV) batteries, has started deploying humanoid robots at scale within its Zhongzhou production base in Luoyang, a city in central Henan province. The company on Wednesday described its deployment at scale as a “world’s first”, as humanoid robots built by start-up Spirit AI performed complex tasks with speeds that matched those of skilled human workers. Spirit AI’s Xiaomo robots have been assigned to plug in...

Alibaba Group Holding is folding its mapping and navigation platform Amap into its Qwen artificial intelligence app, in a tie-up the company says will sharpen Qwen’s real-world “life services” just weeks after the app’s debut. The integration, announced on Thursday, lets Qwen users handle travel and lifestyle requests – from restaurant and hotel recommendations to route planning and turn-by-turn navigation – in a single conversational interface. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Alibaba...

ByteDance’s Doubao AI phone – a limited-run handset built with ZTE’s Nubia brand – remained in hot demand and continued to receive frequent software updates, even as the device drew scrutiny over privacy and data security after its debut in early December. ZTE’s online store briefly reopened applications on Tuesday for an “F code” – a so-called “friend code” – that granted priority access to buy the 3,499-yuan (US$497) handset. Marketed as a “technology preview edition”, the device carried a...

Tencent Holdings has initiated a major restructuring at its artificial intelligence group with the promotion of recent high-profile recruit Vinces Yao Shunyu, a former researcher at OpenAI. Without mentioning his Chinese name, Shenzhen-based Tencent’s announcement on Wednesday came with a photo of Yao. He was tasked to lead the company’s new AI infrastructure efforts, including the development of large language models (LLMs). Yao’s official position is chief AI scientist under the CEO’s office...

Chinese tablet makers, including Xiaomi and Honor, have raised prices across their product lines as they scrambled to absorb soaring costs of memory chips. Xiaomi, the Beijing-based smartphone and electric vehicle maker, has imposed mark-ups of 100 yuan (US$14) to 300 yuan on several tablet products this week, including its entry-level Redmi Pad 2 and the premium Xiaomi Pad 8 series. The Redmi Pad 2, launched in June this year with a starting price of 999 yuan, now carries a price tag of 1,199...