UBS has warned of greater market volatility next year, citing risks ranging from weaker-than-expected artificial intelligence revenue to geopolitical tensions, but the Swiss investment bank remains bullish about Chinese technology shares and gold. UBS identified five major market risks for next year: economic weakness, a resurgence of inflation, government debts, renewed US-China conflicts, and disappointing returns from AI after three years of heavy investment. “One point that we can be very...

Xiaomi has hired a former engineer from Tesla’s Optimus team, Zach Lu Zeyu, to join the Chinese tech giant’s robotics initiatives, as the talent grab in the industry intensifies. Lu, previously a senior robotics engineer focused on the Optimus humanoid robot, joined Xiaomi last month to lead the Beijing-based firm’s dexterous hand research and development operations, according to his LinkedIn page. During his two years at Tesla, Lu worked on the design for dexterous grasping and manipulation, as...

Chinese tech giant Baidu is cutting an undisclosed number of jobs across major divisions and restructuring artificial intelligence teams, as the company moves to streamline operations following a loss-making quarter, according to multiple sources. Baidu has axed staff in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, affecting multiple major business units from its mobile ecosystem group, which includes its bread-and-butter search business, to intelligent cloud and technology platform groups, according to...

The Jack Ma Foundation said on Thursday it would donate HK$30 million (US$3.9 million) to support families, firefighters and rescuers affected by a deadly fire at a housing estate in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district. In a statement, the foundation – established by the founder of Alibaba Group Holding and Ant Group – expressed solidarity with all those affected by the tragedy. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The donation follows a further commitment of HK$20 million from Alibaba and HK$10...

There remains considerable potential to enhance artificial intelligence models by scaling up computing power and data, according to Yao Shunyu, a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and former researcher at US AI start-up Anthropic. Amid heated discussions in the AI community about the future of scaling – the process of increasing computational resources and training data to develop better AI models – Yao said the method was still expected to yield results for at least a year...

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding expects to stay ahead of its Chinese Big Tech peers in artificial intelligence-related capital expenditure, as the firm’s AI and cloud computing unit posted its fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Alibaba Cloud on Tuesday reported a 34 per cent year-on-year revenue growth to 39.8 billion yuan (US$5.6 billion) in the three months ended September 30, as the Hangzhou-based parent’s overall revenue in its financial second quarter reached...

Meta Platforms is in talks to spend billions on Google’s AI chips, according to a report by The Information, adding to a months-long share rally as the search giant has made the case it can rival Nvidia as a leader in artificial intelligence technology. A deal would signal growing momentum for Google’s chips and long-term potential to challenge Nvidia’s market dominance, after the company earlier agreed to supply up to 1 million chips to Anthropic. Google owner Alphabet is on track to hit a US$4...