Technology News
Latest technology news and updates
Total: 510
China’s AI “Red‑Envelope” War: Alibaba’s Qianwen Rockets to 58m Daily Users — But Will They Stay?
Alibaba’s Qianwen vaulted to 58.48 million daily users on day one of its Spring Festival cash giveaway, narrowing the gap with ByteDance’s Doubao and eclipseing Tencent’s Yuanbao. The spike underscores how massive subsidies can reconfigure app rankings quickly, but low retention figures suggest the gains may be fleeting unless platform AI capabilities and habit formation improve.
Amazon Eyes a 'Content Marketplace' to Sell Publishers’ Texts to AI Firms — A New Supply Chain for LLMs
Amazon is reportedly planning a content marketplace to let publishers license text to AI developers, a move that could streamline data procurement for large language models and provide new revenue for publishers. The plan raises questions about market power, licensing terms, and the control and provenance of training data.
ByteDance Rolls Out Seedream 5.0 Preview, Bringing 2K–4K Image Generation into Its Consumer Apps
ByteDance has launched Seedream 5.0 Preview, enabling 2K and 4K image generation within its Jianying and Xiaoyunque apps and opening grey testing on the Jimeng AI platform. The move integrates higher‑resolution generative capabilities into mass‑market creative tools, accelerating adoption while raising moderation and provenance concerns.
Chinese Investor Backs Gallium‑Material Startup as Beijing Eyes Fourth‑Generation Chip Supply Chains
LanHai Huateng has made a strategic investment in GaChuang Future, a startup targeting core materials for fourth‑generation semiconductors such as gallium nitride. The move signals continued investor interest in bolstering China’s upstream chip supply chain, though technical and scale‑up challenges persist.
Chinese Studio Drops Near‑Seven‑Minute In‑Engine Teaser for Black Myth: Zhong Kui — and Its Founder Warns About AI Deepfakes
Game Science released a near seven‑minute in‑engine video for Black Myth: Zhong Kui as a Lunar New Year greeting; the clip contains no gameplay and ends on a mysterious tableau. CEO Feng Ji separately warned that advanced video‑generation models such as Seedance2.0 make it easy to fabricate realistic footage and urged the public to be sceptical of unverified videos, particularly those showing identifiable people.
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 Turns Everyone into a Director — and Terrifies Filmmakers
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 is a generative video model that creates multi-shot, 2K-quality sequences with synchronized audio from mixed media inputs and text prompts. Its release has provoked excitement over reduced production costs and creative possibilities, alongside sharp concerns from filmmakers, legal experts and market observers about job disruption, copyright and platform concentration.
China’s New Year Becomes AI’s Debut Season: Giants Gamble Billions and Workers Guard the Servers
China’s tech giants turned the Spring Festival into a high-stakes field test for generative AI, deploying billions in marketing and integrations while backend engineers worked through the holiday to prevent compute-driven outages. The event may mark a pivot from model-building to mass application, accelerating consolidation and everyday use of AI across social, local and entertainment services.
Alibaba Turns Free Milk Tea into a Showcase for Full‑Stack AI Power
Alibaba used a RMB3 billion promotion through its Qianwen app to orchestrate 10 million milk‑tea orders in nine hours, demonstrating the company’s full‑stack AI capability. By combining in‑house models, cloud infrastructure and proprietary silicon with deep integration across its consumer ecosystem, Alibaba showcased a path from generative models to agentic, real‑world execution.
China Orders Dozens of New Standards to Professionalise Its Technology‑Services Sector by 2027
China’s MIIT and four other ministries have issued a guide to build a standards system for the technology‑services sector and ordered the creation of more than 40 new national and industry standards by 2027. The initiative aims to professionalise services such as testing, technology transfer and IP brokerage to accelerate commercialization of R&D, while also shaping market access and potentially influencing international norms.
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 Tests Ignite Demand for GPUs and Data‑Center Capacity
ByteDance is testing Seedance 2.0, an AI model that automates short video production end‑to‑end and could dramatically increase demand for cloud compute, storage and CDN capacity. Analysts say the model lowers production barriers but intensifies hardware needs and raises quality, copyright and moderation challenges.
Claude and the Rise of AI Agents: Is Enterprise SaaS Next on the Chopping Block?
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and its accompanying developer tools have sharpened AI agents’ ability to write code and run business workflows, prompting investor concern about the fate of standardised SaaS. The technology raises governance and trust questions even as industry figures argue it will augment, not replace, software. The most plausible near‑term outcome is market segmentation: commodity SaaS will be under pressure while outcome‑oriented platforms that offer auditable, domain‑specific value will survive and likely thrive.
2026: The Year AI Glasses Move from Lab to Main Street — China’s Devices Take Centre Stage at the Winter Olympics
Chinese firms showcased AI‑enabled AR smart glasses at the 2026 Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics as analysts declare 2026 a pivotal year for on‑device AI. Advances in model compression and edge compute, plus strengthening supply chains, make large‑model inference on consumer wearables commercially plausible, though adoption will depend on cost, battery life, form factor and regulatory scrutiny.