Technology News
Latest technology news and updates
Total: 510
Seedance 2.0 and the Moment AI Video Became Industrially Real
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 has turned AI video generation into a commercially viable technology, producing near‑cinematic output quickly and cheaply. The model has intensified competition between Chinese and international labs, accelerated industry moves toward AI‑led content production, and raised urgent questions about IP, regulation and platform power.
China’s AI Short‑Drama Boom Enters a ‘Deep‑Water’ Phase as Hit Rates Collapse
Rapid advances in AI video tools have slashed production costs and unleashed a surge of short animated dramas in China, but oversupply has driven hit rates below 5% and forced the industry out of its early ‘easy‑money’ phase. The market is now shifting from volume to IP‑driven, platform‑bound business models, with interactive formats, overseas distribution and B2B brand work seen as the most promising routes to sustainable revenue.
Chengdu Turns Spring Festival Footfall into a Launchpad for AI and Robotics
During the Lunar New Year, Chengdu’s Chunxi Road hosted an AI‑focused consumer launch festival that paired hands‑on demonstrations and a robot pop‑up with a nearby large‑scale robot marketplace. Jinjiang District frames the effort as part of a strategic “first‑release economy” to speed lab‑to‑market conversion and build a linked innovation‑and‑retail ecosystem.
Chinese ‘Nano Manju’ Content Pipeline Adopts Seedance 2.0, Signaling Mass‑Production of AI‑Generated Short Drama
A Chinese production platform for short, comic‑style episodic drama has integrated Seedance 2.0’s full feature set and plans to launch after Lunar New Year, enabling mass automated generation of video content. The integration accelerates automation in the creative chain, with commercial upside for rapid IP production and significant legal, ethical and regulatory risks around deepfakes, copyright and labour displacement.
Alibaba’s Qianwen Extends Free‑order Blitz, Links Up with Damai and Fliggy to Sell Tickets via AI
Alibaba’s Qianwen extended its free‑order promotion and added Damai and Fliggy integrations to let users buy event and travel tickets via AI. The campaign is part of a broader strategy to convert AI convenience into consumer lock‑in across Alibaba’s ecosystem, with strong uptake in lower‑tier cities but questions about costs and regulatory scrutiny.
MooreThreads Claims Same‑Day Port of MiniMax M2.5 to Its MTT S5000 GPU, Highlighting China’s Push for a Domestic AI Stack
MooreThreads said it achieved Day‑0 adaptation of MiniMax M2.5 on its MTT S5000 GPU, enabling immediate deployment of the model on its hardware. The claim highlights progress in China’s domestic AI hardware‑software stack, though independent performance verification and ecosystem maturity remain decisive.
From Supercomputer Roots to Server Floors: China’s Many‑Core Chips Race to Close the AI‑Compute Gap
A new server production line in Jiangsu bundles Loongson CPUs with Taichu Yuange’s heterogeneous many‑core AI accelerators as China pursues an indigenous, energy‑efficient AI compute stack. Backed by policy and driven by demand for HPC+AI, this approach challenges the dominant GPGPU model but faces ecosystem, utilisation and commercialisation hurdles.
ByteDance Elevates 'Doubao' to 2.0 — A Productised, Multi‑variant Large Model Push with Bold Benchmark Claims
ByteDance has launched Doubao 2.0, a family of production‑oriented large models (Pro, Lite, Mini, and a Code variant) focused on efficient inference, multimodal ability and long‑chain task execution. The company claims strong benchmark performance versus rivals but faces scrutiny over IP and international review requests, highlighting the tension between rapid commercialisation and the need for independent validation and regulatory compliance.
OpenAI Linked to Pentagon Bids to Turn Spoken Orders into Drone‑Swarm Commands
NetEase reported that OpenAI is named in competing Pentagon bids to supply voice‑to‑digital translation for drone‑swarm command software, a narrowly defined role that stops short of direct control or targeting. The work is part of a $100m Pentagon prototype challenge to field autonomous swarms, raising technical, ethical and geopolitical questions about the integration of generative AI into weapons systems.
Anthropic’s $30bn War Chest and OpenAI’s Chip Diversification Signal a New Phase in the AI Arms Race
Anthropic has raised $30 billion at a roughly $380 billion valuation to accelerate research and infrastructure, while OpenAI released GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark on Cerebras hardware to lessen its reliance on Nvidia. The moves underscore a shift toward capital‑heavy model development and strategic chip diversification, with Chinese firms simultaneously open‑sourcing large models and pushing robotics and embodied AI.
Driverless, With Help: Waymo Pays Delivery Couriers to Close Car Doors in Atlanta
Waymo has begun paying DoorDash couriers in Atlanta to close car doors when passengers leave them ajar, a pragmatic fix for an operational snag that prevents autonomous vehicles from resuming service. The pilot highlights the persistent need for human intervention in advanced automation and raises questions about liability, labor and the pace of engineering solutions.
Zhiyuan’s A3 Humanoid Marries Martial‑Arts Agility with Eight‑Hour Endurance — A Direct Challenge to YushU
Zhiyuan Robotics launched the full‑size YuanZheng A3 humanoid, showcasing continuous martial‑arts style moves and claiming up to eight hours of mixed‑use battery life. The machine pairs hardware upgrades with a multimodal interaction stack and a company‑backed data platform, signalling a push to convert spectacle into deployable service robots and to outflank rivals such as YushU.