China’s daily AI token calls top 140 trillion
China has made breakthroughs in the commercial and scaled application of artificial intelligence, with daily token calls exceeding 140 trillion by March, up more than 40% from the end of last year, Mao Shengyong, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a press conference on Thursday.
Alibaba releases world model Happy Oyster
Alibaba on Thursday released Happy Oyster, a so-called world model that supports multimodal understanding and joint audio-video generation. It was developed by a team from Alibaba’s ATH innovation business group, the same team behind HappyHorse.
Tencent open-sources new AI model
Tencent’s Hunyuan team on Thursday officially released and open-sourced its 3D world model 2.0. The multimodal world model can automatically generate, reconstruct, and simulate a 3D world based on text, image and video inputs.
Robotics firm TARS raises $455 million
Chinese humanoid robotics startup TARS said it has raised $455 million in a pre-A funding round, setting a new record for the largest single-round financing in the country’s humanoid robotics sector. The funding highlights the growing arms race among Chinese robotics firms to achieve commercial viability and prepare for public listings, even as the global industry grapples with technological bottlenecks in adapting AI for physical tasks.
SenseTime plans HK$3.25 billion placement
SenseTime Group Inc. announced early on Friday that it entered a placing agreement to issue 1.7 billion shares at HK$1.91 (24 U.S. cents) each. The company expects the gross and net proceeds from the placement to be approximately HK$3.2 billion and HK$3.2 billion, respectively.
