Alibaba integrates Qwen AI with Taobao to improve shopping experience
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. on Monday connected its Qwen AI platform to Taobao’s entire product catalog and launched a Qwen-powered shopping assistant inside the Taobao app. The integration allows users in China to browse, compare, place orders and manage deliveries through natural conversation rather than keyword search. The launch marks an upgrade from earlier this year, when Qwen’s commerce features covered only a handful of trial categories. The full integration gives Qwen access to the entire Taobao and Tmall catalog of over 4 billion products, backed by AI agents equipped with a skills library covering order management, logistics and after-sales services.
Baidu releases ERNIE 5.1
Baidu Inc. on Saturday launched ERNIE 5.1, its latest foundational large language model. The company claimed that the new model uses multidimensional elastic pre-training technology, allowing it to achieve industry-leading performance with only about 6% of the pre-training cost of similarly sized models. The model is now available to enterprise users and developers through Baidu’s Qianfan platform and the ERNIE Bot website.
TSMC April revenue rises 17.5%
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. reported April revenue of NT$410.7 billion ($13.1 billion), a 17.5% increase year-on-year, according to a Friday filing. In the first four months of 2026, the world’s largest contract chipmaker generated approximately NT$1.54 trillion in revenue, up 29.9% from the same period last year.
Passenger car retail sales plunge 20% in April
China’s retail sales of passenger cars fell 20% year-on-year to 1.41 million units in April, according to preliminary data released Friday by the China Passenger Car Association. In the first four months of 2026, cumulative retail sales stood at 5.63 million vehicles, down 18% year-on-year.
Robot-maker Xiaoyu Bot raises new funds
Beijing-based robot-maker Xiaoyu Bot on Saturday announced that it raised hundreds of millions of yuan in a series B+ funding round co-led by BAIC Capital, Fosun RZ Capital and C&D Emerging Industry Equity Investment, with participation from existing investors including Didi Global Inc. Established in 2023, Xiaoyu Bot mainly develops general-purpose robots for industrial applications like smart welding.
