China escalates AI tech rivalry with a new national initiative

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: China escalates AI tech rivalry with a new national initiative with Alibaba launching new powerful models and Huawei challenging NVIDIA with a new chip

💰 Funding: xAI aims to raise $20Bn

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Alibaba has launched Qwen3, a new family of open-licensed AI reasoning models ranging from 0.6B to 235B parameters, featuring hybrid thinking modes and outperforming several OpenAI and Google models on coding and math benchmarks, signaling China’s growing strength in the global AI race.

2. Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared AI self-sufficiency a national priority, outlining a "new whole national system" approach to boost AI chip and software development, talent cultivation, and regulatory innovation, backed by increased government support amid escalating tech rivalry with the U.S.

3. Huawei is preparing to test its most powerful AI chip yet, the Ascend 910D, aiming to surpass Nvidia’s H100 by using advanced multi-die packaging to boost performance, even as U.S. sanctions continue to restrict China’s access to cutting-edge semiconductor technologies.

4. OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities by adding a shopping search tool that recommends products with images, reviews, and direct links, all powered by structured third-party data and without paid advertisements.

5. In a new blog post, Dario Amodei argues that the unpredictable and opaque nature of AI systems necessitates urgent breakthroughs in interpretability, highlighting progress in mapping AI's inner workings and urging a race against time to develop an “MRI for AI” before highly autonomous systems reshape the global economy and security.

6. Ziff Davis, the publisher behind PCMag and Mashable, sued OpenAI for allegedly copying its content to train ChatGPT without permission, seeking hundreds of millions in damages amid rising tensions between AI firms and media companies.

7. UPS is in advanced discussions with Figure AI to potentially integrate humanoid robots into its logistics operations, particularly for tasks like small parcel sorting, as part of its broader automation strategy.

8. Duolingo will phase out contractors and overhaul workflows to become an "AI-first" company, aiming to automate content creation and operations while pledging to support remaining employees with AI training and mentorship.

9. Researchers from the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI bots on Reddit’s r/changemyview, making over 1,700 personalized comments that posed as real people to test AI’s ability to change opinions, sparking major ethical outrage from the subreddit’s moderators who accused the team of psychological manipulation without consent.

10. Anthropic’s latest study reveals that AI agents like Claude Code are heavily automating coding tasks, particularly in frontend web development, with startups adopting these tools faster than enterprises, potentially giving them a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

11. Hugging Face, expanding into robotics, launched the SO-101, a 3D-printable, AI-trainable robotic arm that improves on its predecessor with better motors and faster assembly at an entry price of $100.

💰 Top Funding News:

1. Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings is in talks to raise $20 billion at a valuation topping $120 billion, a funding round that would only trail OpenAI’s recent $40 billion raise in size and would solidify xAI’s elite status in the AI startup world.

2. Cheehoo, which uses AI to simplify and accelerate the animation production process for studios and creators, raised a $10M Seed round led by Greycroft, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Basis Set, Headline Asia, Powerhouse Capital, Playground Productions, and Rideback.

3. Lightrun, which uses AI to proactively monitor and debug code within IDEs to prevent production issues, raised a $70M Series B co-led by Accel and Insight Partners, with participation from Citi, Glilot Capital, GTM Capital, and Sorenson Capital.

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