At its annual developer summit in Indonesia on Tuesday, Hangzhou-based Alibaba Cloud said the latest products under its Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, such as the Qwen 2.5 series, as well as multimodal AI models – including the Qwen-VL series and visual generation-focused Tongyi Wanxiang – are now accessible to global developers via application programming … Read more
Alipay, China’s leading mobile payments platform, will bear the expense from unexpected losses that it incurred on Thursday, when a system error gave a 20 per cent discount to an undisclosed number of user transactions. The error, which was caused by a back-end misconfiguration in the app’s promotional campaign, applied an “immediate deduction” to the … Read more
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up MiniMax has launched a new series of open-source models, intensifying the competition among mainland technology firms to deliver cost-effective AI systems that can rival top offerings from US competitors. The Shanghai-based company on Tuesday unveiled the MiniMax-01 large language model (LLM) family, which includes a general-purpose foundational model, the MiniMax-Text-01, … Read more
DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that took the tech world by surprise with its powerful AI model developed on a shoestring, is betting on its secret weapon of “young geniuses” to take on deep-pocketed US giants, according to insiders and Chinese media reports. On December 26, the Hangzhou-based firm released its DeepSeek V3 … Read more
Alibaba Group Holding is taking a 9.3 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) loss in its sale of Intime, one of China’s leading department store operators, as the e-commerce giant walks away from offline retailing to focus on its core businesses. The company is selling its entire stake in the retail chain, in which it first invested … Read more
China’s top electric vehicle maker BYD is conducting a new mass recruitment drive for robotics talent to staff its embodied intelligence (EI) unit, in a sign that the company is doubling down on robot-related research. The Shenzhen-based company posted a global recruitment ad on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, describing job openings for 10 … Read more
A slew of cadres in their early 50s clinched significant administrative positions with full ministerial rank this year, as China’s ruling Communist Party moves younger faces into mid-tier leadership positions. The latest to be promoted was Liu Jie, 54, who was made acting governor of Zhejiang in eastern China on December 18. Zhejiang is well-known … Read more
Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, said it had no immediate plans to revive its initial public offering (IPO), dispelling market speculation it would soon go public. The Chinese company shocked investors in November 2020 by cancelling its US$39.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai less than 48 hours before market … Read more
Ant Group, the fintech giant affiliated with Alibaba Group Holding, is splitting the business group of its mobile payment platform Alipay into two units, in its latest corporate restructuring move to drive new growth. The company will establish the Digital Payment Business Group and Alipay Business Group, and adopt a “rotating presidential system” for the … Read more
China is doubling down on efforts to appeal to foreign investors, with Premier Li Qiang promising offshore players wider access to the country’s markets and better services. Addressing company executives in the eastern economic powerhouse of Zhejiang, Li said China put high value on the development of foreign-invested firms and would “steadily expand” their access … Read more
