The Number
- Moonshot's kimi-k3-max sits #2 on Arena's coding preference ranking at 1682 Elo, the only non-Anthropic model in the top four, per LMArena as of 2026-07-31.
- DeepSeek-V4-Pro runs $0.435/M input (cache miss) and $0.87/M output, with a peak/off-peak policy that doubles both in Beijing business hours, per DeepSeek's pricing docs as of 2026-08-01.
- Qwen3.7-flash lists at $0.03/M input on OpenRouter, the cheapest China-lab prompt tier on the platform, per OpenRouter as of 2026-08-01.
Top of the Fold
- DeepSeek ships the V4-Flash final to public API, a 284B/13B-active MoE at 1M context, with V4-Pro slated for early August, per 智东西.
- Huawei open-sources openPangu-2.0-Pro, a 505B/18B-active MoE trained on Ascend NPUs at 512K context, its first heavyweight drop since 余承东 promised a world-leading model, per 智东西.
- MiniMax releases H3, an omni-modal generator doing native stereo audio-video to 2K, ranked #2 on Artificial Analysis's text-to-video-with-sound board at 1242 Elo, per 智东西 (company-stated pricing, unpublished).
- 米哈游's 蔡浩宇 pauses several AI projects and shifts nine-tenths of resources to Agent work, per 量子位.
Untranslated
- ByteDance folds 飞书 into a new 豆包 product team under 赵祺 and moves 飞书's go-to-market into 火山引擎, ending 飞书's run as a standalone first-level BU as the org rebuilds around models, per 虎嗅.
- Tencent's 混元 research agent Hyra is credited in a 2026-07-29 arXiv preprint with cracking a 50-year-open additive-combinatorics problem via explicit construction, and 姚顺雨 turned the result into an AI-for-Science hiring post, per 智东西 (preprint, unverified).
- 丘脑智能, pitched as the only Chinese firm building native multimodal long-term memory, closes a tens-of-millions-yuan seed round from a Shenzhen fund and industrial capital, per 36氪.
- 新智元 reports a Chinese firm's token-sales revenue jumped 389% even as DeepSeek pricing collapsed, a rare margin-up story in the price war, circulating and unconfirmed, per 新智元.
The Backstory
- LatePost's 高洪浩 tracks 姚顺雨's first 300 days parachuting into 混元 at 29, and the open question of how WeChat's own WeLM team and 混元 will eventually merge, per 晚点聊.
The Kicker
- 眺月科技 is building the hopcopter, a drone with a single leg that moves purely by jumping, its prototype clearing 2 meters, with a remote-control version aimed at FPV hobbyists due year-end, per 极客公园.
