The Number
- DeepSeek-V4-Pro sits at $0.435/M input cache-miss, still under a tenth of most US flagships, per DeepSeek's pricing docs as of 2026-08-12.
- Kimi-K3-Max holds #2 on Arena's code board at Elo 1674, the top China entry, on the preference ranking as of 2026-08-11.
- Qwen3.7-flash lists at $0.03/M input on OpenRouter, the cheapest China-lab prompt tier there as of 2026-08-12.
- Ant leads a 数亿元 (hundreds of millions RMB) round into tactile-sensing robotics firm 戴盟, its first bet on the touch layer, per 雷峰网 on 2026-08-11.
Top of the Fold
- Ant pours hundreds of millions of RMB into robot touch, backing 戴盟 and 模量科技 within days, signaling capital is shifting from robot bodies to fingertips, per 量子位 and 智东西 on 2026-08-11.
- Ant's 百灵 lab open-sources Ling-3.0-tiny, a 7.9B MoE activating 1.3B, built on a Moonshot linear-attention architecture and pitched for local deploy on MacBook and DGX Spark, per 智东西 on 2026-08-11.
- ByteDance ships Seedance 2.5 and cuts the prior Seedance 2.0-fast tier to about 6毛 (RMB 0.6), forcing a price reset as MiniMax M3 and Alibaba's Wan 3.0 land in the same fortnight, per 新智元 on 2026-08-11.
- WeChat threads AI assistant 小微 into 16 surfaces including 公众号 summaries and 朋友圈 caption drafts, moving AI from a query tool to a default action, still in gray-scale test, per 智东西 on 2026-08-11.
Untranslated
- Moonshot's former CLI lead argues the agent harness will not be obsoleted by better models, saying only people who shipped a CLI and tuned an agent swarm know the model cannot do everything, per 雷峰网 on 2026-08-11.
- DeepSeek is caught quietly assigning nicknames to users; the company says it is only temporary tagging, circulating and unconfirmed, per 雷峰网 on 2026-08-11.
- Zhejiang University open-sources HugAgentOS, a self-evolving agent stack claiming per-step attribution, replay and rollback, framed as fixing the fact that agents never accumulate experience, company-stated, per 新智元 on 2026-08-11.
- Alibaba's Qwen office assistant moves to a paid tier, per 雷峰网's morning brief on 2026-08-11.
The Backstory
- Sequoia China's 李彦男 was the first to write 宇树 a check and pushed the firm past a 10% stake through later rounds, leaving Sequoia the second-largest institutional holder above 7% at IPO, and is now turning his attention to AI hardware, per 虎嗅 on 2026-08-11.
The Kicker
- China's robotics boom has spawned a new job: the 6,000-RMB-a-month robot 骨科大夫, an orthopedic doctor for machines with broken arms and legs, per 量子位 on 2026-08-11.
