The Number
- DeepSeek-V4-Pro runs $0.66 per 1M cache-miss input tokens off-peak, half the peak rate, per DeepSeek's pricing docs as of Aug 25.
- Qwen3.8-max lists at 12 yuan per 1M input tokens on Alibaba's Bailian, with a 1M-token free tier for 90 days, per DashScope pricing as of Aug 25.
- kimi-k3-max sits #2 on Arena's coding preference ranking at Elo 1674, top China-lab entry behind claude-opus-5-max, per LMArena as of Aug 25.
- Agent token use on OpenRouter hit 7.3T by Aug 10, about 5.2x the human line, per OpenRouter's own count via 新智元.
Top of the Fold
- ByteDance ships 豆包工作, an Agent product that plans tasks and drives a virtual desktop, after folding TRAE and 扣子 teams into Doubao a day earlier, its bid to make one workplace brand, per 极客公园.
- Thomson Reuters builds its first in-house model Thomson-1 on Alibaba's open Qwen3.5 to cut reliance on Claude, a signal Chinese open weights are now enterprise infrastructure abroad, per 雷峰网.
- Alibaba prices an 80B HKD share placement at HK$112.7 to fund full-stack AI, its first equity raise since the 2019 Hong Kong listing, even as the stock fell 8.54% on the day, per 虎嗅.
- Apple refreshes the Mac mini with a 2nm M6 at 6,999 yuan, up 2,500 yuan on the memory-price surge that made the M4 the go-to box for always-on AI agents, per 极客公园.
Untranslated
- 极客公园 traces a fast-spreading China playbook: labs drop unnamed models on OpenRouter for foreign devs to test and fingerprint, with the current mystery Ox Alpha widely guessed to be Zhipu's GLM-5.x on tokenizer clues, still unclaimed and circulating/unconfirmed, per 极客公园.
- 越疆科技 reports 320M yuan H1 revenue up 106.6%, with embodied-robot revenue up over 20x to 45M yuan at 14.3% of sales, per its interim results via 雷峰网.
- SenseNova U1.5 Lite lands as an open 8B image model 商汤 pitches as rivaling closed Image 2, a company-stated claim to verify at the source, per 量子位.
- 范式 opens its embodied-agent base 从开源迈入多方共建 with 优必选 and a dozen partners under a PhanthyMotus community plan, per 量子位.
- Alibaba's Meoo (秒悟) now builds installable native Android and iOS apps from a plain-language description end to end, per 雷峰网.
The Backstory
- Baiguan's field notes from Beijing's World Robot Conference (Aug 19-23) flag the quiet bottleneck under the humanoid show floor: not GPUs or algorithms but high-quality human-motion data, per Baiguan.
The Kicker
- A zero-budget, 1M-yuan animated film 《牛来》, famous mostly for how badly it was made, has passed 47M yuan at the box office and started shipping overseas, per 虎嗅.
