The Number
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash cache-miss input runs $0.22/M off-peak against V4-Pro's $0.66/M, per DeepSeek's pricing docs on 2026-08-28.
- MiniMax reports revenue up 283.1% year on year in its first half-year report since listing, per its filing via 智东西, 2026-08-28.
- Time's 2026 AI 100 lists 11 Chinese names, down from 13 last year, per 智东西, 2026-08-28.
- Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B lists at $0.07/M prompt on OpenRouter as of 2026-08-28.
Top of the Fold
- Tencent open-sources Hy4 preview at 770B params, 49B active, 1M context, a jump from Hy3's 295B, with company-stated coding scores it places ahead of DeepSeek V4 Pro 0824, per 智东西, 2026-08-28.
- MiniMax says ARR crossed $800M in August with B-side revenue at 80% and July token consumption 20x January's, founder Yan Junjie's read being that minimizing unit-intelligence cost is the only path to maximizing intelligence, per 智东西, 2026-08-28.
- Zhipu ships GLM-5.3-Flash running on SenseTime's domestic compute stack, extending the late-August flash-tier price war, per 量子位, 2026-08-28.
- Alibaba launches a rebuilt Qoder agent workbench aimed at non-coders, pushing its coding stack past developers into product and ops roles, per 智东西, 2026-08-28.
Untranslated
- 智元 swept the World Humanoid Robot Games with 18 golds and top spot on both medal tables, and 夕小瑶's on-site read is that every medal came from unmodified mass-production units, the same models running its 龙旗 factory line, per 夕小瑶科技说, 2026-08-28.
- 越疆 showed a "one brain, many bodies" line splitting a single job across humanoid, quadruped, and cobot arms, 虎嗅's framing being a search for embodied AI's "minimum sufficient form" over the full-humanoid narrative, per 虎嗅, 2026-08-28.
- 自变量机器人 released WALL-SS, a coarse-to-fine autoregressive world model built to kill "magnet grasping," where a robot's gripper misses yet the object still rises, per 极客公园, 2026-08-28.
- A Stanford preprint with Andrew Ng drops intermediate reasoning tokens to cut long-thinking cost up to 3x, circulating in Chinese research channels, per PaperWeekly, 2026-08-28.
The Backstory
- 智元 chairman 邓泰华 made his first Time AI 100 appearance while staying off-stage, one of nine Chinese names on the list for the first time, per 量子位, 2026-08-28.
The Kicker
- Shanghai's Xujiahui opened the country's first tap-to-rent robot store, where a phone tap unlocks a 宇树 machine to walk, dance, or perform, per 雷峰网, 2026-08-28.
