The Number
- DeepSeek's annualized revenue run-rate hit $1B, more than double a few-months-ago sub-$500M, per its CEO to investors as reported by The Information via 智东西.
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash lists at $0.03/MTok prompt on OpenRouter, matching the cheapest routable Chinese models as-of 2026-09-24, on OpenRouter.
- Qwen3-max input runs 2.5 yuan/MTok at up to 32K context on Alibaba's DashScope, the lowest tier in its Max line as-of 2026-09-24, per Alibaba's pricing page.
Top of the Fold
- DeepSeek is closing a fresh 50B-yuan round targeting a 500B-yuan valuation by end-October, up from ~4,000B post-money in June, as it also preps a Shanghai STAR listing, per 智东西 citing The Information.
- Xiaomi's 罗福莉 previewed MiMo-V3's new architecture, its HySparse2 core cutting prefill compute to ~1/5 and KV cache to ~1/4.5 at 1M-token context versus V2.6, citing several DeepSeek results, per 智东西.
- iFlytek shipped Spark-ASR-2.0, a speech model trained entirely on domestic compute, targeting noisy and code-switched transcription, per 智东西.
Untranslated
- 雷峰网 reports a domestic 'pre-training redo' wave, with several Chinese model makers rebuilding data teams after finding a trillion-parameter model beaten by models 1% its size, traced to dirty data, per 雷峰网.
- 雷峰网 reports Anthropic's latest compliance sweep triggered a Claude ban wave across AWS and Microsoft Greater China clients, with some customers now refusing month-end payment; frame as circulating, one outlet's reporting, per 雷峰网.
- Simate 硅基伙伴 says its AutoResearch system topped the RoboDojo physical-AI leaderboard three months after founding, a company-stated result on Physical RSI, per 智东西.
- Tsinghua and 无问芯穹 open-sourced RLark, a cloud-native embodied-AI platform claiming robot onboarding in 5 minutes and cross-cluster task start in 10 seconds, per 量子位.
The Backstory
- 梁琛奇, born 1996 and seven years at ByteDance where he led 猫箱 inside its Flow AI unit, left to found 动念引线 last summer betting AI entertainment, not productivity, is the unclaimed hit, per 晚点聊.
The Kicker
- Meta's own homegrown Manus clone sent the stock up 11% overnight and topped the US App Store, per 量子位, so America now has its own shrimp-farming craze too.
