The Number
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash sits at $0.15/M input cache-miss off-peak, with cache-hit input down to $0.003/M, per DeepSeek's pricing docs 2026-10-16.
- GLM-5.3-flash runs $0.0178/M prompt on OpenRouter, the cheapest China-lab prompt rate listed as of 2026-10-16, on OpenRouter.
- Qwen's office product reports paid users above 20% of its base, a rare conversion number for a Chinese AI tool, per 雷峰网 2026-10-16.
Top of the Fold
- Alibaba's Qwen becomes the AI base for the new BMW iX3 cabin, co-built with BMW and ZEEKR's Banma, putting a Chinese model inside a German flagship's assistant, per 雷峰网.
- Lenovo opens sales on the YOGA Pro 15 RTX Spark at 29,999 yuan, pitched as among the first laptops on NVIDIA's RTX Spark N1X running 100B-plus models on-device, per 智东西.
- Kuaishou ships Kling 4.0 with native 30-second single-shot generation and 10-bit HDR, pushing its video model toward professional shoots, per 雷峰网.
- Li Auto spins out chip arm Mahexin, raising 1.625B yuan at a 15B-yuan pre-money, the second of the EV-startup trio to carve out silicon for outside capital, per 科创板日报 via 虎嗅.
Untranslated
- ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant closed its 30-day SAEP notice period with 155 third-party apps refusing AI automation, including Tencent's 66 apps, Alibaba's 23, and even Kimi and DeepSeek, a collective refusal by super-apps to cede traffic to agents, per 极客公园.
- A 12,000 GPU-hour study argues self-distillation's real gains are thin and plain GRPO still wins on RL post-training, cutting against the current distillation hype, per PaperWeekly (preprint).
- Beihang researchers published a Seq2Seq joint-optimization scheme pairing drones with couriers for three-leg last-mile delivery at KDD 2026, per PaperWeekly (preprint).
- 虎嗅 argues personal agents and enterprise agents are diverging species despite shared models, as product-layer splits widen once raw capability stops being scarce, one named dissenting view.
- Otherwise quiet across the Chinese community overnight.
The Backstory
- Drone-show operator 大漠大, seven times on CCTV's Spring Festival gala, says equipment sales are about 70% of revenue and R&D staff near 40%, now building an embodied-intelligence line and eyeing a 2027 IPO, per 雷峰网.
The Kicker
- Shanghai's 60cm "extra-long egg tart" trend fizzled after roughly a month, with shops pulling the viral dessert as fast as they rushed it in, per 知著网 via 虎嗅.
