The Number
- DeepSeek closes roughly 100 billion yuan (~$15B), the largest AI raise on record in China, with CATL and Tencent the biggest backers, per Bloomberg via 智东西.
- CATL added about 10 billion yuan this round, double its first-round check of ~5 billion yuan, per 夕小瑶科技说.
- iFlytek's cloud 293-A30B lists input at 0.9 yuan/M tokens and output at 3.6 yuan/M, undercutting DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on miss and output, per 智东西.
- DeepSeek-flash now runs $0.003/M input on cache-hit off-peak, per DeepSeek's pricing docs as of 2026-10-22.
Top of the Fold
- DeepSeek raises ~100 billion yuan ahead of a reported STAR Market IPO prep, narrowing the funding gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, per 智东西 (Bloomberg-sourced, unconfirmed on IPO timing).
- iFlytek ships Spark X2.6 trained entirely on domestic compute, a 293-A30B cloud model plus an open 4B edge model, framed as a commercial cost play not a sufficiency claim, per 智东西.
- Unitree marks ten years as founder Wang Xingxing tells the World Physical AI Conference he under-believed in AI, signaling the robotics field is pivoting on model bets, per 极客公园.
Untranslated
- Ant Group's 数科 arm drops decision model LingDT-Decision-1.0 in 4B and 27B sizes, claiming 90%-plus lower token cost and 10x faster response versus an LLM on customer-service and risk tasks, company-stated per 雷峰网.
- China Telecom's Xingchen lab open-sources Xing4.0-29B-Intent, a dedicated intent-understanding model, per 量子位.
- Zhipu's Tang Jie co-authors open-source HarnessPro, reframing recursive self-improvement around cost so agents get cheaper as they evolve, a preprint signal per PaperWeekly.
- Shanghai AI Lab proposes a self-evolving router letting large and small models split work, claimed to halve cost while beating a pure LLM, preprint per PaperWeekly.
- 夕小瑶 tests top coding agents on Chinese-web retrieval and finds them citing stale official archive pages as live data, a running developer gripe about Chinese RAG quality, as one named view per 夕小瑶科技说.
The Backstory
- Bolian's Liu Zongru tells 极客公园 that AI home appliances only pencil out once per-device token cost falls to around 1 yuan a year, a reminder that the appliance supply chain punishes every extra yuan across R&D, certification, and the electrician who installs it.
The Kicker
- A 虎嗅 writer handed an AI the 1,000-piece all-white "pure white hell" jigsaw that took them 12 days by hand, and watched it give up in five hours, per 虎嗅.
