The Number
- DeepSeek's deepseek-flash now lists at $0.15/M input cache-miss off-peak, with cache-hit input at $0.003/M, per its pricing docs as of 2026-11-02.
- GLM-5.2 sits at $0.006/M prompt on OpenRouter, the cheapest China-lab prompt tier listed, against a $6.8/M completion rate, on OpenRouter as of 2026-11-02.
- Qwen3.8-Max prices at 12 yuan/M input, 36 yuan/M output on Alibaba's DashScope, flat across its global and Singapore deployments, per DashScope pricing as of 2026-11-02.
Top of the Fold
- Meituan's LongCat team ships LongCat-2.5, a 1.6T-parameter model activating ~48B per token, company-stated to beat Claude-Opus-5 and GPT-5.6-Sol on its own agent benchmarks while still trailing Opus-5 on Terminal Bench v4.0, per 智东西.
- China Mobile's 20,480-card AI super-node tender lands with five domestic integrators splitting a 116-117 billion yuan project, 华启智慧 taking 2.63 billion of it, per 智东西.
- SenseTime drops SenseNova 6.8 Flash as a free tier, pitched on translation tasks where larger models stumble, per 量子位.
Untranslated
- Xiaomi open-sources a 150-yuan hardware gadget that commands agents and controls smart-home devices, with demand pushing accessory prices up, per 量子位.
- Huxiu runs a shop-floor read that China's factories bought the robots and servers but still treat AI as an expensive administrative assistant, one Jiangsu plant's boss now chasing payback, as a named dissenting view per 虎嗅.
- Huxiu reports ByteDance plans to spin off 小荷, its six-year, roughly 10-billion-yuan medical bet, after never landing a business model, citing Z Finance, circulating/unconfirmed per 虎嗅.
- PaperWeekly surfaces Cortex, a framework giving agents a long-term-memory "cortex" so experience accumulates across runs, marked preprint, per PaperWeekly.
The Backstory
- CCTV's hand-picked "ten China AI startup riders" names only one drug-discovery company, a Tsinghua-lineage firm running a dual model-and-pipeline strategy, per 量子位.
The Kicker
- Roughly 500 spectators at bilibili's fourth Super Science Night in Beijing wore EEG headsets to whack-a-mole with their minds on 2026-10-31, the fusion segment later going viral abroad, per 新智元.
