The Number
- DeepSeek lists deepseek-flash at $0.15/M cache-miss input off-peak, half the peak rate, per DeepSeek docs (2026-11-05).
- Qwen3.8-Max holds at 12 yuan/M input, 36 yuan/M output on DashScope, with the US-Virginia deployment priced ~25% higher, per Alibaba pricing (2026-11-05).
- On OpenRouter, GLM-5.2 runs $0.006/M prompt against $6.8/M completion, the widest prompt-to-completion gap among listed China models (2026-11-05).
Top of the Fold
- Baidu open-sources ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a 280B-parameter sparse MoE activating 14B per token, positioned against DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Base and MiMo-V2.5-Base as same-size SOTA, benchmark figures company-stated, per 智东西.
- Tencent releases Hunyuan Hy4, its latest LLM pitched into the top open-model tier, per 雷峰网.
- Sand.ai closes a $200M A+ round, its third raise in ten months for $300M total, declaring unicorn status with Shanghai state capital in the mix, per 智东西.
- Ant Group's 灵光 assistant passes 20M users, managing 1.16M tasks in the week since its 2.0 "manage-for-me" update, per 雷峰网.
Untranslated
- Beijing startup 基元律动 (TokenRhythm) drops NeoHorse-1.5-Flash Preview, a 125B-parameter agent model built by recursive self-improvement on a Qwen3.8-Flash base, led by ex-Huawei Pangu chief 王云鹤, gains company-stated, per 智东西.
- spaCy's author publicly accuses the MIT-linked Astra project of fine-tuning Qwen weights while presenting them as original, circulating/unconfirmed, per 量子位.
- IDC data cited across Chinese channels puts H1 China MaaS revenue at 10.6B yuan, up nearly 9x year-on-year, now spilling into an embodied-robot MaaS pitch, per 新智元.
- Otherwise quiet across the Chinese community overnight.
The Backstory
- 王云鹤, who ran Huawei's Pangu model team, has resurfaced at his own startup 基元律动 betting the whole model on recursive self-improvement, folding a prior NeoHorse generation back in as training signal, per 智东西.
The Kicker
- An iPhone weather bug showed next Friday at -32C in parts of China, with Apple support blaming a system port glitch and apologizing, per 雷峰网.
