Three major Chinese AI releases landed in the first four months of 2026. Each one makes a different bet on what matters next: reasoning depth, coding stamina, or raw cost efficiency. I have been watching the benchmark sheets fill up.…
Two Chinese phone makers are telling very different chip stories right now. Xiaomi just dropped the 15S Pro with its first self-designed flagship SoC, the Xuanjie O1 (玄戒O1). Huawei launched the Pura 80 series with the Kirin 9020, a chip…
China’s app ecosystem never sits still. In the past few months, Alipay, WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu have all pushed major updates that change how people pay, shop, and interact. Here is what is actually happening. Alipay “Touch to Pay” (碰一下):…
I’ve lost more USB-C cables to hotel rooms and airport lounges than I care to admit. So when UGREEN sent over their Nexode 65W charger with a built-in retractable cable, my first thought was: sure, but does the mechanism hold…
In February 2025, DJI started turning off the lights at 9 p.m. Security guards walked the floors. Employees who used to camp at their desks until midnight were sent home. Some said they felt relief. Others said they felt panic,…
Last week, a friend who works at a Beijing internet company told me her office cafeteria started charging for milk. Not all milk. Just the second carton. The first one is still free, part of the “three free meals” package…
SHENZHEN — Three numbers tell you where China’s tech story is this week. One. Huawei’s Mate 80 series hit a million single-unit activations before the end of 2025, according to leaker Digital Chat Station (数码闲聊站). Three models crossed that threshold:…
Chinese AI labs shipped more models in April than most countries ship in a year. Between mid-April and early May, at least nine frontier models landed from Chinese developers. Some are good. Some are interesting for reasons that have nothing…
In the past few weeks, Douyin made two moves that tell me one thing: ByteDance is serious about becoming a payment company, not just an ad company. First, Apple’s App Store in China started testing Douyin Pay as a payment…
A Miami startup just shipped the first commercial subquadratic LLM with a 12 million token context window—at 1/5 the cost of frontier models. Here's why architecture, not scale, is becoming the story of mid-2026.