Tag: china ai
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China’s StepFun Just Undercut Every AI Price Tag
A Chinese AI company most people outside the industry have never heard of just shipped a model that’s nearly caught up to the best open model available, and priced it to make everyone else sweat a little. StepFun released Step 5 Preview this month. It’s a big model, 600 billion parameters total, though only about…
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A Chinese Chipmaker Says It’s Caught Up to Samsung
Over the weekend, at the World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei, a Chinese chipmaker called CXMT said its newest memory chip platform is now in mass production. Two new chips came out of it, both a power saving type of memory called LPDDR5X, the kind that goes into phones and other portable devices. Each one holds…
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DeepSeek Just Made Its Cheap AI a Lot More Expensive
DeepSeek built its name by being the cheap option. That chapter is closing. The company is raising prices across its V4 lineup, with the increases taking effect on August 16. Peak hour pricing on DeepSeek V4 Flash is jumping to $1.32 per million output tokens, more than four times what it cost before. Off peak…
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Alibaba Just Put a 2.4 Trillion Parameter Model on the Table
Alibaba dropped a new model called Qwen3.8-Max, and the numbers on it are wild. 2.4 trillion parameters, and it’s already beating or matching Anthropic’s top model on a chunk of benchmarks, including one that checks whether a model can actually reproduce real scientific research. The bigger news isn’t just the parameter count. It’s that Alibaba…
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China’s Nvidia Challenger Just Filed for an IPO
A Shanghai chip designer most people outside China have never heard of just filed to go public in Hong Kong, and the timing tells you a lot about where this race is headed. MetaX makes GPUs built to replace Nvidia hardware inside Chinese data centers. Its current chip runs at roughly three quarters of the…