(Xinhua) Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Thursday released a new version of its Quark application, a comprehensive AI assistant powered by Alibaba's Qwen-based advanced reasoning model.

Quark is the first within Alibaba's general user-facing businesses to fully leverage its proprietary foundation models, marking an important milestone in Alibaba's strategy to integrate AI across its businesses.

The revamped Quark offers advanced capabilities such as AI chatbot, deep thinking, deep research and task execution into an easy user interface. It aims to perform functions ranging from academic research to document drafting, image generation, presentations, medical diagnostics, travel planning and problem solving.

(China Daily) Open-source chip design architecture RISC-V is gaining in popularity in China, experts said, as domestic tech companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd work to sharpen their technological strengths in semiconductors amid the rapidly evolving era of artificial intelligence.

RISC-V technology manages memory systems shared between CPUs, and has been open and free for use since its debut in 2010. Developers can use it to design a chip tailored to their unique needs.

(Xinhua) China's National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) has released a pricing guideline for neural system care services, specifying brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as an independent category.

According to the NHSA, this move aims to boost the clinical application of the cutting-edge technology to benefit patients in need, against the backdrop of BCIs' rapid development over recent years.

(China Daily) Chinese scientists have recently achieved the fabrication of single-atom-layer metals with a thickness of merely one-millionth the thickness of an A4 paper sheet, setting a new record for the thinnest metal materials. This marks the world's first realization of stable two-dimensional forms of non-layered metals.

(Xinhua) Chinese scientists have successfully conducted an ice-cap detection experiment in Antarctica using a domestically developed ultra-wideband hyperspectral microwave radiometer, as reported by China's 41st Antarctic expedition team.

The team conducted joint air-ground experiments using helicopters and snowmobiles to successfully carry out remote sensing detection of temperature distribution beneath the Antarctic ice.

(China Daily) Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has released a new artificial intelligence model that it says can read emotions, in an apparent bid to outpace OpenAI’s latest model.

In two demonstrations, Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab researchers showed their new open source R1-Omni inferring the emotional state of a person in a video while also offering descriptions of their clothes and environment.

(Xinhua) The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has stood out at meetings and press conferences during China's annual two sessions, painting a broader picture: China is rapidly evolving into an AI "super market," with the application of frontier technology woven into the fabric of a wide range of sectors in its economy.

(Xinhua) A Chinese open-source AI model is shown to rival top-tier global competitors such as DeepSeek R1, despite its smaller size, representing another step forward in balancing performance and efficiency in AI application. 

The QwQ-32B, unveiled last Thursday by Alibaba's Qwen team, operates on just 24 GB of video memory with only 32 billion parameters, while DeepSeek's R1 demands 1,600 GB to run its 671 billion parameters, thus realizing a 98-percent reduction.

(China Daily) As large language model prices continue to decline, evolving market dynamics and intensified price competition will determine which players thrive in the coming years, said industry experts.

"Low pricing doesn't mean losses. When it comes to LLM profitability, doing more with less is entirely achievable," said Zhang Tong, a senior director analyst at market consultancy Gartner.

(China Daily) Technology has been my beat for more than a decade now — part of my job as a business journalist is to keep a close eye on the latest trends and developments in China's ever-changing high-tech sector.

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek recently caused a global sensation with the release of its latest open-source large language model at significantly lower cost than its foreign counterparts, sending shock waves through the tech industry.
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