Day: August 9, 2025

Top artificial intelligence talent at Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Lab, developer of the widely used open-source Qwen models, has become highly sought after, with a number of leading experts leaving to join rival tech giants amid a heated recruitment race. Advertisement Recent departures include Yan Zhijie and Bo Liefeng, two senior figures at Tongyi. Yan, who joined Alibaba in 2015, was an early member of the company’s cutting-edge Damo Academy and later led Tongyi’s speech lab. He left Alibaba in February and recently joined JD.com’s Explore Academy, a research division…

Advertisement Seated among the attendees in both cities was Lee Yi-yang, head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan, the island’s de facto embassy in the country. At the Nagasaki event on Saturday, Lee sat with representatives from international non-government organisations, “inappropriate seating arrangements” that he attributed to pressure from Beijing, according to Taiwanese media reports. Nevertheless, a Taiwanese official has never attended these events before and, after the ceremony in Hiroshima on Wednesday, Lee said the island hoped to have a presence there every year. Lee’s…

Advertisement While the call on Friday underscored a high level of coordination between Beijing and Moscow in their approach to Washington, Chinese experts voiced scepticism about the prospects for the Alaska summit and its aim of negotiating an end to the Ukraine war. They cautioned that although Trump’s first in-person encounter in his second term with Putin could lead to a temporary US-Russia detente, it was unlikely to produce a lasting Ukraine peace agreement or shift the broader strategic balance. According to the official Chinese statement about the call, Xi…

Pandas and table tennis are two of China’s most beloved national symbols, but the behaviour of some of their admirers has prompted concerns about extreme online fandom. Advertisement In a rare open letter issued last month, the China Conservation and Research Centre for the Giant Panda in the southwestern province of Sichuan condemned what it called toxic fan culture and online abuse targeting panda keepers. “Recently, it has been deeply disheartening to see certain individuals inciting and manipulating public opinion – both domestically and abroad – to smear China’s ‘friendship…

OpenAI’s latest flagship artificial intelligence model, GPT-5, has drawn mixed reviews in China, where some critics expressed disappointment over the new system’s lack of breakthroughs. Advertisement At its live-streamed launch on Thursday in the US, GPT-5 was touted by OpenAI as its “smartest, fastest, most useful model yet, and a major step towards placing intelligence at the centre of every business”. The new AI model features improved performance across coding, maths, writing, health and visual perception, among others. OpenAI described it as “a unified system” that features a built-in “thinking”…

Work is expected to get under way this year on one of the world’s most ambitious rail projects with the launch of a state-owned company to oversee construction and operations of a line that will link Hotan in Xinjiang and Lhasa in Tibet. Advertisement The Shanghai Securities News reported on Friday that Xinjiang-Tibet Railway Company had been formally registered with 95 billion yuan (US$13.2 billion) in capital and wholly owned by China State Railway Group. According to the registration, the company’s business scope also includes diversified operations such as real…

Beijing should be vigilant about India’s recent moves to strengthen infrastructure in a disputed border area while setting its own pace for China’s development efforts in the region, observers say. Advertisement Indian newspaper The Tribune reported last month that the country’s only land access to the Galwan Valley – known as the Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldie (DSDBO) Road – was undergoing a major upgrade to accommodate tanks and specialised trucks capable of carrying long-range missiles. The road, which was completed in 2019, is India’s only strategic land access to the Galwan…

Europe is basking in summer, with sunny skies, high temperatures – and a surge in Chinese tourists. Advertisement Despite lingering challenges such as visa requirements and reduced airline capacity due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the continent’s tourism industry is hopeful that 2025 could mark the highest number of Chinese visitors since the Covid-19 pandemic. “We’re pretty optimistic. I work at the centre of Brussels and we see a lot of Chinese. I hear Mandarin everywhere,” said Ludivine Destrée, senior marketing manager at the European Travel Commission (ETC). Europe as…