The Chinese military tested an AI agentAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. designed to assist battalion-level commanders during a simulated amphibious landing operation, according to a peer-reviewed paper in Command Control & Simulation by researchers affiliated with the PLA and the National University of Defence Technology. The system reportedly outperformed human staff officers in processing battlefield information and generating tactical recommendations. Defense News corroborated the disclosure in a report on the PLA's selective AI investments in frontline command capabilities.
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Silicon Valley coding tools Cursor and Cognition's Devin rely on Chinese open-source modelsOpen-weight modelAn AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download, run and modify it, as opposed to one reachable only through the developer's API. The main policy tension is that open weights spread capability widely and cannot be recalled once released. under the hood, per QbitAI. Cursor confirmed its Composer 2 is built on Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, while Cognition's SWE-1.6 is suspected of post-training on Zhipu AI's GLM models. Alibaba's Qwen family has overtaken Meta's Llama in cumulative Hugging Face downloads, a trend VentureBeat and MIT Technology Review corroborated. Shopify cut annual AI inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to answer a query, as distinct from training it. Inference is where most ongoing compute and energy demand now sits, and it is what chip export rules increasingly target alongside training. costs from $5.5 million to approximately $73,000 by switching to a self-hosted Qwen deployment.
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Alibaba on April 10 confirmed that HappyHorse, an AI video generation model that anonymously climbed to No. 1 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, was developed by its newly formed Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) division, TechNode reported. Bloomberg reported the model outscored ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 in both text-to-video and image-to-video benchmarks. ATH was established in March under CEO Wu Yongming as part of a broader organizational restructure, with API access scheduled for April 30.
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Shengshu Technology, maker of the Vidu video generation platform, closed a nearly 2 billion yuan ($293 million) funding round led by Alibaba Cloud, with participation from China Internet Investment Fund (state-backed) and TAL Education Group, Bloomberg and CNBC reported. The funding will support development of a "general world model" that simulates physical-world perception, which Shengshu describes as a step toward embodied AGIAGIArtificial general intelligence: an AI system that can do most economically valuable cognitive work at or above human level. There is no agreed test for it, which is why debates about when it will arrive, and what to do about it, are so contentious.. The round closed despite the Trump administration's outbound investment screening rule, which restricts US investor participation in Chinese AI ventures.
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