DeepSeek has released its V4.1 Flash model, claiming it outperforms its previous flagship while cutting inference costs and boosting speeds – the latest salvo in China’s aggressive price-and-performance war. The Chinese artificial intelligence developer said on Thursday that V4.1 Flash used a new “Causal-Encoder-Decoder” architecture. While built on a massive 552 billion-parameter framework, it relies on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. In traditional AI, every query runs through the entire...

Apple’s long-awaited entry into the foldable smartphone market, the iPhone Duo, has drawn immediate attention in China over its eye-watering price tag and exclusive dual-eSIM design, as the American tech giant targets entrenched domestic rivals Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi. Unveiled on Wednesday, the iPhone Duo – Apple’s thinnest and most expensive flagship model yet – captured the attention of Chinese consumers with its smooth transition between inner and outer displays. By Thursday morning,...

Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first-ever foldable smartphone, at its annual product launch event on Wednesday in Cupertino, California, following months of mounting anticipation. Presented by CEO John Ternus, the sleek, passport-style device stole the spotlight at the Apple Park event. Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook on September 1, said the handset would “redefine the experience of using a foldable phone”. Starting at US$1,999 – or HK$17,499 (US$2,231) if bought in Hong Kong – Apple’s...

Alibaba Group Holding is giving users the ability to put artificial intelligence-powered “digital employees” to work within rival office platforms, opening a new competitive front against ByteDance and Tencent Holdings in enterprise AI. The latest version of the QoderWake tool, launched by Alibaba Cloud on Tuesday, allowed users to generate fully functioning workers using a single-line description of the required role, the company said. These digital workers could then be put to work within any...