Tech

Two months after a record antitrust fine, a custom-tour customer found her Manzhouli hotel priced at 1,520 yuan a night while the walk-in rate was 500 — reviving the debate over 'big-data price killing' that regulators promised to end.

China's state broadcaster CMG will hold the first World Robot Mount Tai Climbing Competition on October 29, sending robots up the sacred mountain's real stone path — about 3.8 kilometers and more than 3,100 steps from Red Gate to Midway Gate to Heaven. Organizers are billing the UNESCO-listed peak as an 'ultimate testing ground' for embodied AI: uneven stairs, mist and crowds that no lab can replicate.

DeepSeek on September 10 released V4.1 Flash, the smallest model in its new architecture series, with native multimodal vision understanding and a lower price tag — the latest move by the Chinese lab that reset global expectations for cheap, open AI. Built on an unusual asymmetric design that keeps input costs down, the release lands as Chinese users increasingly treat DeepSeek not as a novelty but as everyday infrastructure.