China AI

AIAlibaba's Damo Academy says more than 6 billion chips have shipped based on its XuanTie RISC-V architecture, Chief Scientist Meng Jianyi announced at the RISC-V Summit China in Shenzhen.

AIThe source headline says DeepSeek ranks first and MiniMax second among domestic Flash models.

AITsinghua University's electronic engineering department used five AgiBot G1 robots in an end-of-term exam, with undergraduates controlling them through VR handsets to grasp and fold a jacket.

AIDesign Arena projects DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 to rank #3 among open-weight models on its Website leaderboard, a 16-position jump past DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731.

AITinker says DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, which DeepSeek describes as stronger on benchmarks, faster at completing tasks, and shorter in output than the previous version.

AIMiniMax says its M3.1 Flash model is free for all Command Code subscribers for a limited time. Command Code describes the model as offering a 1M token context window and frontier-level coding performance, available on all plans.

AIMiniMax has released M3.1 Flash, a faster and cheaper update to its M3 model, and says agentic tasks cost 70% less to run than on its previous model.

AIDatabricks adds DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 as a new endpoint, with the same architecture and updated weights. The model shows substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks, according to Databricks.

AIMiles Brundage, Georgia Adamson, and Konstantin Pilz report that the US AI lead over China is currently around six months.

AIMiniMax says its M3.1 Flash model, codenamed Space Bunny, is now live on GMI Cloud on day zero.

AIvLLM's Elastic EP scaling now reduces serving downtime to 0.82 seconds when scaling DeepSeek V4 Pro from 16 to 20 GPUs.

AIMiniMax says its final M3.1 Flash model is live and free on OpenRouter for 72 hours. The model returns after Space Bunny, its stealth predecessor, was OpenRouter's top model for 10 straight days and processed 56.7T tokens.

AIMiniMax says its M3.1 Flash model, built for long agentic coding runs where cost adds up fast, is free in Cline from day zero.

AIOllama announces day-zero support for MiniMax M3.1 Flash, hosted in the US with zero data retention.

AIMiniMax says its anonymous "Space Bunny" model, an early build of M3.1 Flash, held the No. 1 spot on OpenCode for 12 consecutive days and served 106T tokens.

AIThe Department of Homeland Security has ordered US civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, plus third-party products built on DeepSeek implementations, under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018.

Why it matters: The source ties the order to a federal notice and its legal basis, showing how supply-chain security rules can reach AI models even when they are hosted in the US.

AITenstorrent, an inference-focused chip startup, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than double its late 2024 valuation.

Why it matters: The round's valuation history and the rejected acquisition interest show how investors now value AI inference chip startups competing with Nvidia.

AIThe Department of Homeland Security requires all civilian federal agencies to remove DeepSeek products and "any third-party services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Agencies must also stop buying them.

AIModelScope now hosts the MiniMax H3 Character Swap LoRA, an experimental adapter that recasts a selected person in video from an image reference.

AIMiniMax has released M3.1 Flash, a reasoning model that scores 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 13 points above its predecessor M3, at a cost of about $0.22 per task.

AIOllama says MiniMax M3.1 Flash is available through Ollama Cloud, hosted in the US with zero data retention, with a 1M-token context window and image understanding.

AIDeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-20261017 (Max) is now the top open model on Agent Arena, placing #11 overall with a +5.1% net improvement across more than 7.5K real-world sessions.

AIKling AI has released Kling 4.0, which can generate up to 30 seconds of video in one pass and accepts up to ten keyframe images as input.

AIHeyGen Video 1.0, a 1080p model post-trained on MiniMax H3, ranks #3 on both Design Arena's Video and Image to Video leaderboards, according to Design Arena.

AIAnt Ling open-sourced five Ming-3.0 speech models spanning TTS, audio understanding, and ASR, from 0.5B to 126B total parameters (6.5B active). vLLM-Omni supports serving them from day 0.

AICline says MiniMax M3.1 Flash matches Opus and GPT on coding at about 25x lower cost, and it is free in Cline now.

AIArtificial Analysis says DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 scores 45 on its Intelligence Index, six points above DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and ties GLM-5.3 as the #2 open-weights model.

Why it matters: The post places the update against peer models on cost and capability, showing where it sits among open-weights options and what it costs per task.

AIOpenCode says its DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model has been updated to 1017 in OpenCode Go and the Free tier. It adds that no changes are needed on users' end.

AIDaniel Han says Unsloth and llama.cpp support DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 with dynamic GGUF quantizations.

AIAnt Ling says it has open-sourced five Ming-3.0 models across speech synthesis, audio understanding, and speech recognition.

AIUnsloth says DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 now runs locally in a 1-bit quantized GGUF, cutting size from 508GB to 250GB (−52%). The company says the quantized model retains about 88.2% accuracy and needs a device with 128GB+ RAM.

AIMiniMax-M3.1-Flash scores 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 13 points above MiniMax-M3 and level with GLM-5.3-Flash, but behind DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 at 45.

AIFireworks AI says Muse Spark Open is now available through its Serverless Training API. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is added to Serverless training and replaces the prior version.

AISenseTime's Large Device platform, led by CTO Xuan Shanming, now serves 6 trillion tokens per day, and plans 10 trillion per day by Q4 2026.

AIThe first Global Embodied AI Application Innovation Challenge and the 2026 China Robot Competition closed in Hangzhou on October 18, with more than 2,000 teams and nearly 5,000 players competing over three days.

AIDAMO Academy's Xuantie unit releases the Xuantie E908A, which it says is the first RISC-V CPU IP to reach both ASIL-B and ASIL-D, with single-point safety metrics above 90%.

AIZhongxingwei, a Chinese interconnect chip company, unveiled 12 mass-produced chips and three new high-performance interconnect products at a launch event.

AIVercel says MiniMax M3.1 Flash, model ID minimax/minimax-m3.1-flash, is now available free on AI Gateway.

AIApple CEO Tim Cook said on October 15 that Apple Intelligence and Alibaba's Qwen model received approval in China, with beta versions expected later this month.

AIMiniMax has released M3.1 Flash on its API at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens.