Chinese Tech Daily — 2026-05-23#

Top Story#

DeepSeek is reportedly negotiating a massive $10 billion funding round that would push its valuation to roughly $45 billion, with founder Liang Wenfeng planning to personally invest up to 20 billion RMB. The move underscores the company’s commitment to pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and open-source models rather than rushing short-term commercialization. At the same time, the company announced permanent price cuts for its DeepSeek-V4-Pro API, dropping the cost to a quarter of its original price starting in June to aggressively court developers.

Engineering & Dev#

In systems architecture, OpenAI published a deep dive on its WebRTC architecture for scaling low-latency voice AI globally. Moving away from traditional Direct UDP or Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) models, the new design uses a relay-transceiver separation where thin, stateless relays handle public routing while dedicated transceivers manage complex WebRTC session states like ICE negotiation and SRTP encryption.

On the mobile ecosystem front, InfoQ previewed the upcoming AICon Shanghai, highlighting that Huawei’s HarmonyOS tech lead Xie Guo will present on cross-platform development. His session will cover the performance optimization and AI-assisted generation of UI code when adapting frameworks like Flutter and KMP for HarmonyOS.

In game development and systems engineering, veteran programmer Cloud Wu shared a thoughtful comparison between Oxygen Not Included and Factorio. He argues that while both are automation masterpieces, ONI functions as an entropy management game in a finite resource environment, whereas Factorio is built around managing the exponential complexity of logistics on an infinite map.

In the open-source AI space, Bytedance’s intelligent creation team has released Lance, a native unified multimodal model. Utilizing 3B active parameters, it handles both image and video comprehension and generation, scoring highly on benchmarks like GenEval and VBench.

Products & Digital#

In the domestic auto market, the Geely Galaxy Xingyao 7 MAX is attempting to disrupt the 100,000 RMB family sedan segment by making a dual-motor, four-wheel-drive system a near-standard feature. Utilizing the GEA evo architecture and a 28.3 kWh battery, the vehicle achieves a 5.4-second 0-100 km/h acceleration and features chassis tuning heavily influenced by the Lotus engineering team.

For the digital lifestyle and productivity crowd, sspai set up a co-creation exhibition at the Shenzhen ICIF. They showcased several community-driven hardware projects, including a co-branded FiiO portable CD player with magnetic customizable faceplates, and a quirky e-ink smart keychain called “Pocket Prophet” that offers MBTI guidance, e-reader remote controls, and randomized decision-making tools.

Meanwhile, AI in physical retail hit a snag as Starbucks discontinued its AI inventory system in North America. The Automated Counting tool, which used LiDAR and cameras to track ingredients, reportedly struggled with accuracy in real-world scenarios, often misidentifying similar types of milk.

News & Commentary#

The commercial race between top-tier AI labs is intensifying, as data reveals OpenAI’s Q1 revenue hit $5.7 billion, keeping it about $1 billion ahead of Anthropic for the quarter. However, Anthropic is rapidly closing the gap, with its annualized revenue run rate approaching $45 billion compared to OpenAI’s $30 billion, indicating that Claude is experiencing explosive growth in the enterprise market.

In the domestic media sector, Tencent Music officially completed its acquisition of Ximalaya. While this deeply integrates China’s major music streaming and long-form audio podcast ecosystems, regulators intervened to prevent monopolies, mandating that Tencent Music dissolve exclusive audio copyright authorizations to maintain market fairness.

Also Noted#

• WeChat’s team explained that their two-minute message recall limit exists because withdrawing later would disrupt the continuity of chat history for users who have already read or replied to the message.
• Alibaba Cloud’s new flagship model, Qwen3.7-Max, has been integrated across its platforms, reportedly surpassing Claude Opus 4.6 in key benchmarks like GPQA Diamond and HLE.
• Kimi launched its Batch API for large-scale, non-real-time tasks such as media processing and data cleaning, offering developers a 40% discount off standard real-time rates.
• OpenAI updated Codex to include a locked computer use mode, allowing AI agents to securely continue long-running remote tasks on Mac machines even after the screen locks.