Joseph Tsai and Yongming Wu’s Letter to Shareholders: Alibaba’s AI Business Enters Commercial Return Cycle, Striving to Make AI+Cloud a New Growth Driver
On May 20, Alibaba Group Chairman Joseph Tsai and CEO Yongming Wu jointly released a letter to shareholders. The letter stated that Alibaba’s AI business has moved beyond the initial investment phase and officially entered the commercial return cycle. “We are confident in seizing the opportunities of the times and are striving to make AI+Cloud another growth driver for the company. To achieve this vision, we are increasing our investment in full-stack AI capabilities: we will continue to increase investment in AI infrastructure construction and self-developed chips; at the model and application levels, we will invest in building stronger basic model capabilities to attract more applications, while also building more powerful MaaS products to more efficiently connect models and applications.”
OpenAI Founding Member Andrej Karpathy Announces Joining Anthropic
On May 19 local time, OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy posted a status update announcing that he has joined the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. Kapacsi stated that he believes the cutting-edge development of large language models will be particularly shaping in the coming years, and he is very excited to join the team and return to R&D work. He also expressed his continued passion for education and plans to resume related work at an appropriate time in the future.
Google Officially Releases Gemini 3.5: First Model with 3.5 Flash, 3.5 Pro to Launch Next Month
On May 19th local time, Google announced the launch of the new Gemini 3.5 series. As the first model in the series, the Gemini 3.5 Flash was released first, boasting cutting-edge performance in agent operation and programming, particularly adept at handling complex, long-cycle tasks that generate practical application value. In addition, Google is currently accelerating the development of the higher-level Gemini 3.5 Pro model. This model is already in use internally at Google and is expected to be officially launched to the market next month.
Google and Samsung Electronics Announce Smart Glasses Design, Planned for Fall Launch
On May 19th local time, Samsung Electronics and Google announced a smart glasses design developed in collaboration with glasses partners Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, with plans for a fall launch. These glasses, running Android XR, utilize Google Gemini to provide AI functions such as real-time translation, navigation, notifications, and contextual voice assistants. They can also take photos and videos using the built-in camera.
Qingtianzu Completes Series A and A+ Funding Rounds, Raising Hundreds of Millions of Yuan
On May 20th, Qingtianzu announced that it had recently completed its Series A and A+ funding rounds, raising hundreds of millions of yuan. Following this round of financing, Qingtianzu’s valuation reached 7 billion yuan.
Domestic AI Application Apps Reach 670 Million Daily Active Users
According to the “2026 China AI Application Panorama Report” released by QuantumBit Think Tank, in April 2026, the monthly visits to domestic AI application web platforms exceeded 900 million, monthly downloads of apps exceeded 240 million, and daily active users reached 670 million, representing a year-on-year surge of 223%.
OpenAI Pledges Over S$300 Million to Establish First Overseas Applied AI Lab in Singapore
On May 20, Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information signed a Memorandum of Understanding with OpenAI, under which OpenAI pledged to invest over S$300 million (approximately US$234 million) to advance applied AI innovation. At the heart of this collaboration, OpenAI will establish its first “Applied Artificial Intelligence Lab” outside the United States in Singapore, creating 200 technical expert and engineer jobs locally over the next few years.
Alibaba Releases New Generation Flagship Model Qwen3.7-Max
On May 20, Alibaba released its new generation flagship model, Qwen3.7-Max. In Arena’s global blind model ranking, Qwen3.7-Max surpassed Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-v4-pro, and GLM-5.1, ranking first among domestic models. Designed for current intelligent agents, Qwen3.7 achieves breakthroughs in core capabilities such as programming and reasoning. Alibaba’s large-scale model development has accelerated significantly in recent times. Within the past three months, the Qianwen flagship large-scale model has been stably iterated through three versions: 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7.
Pingtouge Releases New Generation AI Chip Zhenwu M890, Performance Up to 3x
On May 20th, at the 2026 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Pingtouge’s new generation training and inference integrated AI chip, Zhenwu M890, made its debut. This chip features 144GB of built-in graphics memory and an inter-chip interconnect bandwidth of 800GB/s, achieving three times the performance of the Zhenwu 810E. It natively supports multiple data precisions from FP32 to FP4, and can be applied to all scenarios from high-precision training to low-precision and ultra-low-precision inference. Combined with the self-developed ICN Switch 1.0 chip, it can achieve full-bandwidth interconnection of 64 cards, significantly improving the efficiency and stability of large-scale intelligent computing clusters. This is an important part of the comprehensive upgrade towards the Agentic era. On the same day, Alibaba Cloud launched a new “chip-cloud-model-inference” technology system.
UBTECH Announces Launch of Consumer-Grade Humanoid Robot Brand UWORLD
On May 20, Zhou Jian, founder of UBTECH, opened a social media account and announced the launch of the company’s consumer-grade humanoid robot brand, UWORLD.
