Daily Brief - SiliconNoon (Page 125)

The Arena

Tencent's AI-driven ads beat Q2 estimates, but profit misses

Tencent beat second-quarter revenue estimates on accelerating game sales and AI-driven advertising, but the results laid bare the tension at the heart of its AI bet: core profit missed expectations, and capital spending jumped 65% quarter over quarter. Tencent posted revenue of 204.78 billion yuan ($30.36 billion) for the quarter ending in June, up 11% year on year and ahead of the 202.17 billion yuan analysts expected. Net profit rose less than 1% to 56 billion yuan, falling short of the 61.82

The Arena

ByteDance creates AI data and safety division

ByteDance is reorganizing around the data problem, Europe's biggest airline is betting its operations on Google's models, and Chinese robotaxis are expanding deeper into the Gulf — a morning of big industry moves. ByteDance has reportedly created a new first-level "AI data and safety" division — its first new AI unit since Seed and Flow were founded in late 2023. Chinese tech outlet IT之家 reported Tuesday, citing multiple sources, that the unit sits parallel to Seed, Flow and Douyin, with former

The Frontier

MLS-Bench: frontier models can't invent new ML methods

A benchmark from UC Berkeley, Princeton and Tsinghua researchers asks whether AI systems can invent the kind of generalizable methods that built modern machine learning — residual connections, attention, Adam — or merely recombine what humans already made. The early verdict is blunt: so far, they can't, even with the answer key in hand. MLS-Bench, built by 28 researchers across UC Berkeley, Princeton, Tsinghua and seven other universities, finds that frontier models can tune machine learning sy

The Guardrails

China approves mandatory autonomous-driving safety standard

China's market regulator just drew a regulatory line under two of AI's most safety-critical uses: driving cars and diagnosing patients. Beijing approved a mandatory national standard for autonomous driving system safety alongside new quality rules for AI medical devices, part of a 338-standard batch that signals how the country intends to govern AI where failures have physical consequences. China's market regulator approved a mandatory national standard for autonomous driving system safety, alo

The Frontier

Xiaomi's MiLM Plus ships PROVE, a benchmark for AI object removal

The AI-editing arms race just got a proper measuring stick: Xiaomi's research team shipped an evaluation framework that says the metrics everyone uses to judge object-removal models are out of step with human perception. Meanwhile, the open-source fine-tuning favorite Unsloth put local model training on the desktop. Xiaomi's MiLM Plus research group released PROVE, an open evaluation framework for object removal in images and video that its authors say fixes what standard metrics get wrong. The

The Arena

Devin maker Cognition eyes $40B valuation in new round

Two stories set the pace today: the agent boom is repricing its most famous startup, and China's newest state-owned auto giant is betting its AI future on Huawei's stack. Cognition, the startup behind the Devin coding agent, is in early talks to raise a new round at a valuation of at least $40 billion, Bloomberg News reported. That would be a jump of more than 50 percent over its last reported valuation of around $26 billion from a May round — and roughly ten times the $4 billion the Peter Thie

The Arena

CoreWeave's backlog tops $104 billion as AI cloud revenue doubles

The AI buildout's scoreboard came in overnight: CoreWeave's revenue doubled and its backlog hit a record, while China locked in its first mandatory safety rules for L3/L4 self-driving. CoreWeave posted second-quarter revenue of $2.58 billion, up 112 percent from a year earlier and ahead of the $2.56 billion analysts expected, with the stock jumping about 10 percent in extended trading. The AI cloud provider's revenue backlog — contracted future business — climbed to $104.2 billion, management r

The Guardrails

China-linked hackers hit Taiwan in first autonomous AI attack

A government breach in Taiwan shows the AI-agent era of cyber warfare has arrived — and the operator may not have needed much of a team at all. Suspected Chinese hackers used publicly available AI agents to build an autonomous hacking tool that broke into Taiwanese government systems in early July, according to the Financial Times — a breach researchers describe as unprecedented. Over four days, the tool mapped 21 government systems, researched vulnerabilities, and changed tactics whenever it w

The Guardrails

OpenAI says US AI policy is being written in state capitals

OpenAI's top policy executive says America's AI rulemaking is happening in statehouses, not Washington — and California's transparency law is the template. Ann O'Leary, OpenAI's vice president of global policy, told POLITICO's California Agenda summit that US AI policy is "really happening in state capitals," with California's AI transparency law — signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year — informing much of the emerging framework. Speaking in Sacramento on Tuesday, O'Leary noted that thousands of

The Arena

Musk: SpaceX AI revenue to top rockets and Starlink by September

SpaceX just reframed itself as an AI company, and China's agent-memory race collected another big check. Musk told employees in a company video that AI revenue "will exceed all other SpaceX revenue probably in September," with AI to make up 99% of SpaceX's value within five years. In a roughly 30-minute all-hands address posted publicly on Tuesday, Musk said the crossover with rockets, spacecraft, and Starlink comes "probably next month" and that AI "will significantly exceed" every other busin

The Arena

Alibaba Cloud's Zhenwu M890 supernode runs 2T-parameter models

China's compute buildout just got a new centerpiece, and South Korea's flagship AI project hit an embarrassing checkpoint. Alibaba Cloud is renting out a supernode that can train trillion-scale models, while Seoul's government-backed models stumble over a two-sentence reasoning question. Alibaba Cloud has made its Lingjun Zhenwu M890 super-node instances generally available, positioning them as the first supernode in China to run models exceeding 2 trillion parameters. The first region opened i

The Arena

Lumentum's revenue doubles as AI data centers go optical

Optical networking is writing the AI buildout's next earnings chapter: Lumentum's quarterly revenue more than doubled as hyperscalers wire their data centers with light, and a Chinese province drew the line on how schools may use AI. Lumentum's fiscal Q4 revenue more than doubled year over year to $1.01 billion, beating estimates as AI data centers race to replace copper links with optical connectivity. Adjusted earnings came in at $3.23 per share against the roughly $2.95 to $2.97 analysts exp

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