Beijing says it wants to become an AI-native city. Shanghai responds with a confused "what?"

🚀 ElevenLabs Launches AI Voice Isolator

💰 NVIDIA's China Sales to Hit $12 Billion

🎁 Baidu Opens Ernie 4.0 for Free

🏥 Alipay Unveils Medical Foundation Model

🌟 SenseTime Releases SenseNova 5.5 Model Family

🏙️ Beijing: Building an AI-Native City in Two Years

💹 Formation Bio Raises $372M in Series D

📈 ULS Robotics Completes Series A+

💷 SoftBank Acquires Graphcore for £400M

🎨 AI Brush, Healing Loneliness

ElevenLabs Launches AI Voice Isolator

AI voice technology company ElevenLabs[1] has launched a free AI voice isolator designed to remove background noise from various media content and enhance speech clarity. This tool is particularly suited for early-stage creators with limited resources. It works in post-production — users upload audio files for processing to eliminate unwanted noise.

While similar tools already exist from companies like Adobe, ElevenLabs' AI voice isolator stands out for its efficient audio processing capabilities. The tool can handle irregular background noise and has demonstrated excellent voice extraction in testing.

ElevenLabs currently offers the service through its platform and will soon open API access. Users get 10 minutes of free audio processing per month; beyond that, they'll need to switch to a paid monthly plan starting at $5 per month.

NVIDIA's China Sales to Hit $12 Billion

Chip consultancy SemiAnalysis predicts NVIDIA will generate approximately $12 billion in AI chip sales in China this year. The company is expected to deliver over one million custom H20 chips to the Chinese market in the coming months — chips designed to circumvent U.S. restrictions on AI processor sales to China, priced between $12,000 and $13,000 each.

Though the H20 faced initial skepticism over performance limitations when launched in China, subsequent testing revealed it still holds market advantages. SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel noted that the H20 costs more to manufacture than the H100 but sells for roughly half the price, indicating NVIDIA has accepted lower margins to maintain its position.

Baidu Opens Ernie 4.0 for Free

Baidu officially announced that its Wenxin AgentBuilder platform has opened Ernie 4.0 to developers at no cost. On the platform, developers can choose between Ernie 3.5 or 4.0 to build agents.

At the 2024 World AI Conference, Baidu founder Robin Li emphasized that agents represent a promising direction for AI applications, with search serving as a critical distribution channel. The Wenxin AgentBuilder supports zero-code operation, streamlining agent development so ordinary users can easily create their own. The platform also leverages Baidu Search as a distribution channel, providing agents with massive user reach, traffic, and intelligent recommendation services — helping developers achieve "easy to build, easy to distribute, easy to monetize." Currently, 200,000 developers and 63,000 enterprises have joined the Wenxin AgentBuilder platform.

Alipay Unveils Medical Foundation Model

At the "Trustworthy Foundation Models Forum" during the 2024 World AI Conference, Alipay launched one of China's first multimodal medical foundation models. Built on Ant Group's Bailing multimodal capabilities, the model can understand and process audio, video, images, and text — achieving highly human-like perception and interaction. It supports medical visual recognition at the hundred-billion parameter scale, achieving over 90% accuracy in identifying diagnostic reports, medications, and hair conditions during testing, while matching GPT-4's performance on Chinese and English medical exams and benchmarks.

Alipay also released a trusted all-in-one hardware solution and cloud deployment option to accompany the model, and jointly initiated an AI healthcare collaboration plan with 20 top-tier tertiary hospitals and healthcare management institutions nationwide to explore innovative applications of foundation models in medicine. This marks Alipay's deepening commitment to medical AI, aiming to drive intelligent and precision healthcare services.

SenseTime Releases SenseNova 5.5 Model Family

SenseTime released its SenseNova 5.5 foundation model family, including: the 600-billion-parameter base model SenseNova 5.5 with 30% performance improvement; the streaming multimodal interaction model SenseNova 5o, China's first "what you see is what you get" model capable of real-time multimodal interaction and Q&A; and SenseNova 5.5 Lite, an upgraded edge model with 10% improved accuracy, 40% reduced time-to-first-token latency, and 15% better inference efficiency.

Beijing: Building an AI-Native City in Two Years

Tang Jianguo, chief economist at Beijing's Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, outlined this plan at the "2024 Global Digital Economy Conference on Intelligent Computing and Decision-Making Technology Forum," with a target of becoming an AI-native city within two years. Beijing aims to achieve 45 EFLOPS of local intelligent computing supply by 2025, planning to build four computing centers each with over 100 million yuan in capacity and form a "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei-Inner Mongolia" computing supply corridor to provide efficient computing support for AI foundation model training and inference applications.

Currently, of the 166 foundation models approved for public release nationwide, Beijing accounts for 71 — roughly half. The city is pushing an AI+ action plan that will create benchmark projects in robotics, healthcare, education, government services, and other fields to establish industry demonstration applications. Beijing has also launched the Jiangmen Chaoyang International Industrial Chain Open Innovation Accelerator, focusing on open collaboration and integration among tech enterprises to connect with global innovation forces.

Shanghai's reaction: AI-native city? Is the sewer system AI-generated too?

Formation Bio Raises $372M in Series D

AI drug discovery company Formation Bio[2] (formerly TrialSpark) recently completed a $372 million Series D round led by Silicon Valley venture firm a16z, with follow-on investment from existing shareholders including Sequoia Capital. The company is now valued at over $1 billion, making it a unicorn in the AI pharmaceutical space. The new funding will go toward acquiring and in-licensing drug candidates, as well as expanding AI capabilities.

Formation Bio was co-founded by Ben Liu and Linhao Zhang to accelerate drug development using AI. Ben Liu discovered during his research at Oxford University that clinical trials were lengthy and expensive, so he partnered with the technically versatile Linhao Zhang to automate and streamline processes for faster clinical development. Formation Bio uses customized large language models to automate medical writing, protocol development, biostatistics, report generation, and regulatory intelligence — dramatically improving efficiency. The company currently has three drugs in clinical trials and plans to add 10 to 15 more within five years.

ULS Robotics Completes Series A+

ULS Robotics[3] recently announced the completion of its Series A+ round led by Dunhong Capital, and unveiled its new "Meet the Future" series exoskeleton products at the World AI Conference (WAIC 2024), with prices starting at ¥6,900. Dunhong Capital partner Yu Wenchao views exoskeletons as a prime example of human-machine collaboration, and considers ULS Robotics — a leader in China's industrial exoskeleton market — to have competitive advantages globally.

Since completing its angel round in 2019, ULS Robotics has consistently aimed to develop exoskeletons priced in the ten-thousand-yuan range, committed to making exoskeleton robots smaller, lighter, and more affordable while integrating embodied intelligence and general-purpose robotics R&D. ULS Robotics' exoskeletons have been deployed in mining, automotive, aerospace, power, logistics, and other sectors — effectively reducing worker physical strain, lowering occupational disease risks, and addressing labor shortages and aging workforces in heavy physical labor industries.

SoftBank Acquires Graphcore for £400M

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank recently announced plans to acquire AI chip startup Graphcore[4] for £400 million, pending U.K. government review and approval. Founded in 2016, Graphcore specializes in intelligence processing unit (IPU) AI chips designed to challenge industry giant NVIDIA's market dominance. Though Graphcore raised $222 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in 2020 — making it one of Britain's most promising startups — the company has faced financial difficulties in recent years.

Graphcore's 2022 revenue was just $2.7 million, down 46% year-over-year, with losses widening to $204.6 million. To control costs, the company laid off staff and closed several overseas offices. As of end-2022, Graphcore held $157 million in cash and short-term investments, but projected continued losses in 2023 and the need for additional funding.

As the largest shareholder in British chip designer Arm, SoftBank aims to expand its semiconductor influence and achieve synergies with Arm through this acquisition. However, SoftBank's offer for Graphcore falls far below the company's 2020 valuation. Under the U.K.'s National Security and Investment Act, the acquisition requires government review — and given SoftBank's controlling stake in Arm, the deal may well be approved. If the transaction fails, Graphcore could face collapse.

AI Brush, Healing Loneliness

On a lonely planet, there are children known as "children of the stars" — their hearts hold endless imagination and creativity, waiting to be discovered. Recently, Alibaba's Tongyi App combined art therapy with AI to release a healing gift: "AI That Chases Stars," China's first AI picture book caring for children with autism, designed to bring these children an entirely new way of cognitive interaction.

AI cartoonist Rootport once said, "For most artists, the story they want to tell should be their top priority. Technology is merely the means to express that story." Here's hoping AI becomes a king of mediums that unleashes inspiration, rather than a mediocre copycat.

There has never been peace and love. There has never been a savior. Every civilization is a hunter in the forest; every civilization is also prey.

— Cixin Liu, contemporary science fiction writer

Editor: Yuki Design: Ivan

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References

[1] ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/

[2] Formation Bio: https://www.formation.bio/

[3] ULS Robotics: https://www.ulsorbotics.com/

[4] Graphcore: https://www.graphcore.ai/