Tesla Chose Shanghai to Send Its Optimus Robot Into the Spotlight

🔍 Perplexity upgrades Pro Search

🌐 French Moshi AI open-source large model arrives

📱 Samsung focuses on AI chip development

🤖 Tesla Optimus Gen 2 debuts in Shanghai

🏛️ Sam Li attends WAIC opening ceremony

🏆 SenseTime Vimi shines at WAIC

🤖 China's first full-size humanoid robot "Qinglong" unveiled

🚀 SiliconFlow raises nine-figure RMB in angel+ round

💼 Baidu leads Jingying Technology's Series A

💹 AI coding startup Magic valued at $1.5 billion

🥣 AI-powered "Sea Turtle Soup" game

Perplexity upgrades Pro Search

AI search startup Perplexity has rolled out a major upgrade to its Pro Search tool, claiming it can now understand queries more deeply and deliver more precise results, particularly in mathematics and research. The upgraded Pro Search[1] can grasp what a question demands, work toward the goal step by step, and deliver comprehensive, in-depth answers with greater efficiency.

Additionally, Pro Search now features more advanced math and coding capabilities, enhancing its ability to analyze data, debug code, and generate content. Users can sign up for a free account with five searches per day, or opt for the $20 monthly subscription with up to 600 Pro searches daily.

French Moshi AI open-source large model arrives

French open-source AI research lab Kyutai recently launched Moshi[2], a multimodal large model capable of listening to voice questions and delivering real-time reasoning responses. Compared to GPT-4o, Moshi is already available to users, giving it a clear timing advantage. Moshi has no regional restrictions and specifically supports mobile devices, though its Mandarin support remains imperfect — English interaction is recommended.

Kyutai plans to open-source Moshi's code, model weights, and related papers to advance community research and development. The user experience is designed to be remarkably simple: visit the website, enter your email, join, and start asking questions via voice input. Moshi's response speed is exceptionally fast, maintaining near-zero latency even across servers — a point users have praised highly. Once open-sourced, Moshi is expected to find broader applications and further development, particularly in education and customer service.

Samsung focuses on AI chip development

Samsung Electronics' System LSI division, responsible for chip design, is undergoing a business and organizational restructuring to shift its development focus toward AI chips. In this reorganization, team members previously working on the automotive processor "Exynos Auto" (codename KITT3) have been reassigned to a new team dedicated to AI system-on-chips (SoCs).

This AI SoC team is now the centerpiece of Samsung's design efforts, concentrating roughly 100 to 150 specialized designers who will collaborate on developing advanced AI chips to meet market demand for high-performance AI processing. The restructuring signals Samsung's serious commitment to AI's future.

Tesla Optimus Gen 2 debuts in Shanghai

At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2024), Tesla showcased its second-generation humanoid robot, Optimus. The robot's walking speed has improved by 30%, and its fingers feature high dexterity and tactile sensing, enabling it to gently grasp eggs and lift heavy objects with ease.

Tesla independently designed and manufactured all of Optimus Gen 2's actuators and sensors. Its exterior is more refined, weight has been reduced by 10 kg, and balance and body control have improved. The robot is planned for initial deployment in Tesla's manufacturing factories; once its utility is validated, the company will consider external sales.

At Tesla's 2024 Annual Shareholders Meeting, CEO Elon Musk projected that Optimus would generate massive profits for the company and predicted humanoid robots could significantly boost Tesla's market cap in the future. As of July 4, Tesla's stock hit its daily limit up, with market cap surging substantially.

Sam Li attends WAIC opening ceremony

Premier Sam Li delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), emphasizing China's embrace of the intelligent transformation and its commitment to AI innovation, development, and safety governance. He proposed three recommendations: deepen innovation cooperation, promote inclusive development, and strengthen collaborative governance — all aimed at advancing global AI services and human welfare.

The opening ceremony gathered approximately 1,000 international guests and representatives from various sectors, including Luís Roberto Barroso, President of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil; Dilma Rousseff, President of the New Development Bank; and Gerd Müller, Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

SenseTime Vimi named WAIC "Crown Jewel"

At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), SenseTime's Vimi — the first controllable human video generation large model — was awarded the "Crown Jewel" distinction -_-||

Alibaba Cloud's AI coding assistant Tongyi Lingma, Alipay's intelligent assistant, Zhipu AI's foundation model, and Tesla's Cybertruck were also selected.

Built on SenseTime's large model technology, Vimi can generate character videos consistent with target actions from a single photo, supporting multiple driving methods including existing videos, animation, audio, and text. Vimi's innovation lies in its precise facial expression control and body movement generation, enabling natural character motion variations within the upper body area while automatically generating matching hair, clothing, and backgrounds. Its lighting effects are physically plausible, ensuring fluid and natural character movements and visuals. Vimi is remarkably stable, capable of generating up to one minute of high-quality video to meet extended video generation needs for entertainment and interactive applications. Vimi is now open for reservation on SenseTime's official website.

China's first full-size humanoid robot "Qinglong" unveiled

"Qinglong," China's first full-size general-purpose humanoid robot open-platform prototype, was officially unveiled at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and AI Global Governance High-Level Meeting, with its technology announced as open-source. Located at the National and Local Jointly-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center in Zhangjiang Guochuang Center, the robot stands 182 cm tall, weighs 82 kg, features 43 active degrees of freedom, and is powered by 400 TOPS of computing.

The Qinglong robot's arms have 7 degrees of freedom, with 6 degrees of freedom at the fingertips and tactile sensors, enabling precise grasping. It also features a highly mobile lower-body walking configuration and lightweight, high-precision upper-body manipulation configuration, supporting rapid walking, agile obstacle avoidance, and other locomotion functions.

SiliconFlow raises nine-figure RMB in angel+ round

SiliconFlow[3], an AI infrastructure startup, completed an angel+ round of nearly RMB 100 million. Founded by former OneFlow CEO Jinhui Yuan, the company aims to provide efficient large model training and inference services through its cloud platform SiliconCloud, lowering the difficulty and cost of AI application development.

SiliconCloud integrates multiple mainstream large models to improve response speed and reduce compute consumption. For example, calling the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion through SiliconCloud can generate images in one second, while calling the large model DeepSeek V2 achieves response speeds of 50 tokens/s. The company recently announced that top open-source large models including Qwen2 (7B), GLM4 (9B), and Yi1.5 (9B) are free to use on the SiliconCloud platform, offering developers "token freedom." Additionally, SiliconFlow plans to expand overseas.

Baidu leads Jingying Technology's Series A

Baidu Group recently invested several million dollars in CreativeFitting (Jingying Technology[4]), a company specializing in self-developed AIGC video generation models. Jingying Technology plans to use the funds to upgrade its AI video models and tools, and strengthen its content ecosystem construction. The company's AI short drama app — Reel.AI[5] — has performed strongly in overseas markets, quickly climbing the entertainment bestseller charts.

Jiang Zhu, founder and CEO of Jingying Technology, stated that the company's goal is to use AIGC technology to transform the content entertainment industry, and believes AI-native applications will become super apps or killer apps in the market. Baidu's investment represents not only recognition of Jingying Technology's team and products, but also affirmation of the development prospects for AI-native applications.

Baidu has previously made multiple AI sector moves, including launching the AI short drama tool "Short Drama AI Watch" and an AI short story and short drama writing course with Ximalaya. This investment in Jingying Technology further confirms Baidu's determination to reshape its short drama business using AI technology.

AI coding startup Magic valued at $1.5 billion

Magic[6], an emerging AI coding innovator, is currently in funding negotiations targeting over $200 million, which would value the company at $1.5 billion. Notably, this valuation is triple the company's post-money valuation from just a few months ago. Investors including Jane Street are reportedly participating in this round.

Magic currently generates no revenue and has no products on the market. Nevertheless, according to PitchBook data, the company — with approximately 20 employees — has raised $140 million since its founding in 2022, and was valued at $500 million following a round in February last year. Magic plans to use the newly raised funds to improve its AI models, particularly technology supporting longer context windows.

AI-powered "Sea Turtle Soup" game

AI Sea Turtle Soup[7] is a reverse-reasoning game based on the traditional "Sea Turtle Soup" format. The twist: AI serves as the game master. In the game, the AI tells an incomplete story — the "soup surface"; players gradually guess and fill in the missing parts through questioning, until the complete story — the "soup base" — is revealed.

The game master may only answer with "yes," "no," or "not important/irrelevant." When AI becomes the game master, testing whether it can understand your wild ideas, your humor, your judgment — unexpectedly becomes a rather delightful self-made Easter egg moment.

Next time you're just chilling, give it a try.

The universe began with a great breath. Who can know the reason? But whatever the reason, I am glad it did so, because my existence is owed to that fact. All my longing and contemplation are but eddies produced by our universe's gradual exhalation. Until this great exhalation ends, my thoughts will continue to exist.

— Ted Chiang, American science fiction writer

Editor: Yuki Design: Ivan

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References

[1] Pro Search: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-pro-search

[2] Moshi: https://moshi.chat/?queue_id=talktomoshi

[3] SiliconFlow: https://siliconflow.cn/

[4] Jingying Technology: https://creativefitting.cn/

[5] Reel.AI: http://reel.ai/

[6] Magic: https://magic.dev/

[7] AI Sea Turtle Soup: https://www.tanghenre.com/