Cathy Fu

Zack Williams brought one of the world's oldest writing systems to the ERNIE AI Developer Challenge: ancient cuneiform tablets. Using PaddleOCR, he built NabuOCR to help read cuneiform from tablet images. See the story behind @BoatbomberRBLX's winning project 👇

A small but useful update from Baidu Create 2026: Baidu says its Kunlunxin P800 chips have now been validated at scale and used in multiple 10,000 card clusters since 2025. It also says a Kunlunxin based cluster trained a key ERNIE 5.1 version, reaching 97% effective training efficiency and over 85% linear scaling at 10,000 card scale. Baidu’s 256 card Tianchi supernode is scheduled for June. The company says it has been adapted for ERNIE, DeepSeek, GLM, MiniMax and other major models.

@heyshrutimishra Thank you for coming!

Baidu invited me to their office in Beijing this week. I expected presentations and product demos. What I didn’t expect was to walk in and immediately start playing with the future. There was this robot hand just sitting there. Matte black, five fingers, human-sized & next to it, a webcam pointing at a little open space on the table. Someone said, just put your hand in front of it and move. So I did. And the robot copied me. Every single finger. The delay was so small it felt like looking in a mirror. Here’s what’s fascinating about what I saw. The whole playbook in China right now is hardware companies building the bodies, AI companies building the intelligence, and everyone snapping together like Lego. Everyone’s doing one thing really well. And this ecosystem is moving at a speed that’s genuinely hard to comprehend. China now has over 150 robotics companies building humanoid robots. The US has around 20. Even Elon Musk acknowledged it at Davos. “China is very good at AI, very good at manufacturing, and will definitely be the toughest competition for Tesla. To the best of our knowledge, we don’t see any significant competitors outside of China.” The hand I played with? It’s just one small piece of something much, much bigger. 🤖

At Baidu Create today in Beijing. 🇨🇳 Robin Li's keynote made the pattern clear: Baidu chip, Baidu cloud, Baidu model, Baidu app. A vertical AI company, every layer built inside China. What stood out: • Kunlun chips: 30,000+ cards in production, Kunlunxin IPO incoming • ERNIE 5.1: pre-training cost cut 94% • Agents at scale: DuMate, Miaoda, Huiboxing • "Disposable software": built for one task, used once, thrown away • 10B daily active agents forecast, 3x Meta's DAU This wasn't any single launch. It was the whole stack, in one company, in one country.

This RoboTaxi in China will shock you 🇨🇳😳

Baidu’s Robin Li proposed measuring AI by “Daily Active Agents.” The number of agents completing real work each day. Sounds like marketing. It is not. Look at what is happening simultaneously. Ant Group processed 120 million agent payment transactions in a single week. Xiaomi committed $8.7 billion to AI over three years. The Chinese government issued agent definitions and device intelligence grading on the same day. China is building the plumbing for an agent economy. My analysis maps the full stack and what it means for competitive positioning: hellochinatech.com/p/china-ai-age…

"Daily Active Agents" China Builds the Plumbing, Not the Agent open.substack.com/pub/hellochina…

ERNIE vs Nanobanana 2 😱

Dubai’s driverless taxi to hit roads soon: Khaleej Times enjoys exclusive first ride khaleejtimes.com/uae/transport/…

Congrats @rta_dubai on the launch of commercial autonomous taxi services! We're proud Apollo Go is part of this rollout, and glad to support the launch alongside @DTCUAE and @Uber. Riders can book their fully driverless trips right now through the Apollo Go app, with rides coming to the Uber app in the coming weeks. mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2026/m…

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) in Dubai announces the launch of commercial operations of the autonomous taxi service in Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah, in partnership with Apollo Go and WeRide, a global leader in autonomous driving technologies. The vehicles are available via the Uber app and the Apollo Go app. @rta_dubai

When it doubt, zoom out… $BABA $KWEB coughlincap.com/p/the-china-te…

Welcome to Baidu, @lyft! @davidrisher, we were glad to show you and the team around, share more of our latest autonomous driving progress, and get you in the passenger seat. Looks like you had a good ride too 🚖 Excited for the next chapter with Lyft as Apollo Go gets set for the UK, with broader expansion across Europe to follow.

Here's why Waymo, Baidu, Hyundai, and Cadillac are among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in automotive for 2026. f-st.co/ukuWwUc

Humbled and proud! Many thanks to @FastCompany for the recognition.

Joint Statement on the Strait of Hormuz mofa.gov.ae/en/MediaHub/Ne…

I wrote about tokenmaxxing, the new status game taking over Silicon Valley. nytimes.com/2026/03/20/tec…

Looks like it’s confirmed Cursor’s new model is based on Kimi! It reinforces a couple of things: - open-source keeps being the greatest competition enabler - another validation for chinese open-source that is now the biggest force shaping the global AI stack - the frontier is no longer just about who trains from scratch, but who adapts, fine-tunes, and productizes fastest (seeing the same thing with OpenClaw for example).

Baidu joins Alibaba in raising prices for its AI computing power-related services by ~5% to 30% and its parallel file storage system by 30% from April 18 (South China Morning Post) scmp.com/tech/article/3… #a260319p4" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/260319/p4#a260… 📥 Send tips! techmeme.com/contact

Professor Jiang Xueqin on how this war is likely to go and what happens to the world. (0:00) How Will the Iran War Be Resolved? (7:33) The 3 Major Trends We Will See Due to This War (11:28) Will Japan Become a Nuclear-Armed Power? (16:06) The Future of South Korea (20:12) The Energy Crisis (25:23) The Future of the GCC and Iran (29:57) The Greater Israel Project (35:11) How US Ground Troops Will Change the War (36:46) Prof. Xueqin’s Advice to Donald Trump (38:49) Is It Possible for the US to Get Israel Under Control? (45:03) What Role Does Trump Play in All This? (48:21) The Future of North America (54:59) Are We Seeing the End of Europe? (1:00:58) How Many Americans Truly Understand What’s Happening in the World? (1:03:50) The Effort to Destroy Western Civilization