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Bottom Line Up Front DeepSeek's updated AI model led OpenRouter usage in the week through yesterday, processing 33.6 trillion tokens on the developer routing platform as usage of its V4.1-Flash-1017 rose 801% from the prior week. China's Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission released a plan on Friday that calls for launching 6G commercial service when appropriate and completing a national blockchain network by 2030. A lab under state-owned CICT says it set a record in a real-time trial that sent 3.2 petabits per second both ways through one multi-core optical fiber. Stonehill's RockMatrix unit open-sourced the EdgeRock-4B model, whose fixed working memory let one Nvidia chip serve 512 long sessions in the team's tests, a load that would need about 13 chips running Alibaba's Qwen3.5-4B. |
DeepSeek's updated AI model tops a global ranking of developer trafficDeepSeek's V4.1-Flash-1017, the model update CTD reported October 19th, led OpenRouter usage with 33.6 trillion tokens, the word fragments AI models read and write, in the week through yesterday. OpenRouter routes developers' requests to many AI models through one interface, so its weekly table is a public measure of which models developers actually send work to. Usage jumped 801% from the prior week as developers moved off the older V4.1 Flash, according to Jiemian. Chinese models carried about four times U.S. volume that week. The figures cover only traffic routed through OpenRouter, not DeepSeek's own apps or private deployments. |
| China's internet policy body sets 2030 goals for 6G service and a state-run blockchain data network The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Communist Party body that directs China's internet policy, has issued a plan, made public Friday, for spreading digital technology across the economy and government through 2030. The plan is meant to guide ministries' and local governments' digital work, and the commission's working office, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), says it will monitor and evaluate how it is carried out and regularly publish national reports. By 2030 the plan calls for launching 6G commercial service "at the appropriate time" and basically completing a national blockchain network. That network is state infrastructure for recording and verifying data, not a cryptocurrency: the plan calls for a central backbone linked to regional hubs, with uses such as digital identity, taxation and shipping and trade records. Indicators listed in a CAC question-and-answer release include 5G base stations per 10,000 people and the energy efficiency of newly built large computing centers. |
| Chinese state lab reports record 3.2 petabits per second over a single optical fiber A lab under state-owned telecom equipment maker China Information and Communication Technologies Group (CICT) says it sent 3.2 petabits per second both ways through one optical fiber in a real-time trial. Standard single-core fiber tops out at roughly 100 terabits per second, so packing more light paths into each strand raises the capacity of long-haul links without laying more cable. The lab calls the result a world record for real-time two-way capacity and puts it at 32 times that ceiling. The lab used multi-core fiber, which packs several light-guiding cores into one strand. The trial, run with Peng Cheng Laboratory and fiber maker Fujikura Fiber-Home Optical Technology, has been submitted as an invited paper to the Journal of Lightwave Technology. |
| Chinese firm Stonehill and universities open-source small AI model whose memory stays fixed RockMatrix, a unit of Chinese company Stonehill Technology, open-sourced EdgeRock-4B, a small AI model whose working memory stays the same size from short inputs up to 256,000 tokens. That memory, the key-value cache, normally grows with every token a model reads, which caps how many long sessions one graphics processor can serve. In the team's tests, one Nvidia chip served 512 long sessions that would need about 13 chips running Alibaba's Qwen3.5-4B, the model EdgeRock was converted from. The developers report an 82.9% first-try pass rate on the AIME competition math test, against 18.8% for the best of the other fixed-memory models they tested. The team includes the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Carnegie Mellon University. |
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| Chinese authorities begin drafting rule requiring cars to carry connected-car safety radios, source says Chinese authorities have begun drafting a mandatory standard requiring vehicles to carry C-V2X, radios that let cars swap safety data with each other and traffic signals, an industry source told National Business Daily. Only about 4% of new passenger cars sold in China in the first half carried C-V2X as standard, so a mandate would turn an optional feature into required equipment for the vehicles it covers. Commercial vehicles already face a draft national standard, released for comment in July, that would require all newly added commercial buses, trucks and tractor-trailers to carry an LTE-V2X terminal, the 4G-based version of the technology, 25 months after it takes effect. A working group of dozens of organizations has already formed, the source said. |
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| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
| Telecom carrier China Mobile launches shared AI platform for carmakers, calling it sector's first State-owned carrier China Mobile released what it calls the auto industry's first AI foundation platform, which supplies computing powerComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs., data tools and AI models to carmakers on demand. A carmaker representative at the launch said building AI systems in-house had meant heavy investment and long development cycles, and that shared compute, data and models let carmakers concentrate on products. The platform pools 112.7 EFLOPS of computing power, or 112.7 quintillion calculations per second. Six AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise., software that carries out multistep tasks, handle jobs from styling design and visual quality inspection to training driving models. In company-cited results, one Shanghai carmaker cut the time to prepare a model's manufacturing instruction sheet from five days to four hours. |
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| IV | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Robot maker AgiBot launches heavy-duty factory robot it calls the first for multi-task work AgiBot formally launched the Genie G2 Max, which it calls the industry's first heavy-duty embodied robot, an AI system in a physical body, for long, multistep jobs. Unloading pallets and feeding parts to assembly lines is round-the-clock manual work, and AgiBot says the robot already does it on production lines at daily-chemical, e-commerce and food companies. At Huguang's robot factory, it carries joint assemblies to final assembly in step with a line that finishes one Qiyuan T1 robot every 2.5 minutes. The two-arm robot, first shown with JD Logistics in July, is rated to carry 40kg, which the company says covers more than 95% of industrial tote and parts-handling needs. |
| Volkswagen wins permit to test conditional self-driving cars on public roads in Hefei Volkswagen Group China obtained a Level 3 (L3) road-test permit in Hefei and has begun road testing and data collection, ITHome reports. The permit lets Volkswagen test a conditional self-driving system, in which the car drives itself in set conditions while a human stays ready to take over, on designated road sections. Testing is separate from the product approvals that let cars run in public pilots, which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) first granted to two Chinese models in December 2025. Volkswagen has targeted L3 deliveries as early as the second half of 2027. |
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| Chinese navy aviation unit pairs patrol aircraft with drone to track submarine in drill A People's Liberation Army Navy aviation unit ran an anti-submarine drill in which a drone confirmed a submarine contact found by a patrol aircraft's sonobuoys, floating listening sensors, the military newspaper PLA Daily reports. A participating pilot said crewed patrol aircraft are limited by crew endurance over wide areas of sea, and that sending a drone to verify at key moments gets more from the pairing. The drone confirmed the contact with magnetic-anomaly detection, which senses the disturbance a submarine's metal hull causes in Earth's magnetic field. It then kept tracking the target and updating its movement in real time while the patrol aircraft set weapon parameters for a simulated attack. |
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