Chinese

A Chinese driver bought a spectacular electric SUV to travel to Europe. Everything was perfect until he reached the border

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Fabio Belmone is Volata di Peluca. At the beginning of last year he went viral when he posted that he was going to Tokyo. So far, everything is normal. Another millennial going to Japan. What made Fabio Belmone’s trip special is that he planned to reach the Japanese capital by car. 25,000 kilometers and 80 days later, the account Volata di Peluca confirmed that it had arrived in Japan. But perhaps the most curious thing about the trip is that, in addition to crossing all of Europe and Asia, the car chosen was a Fiat Marea. The only thing he could afford with 900 euros, he explained to The Vanguard. “I have crossed two continents, but my car can’t enter Barcelona,” he said in the interview. And perhaps, precisely because of that, because the car was tremendously analog, the adventure was able to reach its destination. Because in any country they could fix it. And, above all, because it wasn’t a car that was going to stop for crossing a border. The owner of this Zeekr 9X cannot say the same, explain our French colleagues from L’Automobile. At least he’s not standing still That transcontinental journey is having its particular replica from China. Mr. Liu is a Chinese driver who wants to repeat Fabio Belmone’s adventure in reverse. From Europe to China. Of course, aboard a Zeekr 9X, one of the most luxurious SUVs in the country. He Zeekr 9X It is a car that costs, in direct exchange, just over 61,000 euros. That means that in the Asian country it is one of the most luxurious options you can buy since manufacturers have filled their cars with technology at ridiculous prices. In this case we are talking about an extended range electric vehicle (a particular version of a plug-in hybrid) that in China it reaches 1,300 HP of power. The car, in fact, has just arrived in Europe although reduced in power, with an 897 HP version. But beyond the power figures, what is truly interesting about this car is inside, with six seats (or rather six seats), this huge SUV can become a rolling living room. Heated, ventilated and massaged seats that can be faced until they become a kind of hammock, 32 speakers spread throughout the cabin, two consecutive 16-inch screens to manage the infotainment system and even a third 17-inch screen that slides from the roof so that the rear passengers can enjoy it while they are driving. Inside the Zeekr 9X The experience of traveling in the car goes far beyond traveling through countries because, unlike with the Marea, the beauty is on the inside. Mr. Liu must have been thinking something similar when he began the trip. But a few thousand kilometers later, upon crossing the first border, the dream turned into a nightmare. Suddenly, your Zeekr 9X hood a multitude of functions. All software functions fell apart when it crossed the border into Kazakhstan. The loading ports and access to the warehouse also did the same. The reason was simple: the car, using GPS, had detected that the border had been crossed. They explain in CarNewsChina that the driver could not find a way to continue his journey for 30 hours. The reason, they explain from the specialized media, is in the vehicle’s anti-theft system. Automatically, the car detects through GPS positioning whether it is in China or beyond the borders. In the latter case, the vehicle repeatedly sends warnings but if it continues moving it blocks the vast majority of the functions. The system is activated by default in the car. The company has recognized in the Chinese media National Business Daily that, indeed, most of the car’s systems were blocked but that the vehicle can continue moving. To unlock the gas tank and charging socket you have to press and hold some specific buttons. This information, according to the company, should be known to the owner. What they explain however in CarNewsChina is that Mr. Liu knew about the blocking system before leaving China so went to a dealer. To avoid theft or illegal exports, what they do at the point of sale is certify the validity of some documents such as the driving license or the purchase contract. At that moment and after knowing the client’s intentions, they should have deactivated the anti-theft system with GPS positioning but they did not do so and it was not clear to the driver what he should do if this situation arose. But this time, what the software takes away from you, the software gives you. With an activation code, the brand was able to update the car via OTA and unlock the anti-theft systems, leaving the car ready to be used again. Photo | In Xataka | China wants to throw the door on the European electric car. Zeekr is your argument in the premium segment

that Apple does not go with the Chinese

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The DRAM memory situation has completely gotten out of hand for the chip industry. The situation and needs of hyperscalers and data centers has caused the majority of the production of memory chips produced by Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix to go to meet the demand for AI, leaving the consumer sector orphaned. Nothing new, since we’ve been talking about this (and complaining) for months, but although we have been talking about new factories to satisfy the brutal demand, we also said that these factories were destined to continue creating more memory for those data centers that were causing the bottleneck. The situation has gotten so out of control that consumer brands have begun to look at chinese manufacturers as CXMT or YMTC, and Samsung has made the decision to expand its production of standard DRAM. The reason? Apple cannot go to Chinese suppliers. Save Soldier Apple Even though the situation is as it is, the wheel must keep turning. Although some brands they are going to stay by the way due to the very high prices of RAM that forces them to increase the price for the consumer, with the risk that the consumer will not want to assume it, and Apple is one of those that is going to launch new devices. Although he iPhone 18 It is expected for the beginning of 2027, by September we hope to see, at least, the iPhone 18 Pro and the foldable iPhonetwo devices whose price is up in the air, but which obviously need both RAM and storage. They are the two most complicated components at the moment and we have already seen that Apple his pulse does not tremble when raising prices. Several times, in fact. But of course, you must have devices on the market and, to do so, you need components. If the production of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron is not enough, it will look to others, and those are the Chinese producers. Specifically, a CXMT that in recent years has taken giant steps in the manufacturing processes of its RAM, and for weeks we have been hearing the rumor that Apple would not mind if CXMT was one of its suppliers. CXMT would be delighted, of course, despite the fact that in the United States there are those who point out that Apple would get into trouble and that, furthermore, It’s theater to get better prices with your usual suppliers (Samsung). Stratagem or not, it seems that it has worked since, as the media points out SedailySamsung would be expanding its facilities in Hwaseong to increase the supply of commodity DRAM. This plant would focus on consumer DDR and LPDDR memories for mobile devices, and what the South Korean media points out is that this expansion will allow Samsung increase your standard DRAM production capacity by approximately 15% before the end of 2026. It is a move that clearly tells Apple “we will be able to give you the DRAM you need, stop looking at China”, and it makes all the sense in the world. Right now, Samsung accounts are skyrocketing thanks to the momentum of the AI ​​industry, but if all this ever explodes and things return to normal, the fact that one of your main clients has found a better partner is not desirable, and even more so if that partner is a third party with whom you are not as comfortable as with Micron or SK Hynix, with which there is competition, but also favorable treatment, so it seems. And beyond dazzling a giant like Applethe restructuring of the Samsung plant responds to a more practical question. The company has several complexes, but to create this basic DRAM, there were processes spread across several factories, which made the process longer than necessary. With the reorganization, apart from expanding production capacity, they concentrate production systems in one place to improve efficiency. It is not that they are going to start manufacturing more, but that they are going to manufacture more intelligently. We will see if that extra 15% is enough to somewhat alleviate the burden of a saturated market and, above all, we will see if the decision comes in time. Image | Apple In Xataka | In 2007, Steve Jobs went on stage with an iPhone that barely worked: he was saved by a script that did not allow even a detour

We thought that the Chinese RAM manufacturers came to relieve the market. Turns out they’re playing the same game as everyone else.

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When the market is shared by a few, you can’t expect popular prices. The RAM memory segment is dominated by three manufacturers (Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung) and, with most of its production focused on the AI ​​market, the consumer segment is in deep water. In a scenario in which there are simply no chips, the Chinese RAM memory companies seemed like a ball of oxygen. The reality seems somewhat different. Hunting in China. Giants like Asus, Lenovo or Apple have been around for some time knocking on the doors of Chinese companies of RAM memory. Although traditionally it was the two South Korean companies (Samsung and SK Hynix) and the American Micron that supplied RAM to both manufacturers and assemblers, with the current component crisis those companies have been left orphaned and have had to look to the Chinese market. CXMT and YMTC (which is the counterpart of flash memory) are the two proper names of Chinese RAM and in recent years they have been making advances to catch up with consumer chips. There are those who believe that they are not suitable for high-end products, but when the need arises, expectations relax. That is why both have consolidated as a juicy element to alleviate the marketbut it turns out that they did not come to solve the global crisis, but to play the same game as the big ones. Bargaining power. As demand increased, both YMTC and CXMT have started selling their products at premium prices. It is that market that regulates itself, one in which everyone is in the same boat and, if they can sell their products at a higher price, they see no need to do so at a lower one (especially when we are seeing stratospheric financial results in this situation). But the most curious thing is that they are selling the most expensive things… to their own business partners. According to ReutersCXMT has been raising Huawei’s RAM prices for months. Huawei is competing against Nvidia both in the local and global markets, showing its equipment specially designed for a period in which AI inference seems like the next step of this technology, and as pointed out in Reuters, when Huawei asked for a relief in prices, CXMT did not give in. In fact, they point out that a power struggle is taking place with negative consequences for Huawei, since CXMT has been ordering its engineers to leave clean rooms in which they collaborated with partners of the Chinese giant, such as SiCarrier. In fact, it has also been recently commented that Huawei has begun to move to create your own DRAM factory. The one who warns… It is an interesting twist when it was assumed that Chinese manufacturers would arrive to alleviate the situation, competing with aggressive discounts below the prices of the three that control the market thanks to a growth produced, in part, through government subsidies. By competing with prices below those of the market they would be able to get a juicy piece of the pie among consumer brands, but as we have repeatedly said when we talked about itIn the end what rules is… money. Whenever it has been reported that someone opened a new plant or that a new research movement was being carried out in NAND chips, we already commented that the product would not be intended to alleviate the situation worldwide in the consumer segment, but for what is most profitable for the manufacturers of these chips: the AI ​​segment. Seeing the record profits of companies like SK Hynix or Samsung, it was naive to think that a company would enter this sector to alleviate the burden of consumer products. USA with the magnifying glass. Thus, CXMT has become the fourth largest manufacturer of memory worldwide, including the memory that goes into mobile phones and servers for AI, which is giving it brutal bargaining power, enough to put the brakes on a Huawei that has full government trust to become one of the technological engines of the country. However, there is a conflict of interest because Huawei is interested in its hardwarebut where China is also competing globally is in AI, and CXMT has just signed two very juicy agreements in this area. one with ByteDance for more than 7 billion dollars and another with Tencent for more than 3 billion dollars. Both to supply DRAM chips for data center servers for artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the United States is seeing a new problem being born, as both CXMT and YMTC have started to get your attention. YMTC is listed in the ‘EntityList‘ American and Micron is seeing its business in jeopardy, urging Congress to impose stricter controls on CXMT. Interestingly, Apple is advocating the opposite as it desperately needs RAM and CXMT seems like the ideal candidate. Prepared for the worst. In any case, and as we have said on several occasions, any movement in this direction by the RAM majors will be aimed at producing more chips for hyperscalers. It’s a gigantic market right now that doesn’t seem to have an end or relief in sight. Samsung has achieved a quarter even better than Nvidia and since SK Hynix has issued a clear warning“Next year will be the worst in the history of the semiconductor industry.” Translation: buy now what you think you will need because there is nothing to indicate that the situation will relax in the short term. And when it happens, there are already manufacturers like Lenovo who point out that prices they will never return to the pre-crisis situation… In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

Chinese AI geniuses could be billionaires in the US. The bad thing for the US is that they prefer to return to China

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It is normal for someone to take six years to complete a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). A young man named Yang Zhilin got it in four, and immediately what had to happen happened: the big technology companies raffled him off. They wanted to sign him to Apple, Google or Meta, and both MIT and Stanford opened their doors to him. He could have stayed in the US and probably become a billionaire, but no. He returned to China, founded Moonshot AI, created the Kimi family of AI models and became one of the great new AI gurus of the Asian giant. His story is a good example of a big problem they are having in the US. A genius in the making. Yang graduated from the prestigious Chinese university of Tsinghua, and during his years at CMU he ended up collaborating on another of the “iconic papers” that were the seed of ChatGPT, the so-called “Transformer-XL“. That was a turning point in his career, because after that job he considered what he wanted to do with his life. Start up yes, but not in the US. His supervisor at CMU, Russ Salakhutdinov, I remembered in the Financial Times what he discussed with Yang, who made it clear to him that “if he didn’t at least try to create his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life.” The curious thing is that he did not do it in the US, where he would surely have obtained plenty of financing and economic support, but rather he went to China, where he founded Moonshot AI. There he created the mentioned models of AI, of which the latest version, Kimi K3, has turned the market upside down: an open model that competes with the best of Anthropic and OpenAI and that has made Yang a current protagonist in the sector. Working for others, what’s up?. There is a narrative in Silicon Valley that talks about how immigration regulation in the US is designed to get young talents to join large companies, and not so much to found their own startups. That was much more complicated, so the Chinese talents who had just trained in the US realized that they had a better option: return to their country of origin and create their startups there. Source: Hoover Institution. Chinese talent returns to China. A study by the Hoover Institution at Stanford analyzed the profile of the 356 researchers who worked on DeepSeek and revealed something surprising: 53.5% never studied or worked outside of China. Of those who did have an experience of this type and had studied or worked in the US, 70% ended up returning to their country. The Asian giant is no longer an exporter of brainiacs: it now has a self-sufficient quarry that boosts the country’s AI industry. Less money, better execution. The difference between the US and China is not only financial, but operational. A Chinese entrepreneur in the sector explained in that FT report that although setting up his startup in the US would guarantee a valuation up to 10 times higher, in China he is much more likely to launch real solutions and production in less than five years. It doesn’t matter the sanctions, the risk of censorship or a much more conservative investment market: the density of engineers and the familiarity of the environment compensate. Source: Stanford University. The US does not make it easy. The phenomenon of the “return home” of Chinese engineers not only affects recent graduates, but also veteran professionals who were already installed in the country’s academic and engineering system. a survey conducted by Stanford University in 2024 among 1,304 scientists of Chinese origin who lived and worked in the United States revealed curious data. 73% did not feel safe working as a researcher in the country, and 65% pointed directly to a fear of harassment and racist violence. Political uncertainty and institutional distrust have only accelerated the exits. Silicon Valley has a problem. The trajectory of Moonshot AI, which in just three years and with a team of 300 people has launched a fantastic model, shows that there is life beyond Silicon Valley. With Chinese talent returning en masse to China, the question is whether the US Government will modify its requirements and proposals for obtaining a visa. If they don’t, the “brain drain” can be absolute. Image | Tommao Wang In Xataka | Four decades ago, China decided to invest in training millions of engineers. Today that plan gives it an advantage in the race for AI

Two years ago, Europe did everything possible to stop the Chinese car. Spain has become your best gateway

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“Honorary registration.” That was the note that Pedro Sánchez gave to the Chinese car that he had briefly tested during his visit to the Asian country in September 2024. The statement did not go unnoticed because while Europe tried to stop China’s entry into the European automobile market by all means, Spain distanced itself from this strategy. That declaration, however, had begun to take shape much earlier. In July, Europe had already activated what are known as “compensatory duties” to Chinese cars. It was a temporary measure before it was firmly decided whether to apply it or not duty to the companies, their amount and how they would be carried out. In October, the decision was made definitively and at the end of the month tariffs began to be charged to all Chinese electric cars. The fees that each brand must pay are specific for each of them depending, in the eyes of the European Union, on how many subsidies they have received from the Chinese Government and how much they have collaborated with European investigations. At first, Spain defended the lifting of tariffs against these vehicles, but as the months passed, little by little, its position changed. In April 2024, Chery had announced that it was purchasing the Nissan plant in Barcelona to produce Omoda and Jaecoo cars there. Along the way, Ebro was reborn, At the moment they are Chinese cars although the name is Spanish. The movement could have been key to eroding the Spanish position. The second push came from the Chinese Government: tariffs on Spanish pork. The threat of putting obstacles in a market that Spain dominates paid off. During the September visit, Pedro Sánchez already pointed out that “we need to reconsider our position”in relation to tariffs. And he stressed that “we do not need another war, in this case a trade war,” in words collected by The Country. Spain went from voting in favor of tariffs in 2023 to abstaining in the 2024 vote. A movement that said more about positioning itself against them than about granting with its silence. Two years later, Spain is the preferred gateway for Chinese manufacturers to reach Europe. Spain, land of Chinese cars At the beginning of October 2024, Chery announced a delay in car production in Barcelona. If Spain was missing a message to opt in favor of lifting tariffs on Chinese cars, there it was. Agencies like Reuters They began to point out that the Chinese State was pressuring its manufacturers to withdraw their investments from where the trade barrier against the country had been supported. Europe intended attract investments with tariffs and for months we thought that it could be such a big barrier that China would not be interested in bringing its manufacturing here. But little by little, in a constant trickle, Chinese investments have arrived. And Spain has done business with it. Since 2024, Chery has invested in Spain, taking over a factory that had been almost completely stopped for years. Now the latest news is that Geely and Ford have reached an agreement to produce cars at the Almussafes plant in Valencia. The American company maintained its facilities at half throttle but starting in 2028, up to four different cars should leave through its doors. Along the way, Geely and Renault, which own Horse, decided that the development and production of their combustion engines would leave the Valladolid plant. Stellantis and CATL reached an agreement to build a battery plant in Zaragoza and feed the automobile conglomerate’s small electric cars. As a consequence, Stellantis will also produce Leapmotor cars on Spanish soil. Besides, SAIC has announced an investment in Galicia to produce MG cars there. As is the case with Barcelona, ​​this last plant will nourish the market for cars assembled at destination through kits but will serve to give some life to the industrial environment from the north of Spain. At the same time, Spanish ports have been consolidated as a perfect space to unload Chinese cars in their previous distribution step through Europe. Spain has several advantages over its competitors. We are a powerhouse in car manufacturing. This had the counterpart that with an electric car that requires fewer employees, thousands of layoffs have swept over the Spanish labor market. But we also have a qualified workforce and facilities already built to do this work. This is a value for those companies that are looking for already installed facilities to produce as soon as possible, even if it is through kits. But in addition, we are also a country with more competitive production costs than other countries north of the Pyrenees because our salaries are cheaper but the price of energy is also less expensive. This positions us as a very interesting space. to produce small cars that offer narrower profit margins. And if those were few incentives, Spain is buying many Chinese cars. With a proposal to offer more equipment and technology than rivals for the same price or even less, Chinese cars have gained many followers. So far this year, the MG ZS and the BYD Atto 2 They are already two of the 10 best-selling cars in our country. Last year was a year of consolidation for Omoda and Jaecoo and an opportunity for MG and BYD to continue gaining ground. Without tariffs on cars with combustion engines, five of the 10 best-selling plug-in hybrid cars in Spain are already Chinese. The reception has been so great that Geely is also looking for its own niche. GWM announced a few weeks ago his arrival in Spain. Changan (which is the origin of Mazda electric cars) already operates in our country. Zeekr will try to make a raid in the field of premium electric and plug-in hybrid cars. BYD’s Denza has also recently arrived. In three years, Spain has gone from supporting tariffs on Chinese electric cars to completely embracing its cars. He has done it in a complicated game of balance but the fact is … Read more

Kimi K3 forces Trump to resume his plan to stop Chinese AI

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The Trump Administration likes to veto things. Now they seem to want to do it with the AI ​​models of Chinese companies, which are becoming increasingly competitive. The launch of Kimi K3 seems to have been the trigger for this new plan to be activated, but there is a problem: vetoing those models is a terrible idea. This comes from afar. The US Department of Commerce I had already studied last year included several Chinese AI startups, including DeepSeek, in its famous Entity List. With this they wanted to limit the access of these companies to sensitive hardware and technology developed in the US. Companies at risk for using Chinese models. Recently it has even been proposed drafting an executive order to hold US companies responsible for security breaches that appear due to using Chinese models in their systems. The objective was always the same: to discourage the use of these Chinese models as much as possible. Why US companies use Chinese models. The reason is simple: Chinese open weights like DeepSeek V4 or Kimi K3 allow companies to download and run them on their own servers, dramatically reducing inference costs and keeping all data private. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong himself has indicated that use models such as GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7 in local production, which has allowed them to cut their total spending on AI in half despite the fact that token consumption has skyrocketed. Duopolies without competition. David Sacks, White House AI advisor, posted a message on X on Sunday in which he warned of the risk of using these models: “We are at a critical turning point in AI policies. The leading laboratories with proprietary models, which are already a duopoly in terms of revenue from their AI models, want the government to eliminate Open Source competition.” A Axios report reveals that indeed both OpenAI and Anthropic could have part of the responsibility in promoting this ban. This could be a shot in the foot for the US.. An analysis published in The Washington Post raises an argument worth considering. Treating open models as a security threat is confusing competition with a danger that must be contained. This text recalls how the Sears chain was not allowed to ban Walmart, nor IBM to ban Compaq or Dell, nor traditional airlines to veto the operators that lowered prices. In each case the same thing happened: an established company ran into a rival that was lowering costs, so it had only two options: compete or lose. Linux and Open Source have already shown the way. As the author of the article says, open source eliminated the barriers of commercial software, which locked users into an alternative from which they had no way out. That did not make these companies disappear, but rather boosted competition. Red Hat, MongoDB, Android or Kubernetes showed that “giving away” the product was not incompatible with building profitable businesses around that product. Danger, duopoly. That analysis shows that almost all companies prefer a scenario in which open models remain available. The only ones who have a direct interest in maintaining closed models are precisely Anthropic and OpenAI, because their businesses depend precisely on there being no free (or very cheap) competitive alternatives. If they are so good, why are they afraid? What’s ironic is that if Anthropic and OpenAI really claim to be so far ahead of Chinese AI companies, they shouldn’t have to worry about the competition. Nor would they have to ask the government for help to stop their competition. The US antitrust laws themselves exist precisely to prevent a market from falling into the hands of one or two companies. This veto would precisely allow them to create that monopoly (or duopoly) to lock users and companies into it. In Xataka | A few days after the Kimi K3 “shock”, Alibaba has launched Qwen 3.8: it is the sign that the US has a problem

Even Elon Musk surrenders to the open Chinese AI model Kimi K3. It is not for less

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It’s good, it’s pretty and it’s (quite) cheap. We met him a few days ago, but Kimi K3the new open AI model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, is causing a sensation. So much, so much, that they have had to pause new subscriptions because they cannot handle so much demand. Another turning point for Chinese AI. Kimi K3 is the largest open weights AI model ever published, with numbers that probably rival those of the frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI, which do not provide information on the size of their models. Those 2.8 billion parameters make a difference and are a good part of the reason why this model represents a real leap in quality according to all the benchmarks that are being published. “Awesome”. Elon Musk himself published a single “Impresionante” on his X/Twitter account as answer to the very complete analysis Artificial Analysis performance. Its agentic behavior surpasses that of Opus 4.8 and only Fable 5 surpasses it, but in a specific benchmark it goes even further and is the best of all the models evaluated by this firm, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic. Source: Artificial Analysis. More tests. In programming it is better than Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, but inferior to Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, and all the independent tests validate these results: we are facing a model that at least on paper competes directly with the best that both Anthropic and OpenAI had until now. No Chinese model had come so close until now: GLM-5.2, although notable, competed more with GPT-5.5 and Sonnet 5 than with the US frontier models. Source: Artificial Analysis Gigantic… and not so cheap. DeepSeek showed that it was possible to access really capable models at a very affordable price, and recently GLM-5.2 proposed exactly the same: it is possible to achieve 90% capacity of frontier models such as Opus 4.8, but at 20% of the cost. The curious thing is that with Kimi K3 the trend changes: it is a more affordable model than Fable 5 or GPT-5.6, but not as much as one might expect: the cost per million input/output tokens is 3/15 dollars, while in Fable 5 it costs 10/50, Opus 4.8 costs 5/25 and GPT-5.6 Sol costs 5/30. Tokens everywhere. One of the factors that probably influences that quality/price ratio is the large number of tokens that Kimi K3 seems to use when answering. It is a model that “thinks a lot”, and that, although it undoubtedly improves the precision and capacity of the model, also causes it to generate higher bills for the user. Artificial Analysis’ own report goes further: the cost per task in its test battery is $0.95, at the level of GPT-5.6 Sol’s $1.04 and certainly cheaper than Fable 5 ($2.75), but also much more expensive than Grok 4.5 ($0.31) or GLM-5.2 ($0.47). The pelican test. Analyst Simon Willinson was able to test the model to perform a test to evaluate the behavior of all these developments: having the model generate an SVG image of a pelican on a bicycle. In their tests the image was of very good quality, but it generated almost 17,000 tokens for the response with a task cost of 25 cents. It is not that this test is too conclusive, but it does reveal that for a simple task, the result, although outstanding, is not especially efficient in token consumption. Cybersecurity, the unknown. Unlike the latest models from Anthropic or OpenAI, Moonshot AI does not seem interested at the moment in its use in the field of cybersecurity. There is no mention of those potential capabilities in the notes of launch, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deliver. Vercel’s CTO, Malte Ubl, explained Although it is not the most advanced of AI models in this area, after running several tests it seemed like a model that can be very useful when finding and correcting vulnerabilities. Demand, through the roof. The expectation generated by this model has been such that the company has announced that pause new subscriptions. This will allow them to be able to deal with all requests to use it without harming the experience for both old and new users. A striking decision that seems to make a reality clear: they cannot cope. In Xataka | The gigantic Qwen 3.8 is another worrying sign for the US: its AI advantage is evaporating

the Chinese return to their stores

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In Shanghai, during the Lunar New Year, the lines in front of the original Louis Vuitton store that emulates the bow of a cruise ship stretched around the corner. Luxury brands have managed to once again draw the attention of Chinese customers to fashion and cosmetic products, after a sharp drop in sales which was consolidated with the tariff war between the US and China. As a result, brands such as L’Oreal, LVMH and Burberry saw a large part of their income coming from the Asian market. they collapsedand with them their quotes. As examples of this financial debacle, just say that Bernard Arnault, president and main shareholder of LVMH, was the richest man in the world in 2023, according to Forbes, and now occupies ninth position among the greatest fortunes in the world. The blow that no one expected. The year had not started badly. Reciprocal tariffs of up to 20% on European goods they threatened with making luxury bags and watches that come out of the artisan workshops of European luxury brands more expensive. They arrived just when the sector I was hoping to land in the United States after weak years in China. Brands such as Rolex or TAG Heuer, manufactured only in Switzerland, were especially exposed to price increases due to tariffs. Added to that was another unexpected front. The war in Iran suddenly stopped purchases in great luxury centers like Dubai. Middle East has a weight 6% in LVMH sales. According to collected France24LVMH’s financial director, Cécile Cabanis, acknowledged that this demand was still “very low” at the beginning of the year. The blow subtracted about one percentage point to the growth of the group in the first quarter. China activates its luxury consumers. Meanwhile, something was changing in the pockets of the wealthiest Chinese consumers. The ChiNext, the Shenzhen technology index, broke the record of the 2015 bubble in May. It rose 26% so far this year. This indicator is increasingly important for consumption because brick-and-mortar is no longer the only refuge for family savings in China, and there are more and more investors. If the stock market makes profits, the consumption of luxury products it shoots. According to McKinsey, the weight of the house The savings of Chinese households has fallen greatly since 2016. Then it was around 90%; last year it was only a third. Money migrates to stocks and funds. “For the first time in several years, there are encouraging signs in China’s consumption,” resume Daniel Zipser, partner at McKinsey in Shenzhen. The figures that confirm it. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, sales cosmetics grew by 5.6% between January and April. General consumption remains lukewarm, but high-end cosmetics and beauty products they already emerge on sales charts. L’Oréal reported sales growth of between 5% and 9% in China during the first quarter. On Alibaba platforms, the ten most expensive beauty brands sold 39% more in those same months. The cheaper ranges, on the other hand, fell. LVMH itself noticed this in its physical stores. In the first quarter, the region that includes China grew 7% in organic sales, according to the company’s own reports. Louis Vuitton and Burberry also rebounded in Chinese brick-and-mortar stores. Ralph Lauren grew more than 50% in the country thanks to the New Year. They are the first green shoots. The rebound in sales in China tells only part of the story, but it does not mean that luxury brands have overcome the slump. The war in the Middle East continues to weigh on the most profitable business in the sector. Cabanis warned that the environment will continue to be very volatile in the coming months. In addition, the tariff tension left its mark on the purchasing habits of Chinese customers and many of them they started using local brands versus foreign ones. It is a nationalist turn that also touches fashion. “Full consumption recovery will take time,” warns Morningstar analyst Jeff Zhang in statements to Bloomberg. The rebound is real, but no one in the sector dares to call it a victory yet. In Xataka | The millionaire heir of Hermés adopted his gardener. Your fortune has evaporated before it reaches your garden Image | Flickr (Trump White House Archived)

The new Chinese model Kimi K3 is already number one in Frontend Code Arena. And it’s unleashing madness on the Internet

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It seems like yesterday when DeepSeek R1 called into question an idea that many took for granted: that the race for advanced artificial intelligence It still had a clear owner in Silicon Valley. The emergence of the Chinese model helped trigger a massive sale of technology and led NVIDIA to suffer a loss daily capitalization unprecedented until then. As the months passed, that image lost intensity, but the message remained: the Chinese technological ecosystem was not willing to limit itself to keeping pace with the United States. The following notice now has a different name: Kimi K3. Moonshot AI has just presented a model with 2.8 trillion total parameters that, as soon as it arrived, was placed at the top of Frontend Code Arenaahead of some of the most powerful proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI. But the story is not limited to a classification: developers and fans are already using it to create interfaces, games and recreations that anyone can see and, in some cases, try. That’s where this article really begins. It is worth dwelling on the details of that classification. At the time of writing, Kimi K3 reaches 1,679 points in Frontend Code Arena, ahead of Claude Fable 5with 1,631, and GPT-5.6 Sol xHigh, with 1,618. The improvement compared to the previous generation is also striking: Kimi K2.6 was in 18th placewhile his successor leads six of the seven domains evaluated. For now, Arena maintains the label of preliminary result, so it is convenient to read this position as a very significant photograph, but still susceptible to change. We are not facing a universal programming exam, but rather a very specific test. Frontend Code Arena compares web applications created by different models and lets users evaluate which one solves the task better, which one works more reliably, and which one presents a better experience. That approach is especially useful for measuring visible and practical capabilities, but it also has obvious limits. That Kimi K3 leads here tells us a lot about its frontend performance, although it doesn’t automatically allow us to extend that advantage to complex repositories, backend, mathematics, or general reasoning. Outside of this specific terrain, photography remains favorable, although more balanced. Vals AI places Kimi K3 second among 38 models, with 74.70%just behind Claude Fable 5, which reaches 75.14%, and above GPT-5.6 Sol, with 73.12%. Artificial Analysis also places it among the most advanced systems in its classification, with 57 points and third place overall. Where Kimi K3 seems to feel most comfortable is in tasks that combine programming, visual context and several chained steps. Arena supports its ability to build web interfaces, while Vals AI also records high performance in agent programming tests. Moonshot adds that the model can traverse large repositories, use terminal tools, and review screenshots of its own work to correct the output on the fly. That last capability, which the company calls “vision in the loop,” helps explain why it excels at transforming visual references into interactive products. There are also several cautions before interpreting Kimi K3 as a definitive victory. Moonshot presents it as an open weight model, but those files have not been published yet and the company promises to release them no later than July 27. Nor should we confuse this openness with complete open source, because details about the license and the rest of the system are still missing. Its 2.8 billion total parameters belong to a sparse architecture that activates 16 of its 896 experts. The company itself recommends configurations with 64 accelerators or more, very far from what a conventional computer can offer. The community reaction helps understand why Kimi K3 is attracting so much attention. One of the most striking examples is a recreation of macOS 27 which works within the browser and which its creator attributes to a swarm of model agents working for about three hours. They add to it Ballista, an interactive panel with a 3D balloon and several comparisons against Claude and GPT. They are not independent benchmarks, but demos shared by their own creators, but they allow you to see what kind of results the model is producing outside the tables. To create something like the macOS simulation or the ballista game, we don’t need to model every element by hand from scratch. We can describe the resultattach a reference and commission Kimi to build a functional application, for example with HTML, JavaScript and various graphics libraries. The project is then tested, modified, and finally published or recorded for sharing. Kimi K3 can be used from Kimi.comKimi Work, Kimi Code or tools connected to its API, although it is not confirmed which specific environment was used in several of the examples we have seen. It is still early to turn this launch into a definitive change of leadership. Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sun They are still ahead in several evaluations, the Kimi K3’s weights are not yet available and many of its capabilities will have to be verified with more time. Even so, what we have seen is already difficult to ignore: a Chinese company can compete for leading positions, offer competitive results and get the community to transform that capacity into real applications almost immediately. The race continues, but the margin between its main protagonists seems increasingly narrower. Images | Kimi | Screenshot In Xataka | China has a plan to win the AI ​​war against the US. And DeepSeek is its champion

turning Chinese air conditioners into a mass phenomenon in Europe

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Brussels has been trying for months to stop the avalanche of Chinese products entering the continent. A few weeks ago we wrote about excise tax on small value items in stores like AliExpress, Temu or Shein. The EU blames China for a trade deficit that continues to grow and has threatened new restrictions. What is impossible to stop is the heat. And this summer is being especially deadly for millions of Europeans. Some have even stood in lines, visited several cities and spent the day updating websites. in order to get an air conditioning unit. Most, by the way, made in China. European trade policy has failed to curb dependence on China. The thermometer, on the other hand, has achieved it in a matter of weeks. What has happened? A historic heat wave has hit numerous countries in Europe, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Poland and the Czech Republic, countries where air conditioning has never been a real need. With temperatures soaring and a notable increase in heat deaths, the demand for air conditioners has been shot suddenly. The problem is that the supply has not been able to keep up, as many stores have run out of stock. How we got here. Although here in Spain we are more than used to having houses with air conditioning (at least in the farthest part of the north), In the rest of Europe it is not so common. In fact, according to dataAccording to the International Energy Agency, only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning, compared to about 90% in the United States. For decades, the continent has considered these devices noisy, unsightly for historic facades and, above all, unnecessary, because extreme summers were a one-off occurrence. This same logic has led to buildings designed to retain heat in winter. When heat waves are no longer an exception, Europe has found itself without infrastructure, without a culture of installation and without its own industry capable of covering that demand. And none of the five best-selling brands on the continent are European, according to data from Euromonitor International collected by CNBC. In detail. According to customs figures Chinese companies cited by The Wall Street Journal, exports of air conditioning units from China to France grew by 57% in May compared to the previous year, while to Spain they grew by 41%, and that before the worst days of June. The South China Morning Post, citing May estimatesplaced the year-on-year increase at 186% in France, 69.6% in Germany and 139.1% in the Netherlands. The Telegraph collected In addition, Chinese exports of air conditioners to the European Union have grown by 43% in the first half of the year, up to 3.8 billion dollars, with increases of between 20% and 97% in fan sales depending on the market. Midea, one of the largest manufacturers, assured to the Chinese state agency Xinhua that would send 100 containers of your PortaSplit model to Europe in just one month, and that its orders had already exceeded 200,000 units this year, double that of 2025, according to collected CNBC. Between the lines. All of this is happening at the worst possible time for the European trade narrative. Brussels and Beijing are holding talks to try to reduce a trade deficit that reached 360,000 million euros last year and that in the first quarter of this year it already amounted to 98,000 million, the highest level since 2022, according to Eurostat data. The European Trade Commissioner himself, Maros Sefcovic, recognized that the trend “is not sustainable.” Analysts such as Ding Chun, from the Center for European Studies at Fudan University, they counted to the SCMP that there is a growing disconnection between the political discourse of Brussels, focused on industrial protection, and the real needs of citizens, who are simply “seeking to survive the heat at the best possible price.” And now what. The European Union has set October as the deadline to achieve “tangible” progress in the trade relationship with China. But the problem of air conditioning is not going to disappear with the summer, because the European Commission itself calculated in 2024 that by 2030 up to 70 million new devices could be installed on the continent, which would cover around 35% of homes. This implies that, in addition to Chinese manufacturers, Europe will need a network of installers and regulation adapted to a reality that until recently was not contemplated. Cover image | TCL In Xataka | We have been cooling homes for decades with increasingly expensive machines. The Persian method has not consumed a single watt for 2,500 years

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