Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at breakneck speed, reshaping industries and fueling a global tech race. With governments backing AI innovation and companies pouring billions into research,

Baidu Inc. timed it just right with its $1.4 billion debt sale. The search engine giant’s offering — coming ahead of a $600 million debt due in April - wrapped up Wednesday, as investors kept bidding up China’s artificial intelligence-linked stocks.

Baidu could see further gains thanks to its advancements in AI—including Ernie Bot and self-driving technology—and by being one of the few publicly traded companies

Alibaba Cloud on Thursday launched QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model built on its latest large language model (LLM), Qwen2.5-32b, one it says delivers performance comparable to other large cutting edge models, including Chinese rival DeepSeek and OpenAI’s o1, with only 32 billion parameters.

The search-engine firm last month reported a 2 per cent decline in quarterly revenue and faces intensifying competition in the AI arena.

Tencent Holdings Limited’s Yuanbao AI chatbot passed DeelSeek as the most downloaded app on AppStore in China. Yuanbao integrates Hunyuan artificial intelligence technology alongside DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model.

While AI is transforming industries worldwide and is expected to elevate our society to new heights, Caleb Maresca at New York University shared a contrarian view in his latest study.

Apple says the highly-anticipated AI overhaul that would give Siri to more contextual awareness and get work done across different apps will arrive next year.

Chinas Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is set to release an upgraded version of its artificial intelligence model, Ernie 4.5, in mid-March, featuring enhanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities. According to a source familiar

CHINESE technology firm Baidu raised US$2 billion in a sale of bonds exchangeable into the Hong Kong shares of online travel agency Trip.com Group, matching the biggest ever US dollar offering in the format by an Asian issuer.

CHINESE technology giant Baidu began marketing offshore yuan-denominated bonds of five- and 10-year tenors, according to a source familiar with the matter. Read more at The Business Times.