On Nov. 12, Baidu's Robin Li unveiled Token Exchange at Baidu World 2026, a marketplace listing many AI models and providers, including rivals DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM. It uses entry tests, model fingerprinting and ongoing monitoring to catch swapped models and inflated specs, and gives providers credit ratings. Baidu says that a month in, it has over 100 supply sources and handles more than 700 billion tokens a day. The platform had quietly gone live earlier.
AWS on Nov. 11 released AWS Emulator, a free, open-source tool that imitates more than 200 AWS cloud services on a developer's own machine for offline testing. AWS says autonomous AI agents wrote all of the code and its team neither wrote nor reviewed any of it. Agents in three teams write tests, find gaps and fix them, and every change must pass automated build, standards, security and regression checks. AWS warns it doesn't evaluate IAM policies, so it can't test security.
At Baidu World 2026 on Nov. 12, founder Robin Li said Baidu's daily active AI agents grew from about 5,000 a year ago to 37,000, and the tasks they complete rose from 84,000 a week to more than 1 million. He called the "intelligent organization" AI's next act and said jobs won't vanish but will converge into builders and sellers. The figures are Baidu's own and haven't been independently verified.
On Nov. 11, Runway released the weights, inference code and fine-tuning code for its robotics model Praxis-1 under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use. The 27-billion-parameter "world action model" learns from large amounts of video and predicts both scenes and robot actions. Runway says it ranks first on Nvidia's RoboLab-120 leaderboard at 46.2% success. All results are self-reported.
Security firm Claroc says 35,578 of the 37,571 Grok-built apps it found online opened without sign-in, and about 1 in 10 held business or personal data, including a hospital staff list, an ICU patient briefing and plain-text passwords. Twenty-four were built by X and SpaceXSI staff. App addresses could be found in searchable DNS records, and sharing defaulted to "Anyone with the link." The company says creators choose access before publishing.
At 19:41 Beijing time on Nov. 11, a Long March 2D rocket launched four Pathfinder satellites for China's Tanyuan space science program. Satellite A carries five instruments, while three others fly in formation to test low-frequency interferometric imaging for future missions such as Hongmeng and Kuafu-2. The Chinese Academy of Sciences plans four science missions over the next three to five years.
On Nov. 11, Chengdu-based Yuefan Innovation held the first public flight of an air-ground delivery system: a drone carried a hot drink from a shop to a smart handoff station, and a ground robot delivered it to a customer in a city park. The company plans networks of one drone, three stations and 12 robots covering up to 20 km. Payload and cost figures weren't disclosed.
Chip research firm SemiAnalysis said on X on Nov. 11 that SpaceX is developing "Kessel," a custom version of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack. It replaces internal NVLink copper cables with an 84-layer passive circuit board, and SpaceX would buy only chip packages from Nvidia, skipping Nvidia's L6 compute boards and sourcing the rest itself, for data centers on the ground and in orbit. Neither company has commented publicly.
Chinese AI company MiniMax released H3-Image, an image generator with downloadable open weights. The company says it can produce a 4096-by-4096-pixel image in under 10 seconds, use up to 16 reference pictures, and run up to five times faster than mainstream rivals. Those speed and quality figures are the company's own claims, and its announcement doesn't say what hardware the timing was measured on.
Chinese EV news site D1EV staged a driver-assistance competition in Changsha featuring a Tesla Model Y running an unofficially activated FSD V14. Tesla's legal department called it unauthorized cracking, demanded the content come down, the car's VIN be handed over within 48 hours and the software restored. D1EV's CEO Pang Yicheng refused, saying he doesn't believe anything illegal happened. Unlock tools sell for a few hundred yuan online.
Chinese robotics company UBTech said Nov. 11 that Yongda Automobiles, a listed luxury-car dealer group, will buy 400 of its U1 Pro lifelike humanoid robots for delivery this year. It's the first large order UBTech has disclosed for its human-faced line. At the 169,800-yuan (about $23,800) retail price, that's roughly 68 million yuan (about $9.5 million). The robots are meant for showroom experiences, sales promotion and customer service; how much they'll actually do remains to be seen.
A drone called Qingqibing ("Light Cavalry"), built by an institute of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., made its first flight Nov. 11 at an airfield in northwest China. State media say it's China's first commercial-grade small-to-medium drone powered only by solar energy: 3.2 meters long with an 8-meter wingspan, a 45-kilogram takeoff weight and a maximum design endurance of 30 hours. The 30-hour figure is a design target; the first flight was a short circuit, and no actual endurance result has been released.
South Korea's Financial News on Nov. 11 published what it said was the Q&A from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Oct. 31 session with Samsung executives. Altman reportedly said the coming AI companion device will be "the next version of the smartphone," with AI rather than apps proactively managing people's lives, and that he'd like to work closely with Samsung on a joint device. Neither company has announced any partnership.
On the morning of Nov. 11 Beijing time, Alibaba said its next-generation Qwen4 model family is coming and opened a preview of the flagship Qwen4-Max on its Token Plan subscription. The model targets coding and AI-agent work, takes images and video, and handles a 1-million-token context. Alibaba has not released benchmarks, a parameter count or a technical report, and the preview shuts off on Nov. 25.
On November 11, Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, the first post-trained model built on its previously open-sourced ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base. It has 280 billion total parameters, 14 billion active per token, and a 1-million-token context window. Baidu says it is strong at coding, 3D modeling, office work, and content creation, and showcased it building a third-person martial-arts game in Unreal Engine in a single 11-hour coding task. The API is live on Baidu Qianfan, and Baidu says the weights will be released under Apache 2.0 by November 25. Baidu also calls it an in-progress checkpoint that may still have gaps; the demos are the company's own claims.
On November 11, Tencent launched Yuanbao Search, a new AI search engine at so.qq.com that can also be set as the default engine in the latest QQ Browser. Tencent says it rebuilt the entire search pipeline on its Yuanbao AI model, with an index of hundreds of billions of items covering the open web, WeChat Official Account articles, WeChat Channels videos, and academic papers. It says the engine draws on 157 authoritative sources and keeps ads in a separate, labeled block that users can collapse. These are Tencent's claims; real-world quality has yet to be tested.
ByteDance plans to release an AI assistant similar to Meta's Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported Nov. 11, citing people familiar with the matter. At an all-hands meeting of the AI team, co-founder Zhang Yiming reportedly said ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, but not until at least 2029 or 2030, conceded that its Seed models are pretrained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than U.S. rivals', and said the company should not lean on distillation. Bloomberg also reported a plan to spend up to $70 billion to make Seedance China's top video AI platform. ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment; none of this is an official company announcement.
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope published the first direct image of a black hole, the bright ring around M87's center. Critics have long wondered whether that ring was an artifact of sparse data and image processing. On November 12, four researchers at Australia's CSIRO said a new method called GenDIReCT, which was not told what a black hole should look like, reanalyzed the public data and recovered a ring of almost the same size and shape. The work is published in Nature.
Motor neuron disease, also called ALS, has no cure, and existing treatments for rare genetic forms cover under 3% of cases. The other 97% share a failure of a protein called TDP-43, which normally proofreads genetic material. On November 11, King's College London described a Nature study showing that when TDP-43 fails, a single error in the UNC13A gene breaks communication between neurons — and that an antisense oligonucleotide drug restored that communication in human neurons in the lab. This is not a therapy already proven in patients.
All-solid-state batteries have long been stuck on two problems: promising sulfide materials can react with lithium metal, and they often need high pressure to work, which is hard to do in a car. On November 11, QuantumScape announced Osprey, an open all-solid-state platform, saying its cells have produced the first public data of a sulfide-based cathode cycling 1,000 times under just one atmosphere of pressure. It also cites a projected energy density of up to about 1,100 Wh/L. These are the company's laboratory results. Osprey is a long-term technology platform, not a mass-produced car battery.