U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee granted Alibaba a preliminary injunction on Oct. 26, finding the Chinese company likely to win its free speech challenge, the South China Morning Post reported. The provision, Section 4663, in effect since June 30, bars the Pentagon from contracting with companies whose lobbyists also represent firms on its Section 1260H list, which names businesses the department says aid China's military. Lobbying firms in effect had to choose between Alibaba and clients seeking defense contracts. Lee found the government had not offered enough evidence to justify the restriction. "By restricting Alibaba's ability to retain lobbyists, Section 4663 functionally restricts its political speech," she wrote in a 26 page order. Alibaba stays on the 1260H list while its challenge to that designation continues in the same lawsuit.
Read at SCMP China ↗ • Read at Reuters ↗
NeuroXess, which develops implantable brain-computer interfaces, raised 700 million yuan ($98 million) in a Series B round, TechNode reported. SDIC Juli, an investment arm of state-owned State Development & Investment Corp., co-led the round with Qinzhi Capital and Shenzhen Capital Group, a venture firm backed by the Shenzhen government. The wireless implant is designed to decode movement and speech and let users operate external devices. NeuroXess said it has completed 65 clinical cases and in July began a registration trial, the final testing stage before regulatory approval, at nearly 20 hospitals. The money will fund trials, regulatory filings and a 14,300 square meter plant planned to build 10,000 systems a year.
Read at PE Daily ↗ • Read at TechNode ↗
Shanghai robot maker AgiBot released Genie Master, a framework meant to let deployed robots keep improving without engineers retraining them, tech blog Pandaily reported, drawing largely on the company's own account. AgiBot said its G2 robots ran the system in a working convenience store, packing ready meals, picking orders and restocking shelves, and found and corrected recurring failures without human demonstrations. In one example the company gave, a robot that kept missing a shelf hook because a price tag blocked its head camera reviewed its own logs and switched to a wrist camera to locate the hook. AgiBot called the deployment the first test of robot "recursive self-improvement" outside simulations and labs, a claim not independently verified. When tasks fail repeatedly, the system schedules practice during the store's quiet hours.
Read at Pandaily ↗
Infinigence AI ranked first by total score on two of four tracks of SOL-ExecBench, a public benchmark run by Nvidia Research, per QbitAI, a tech blog whose article appears to be material supplied by the company. The benchmark grades code for 235 computing tasks drawn from 124 AI models against the theoretical performance ceiling of Nvidia's B200, a data center chip from its Blackwell line. As of Oct. 26, Infinigence held first place on 88 individual problems, more than twice the next team, by its own count. Its entries came from 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. that write, test and revise code in isolated software environments, a setup the company said keeps the agents from tampering with the benchmark's timing. The leaderboard, launched in March, had drawn 583 teams and more than 31,000 submissions by Sept. 25, according to startup SF Tensor.
Read at QbitAI ↗ • Read at arXiv ↗