TechHorn Lab

Finally got to try Muse. From the UI to the features, it makes GrokBot feel half-finished. #Muse #GrokBot

The Nasdaq fell 5.5% overnight. China’s A-shares opened down just 2% or so. Better than I expected. #ChinaStocks

miHoYo may pour up to ~$15B into AI over the next three years. China’s next AI wave might be game studios.

DeepSeek’s next model, V5, may train on Ascend—not just run inference. Is China really entering a post-Nvidia era? The U.S. might have locked out a monster.

Seres, Huawei’s partner behind AITO, saw October sales plunge 50.29% to 27,037. Has the Huawei halo worn off? #ChinaEV

ByteDance’s free short-drama app Hongguo has 400M+ monthly users in China. Average daily use: 2.5 hours. #ChinaTech

HP, Asus and Acer are reportedly cutting Southeast Asia expansion and moving some production back to China. Costs still matter. #ChinaTech

Chinese brands beat Japan in Europe: 12.7% vs 11.9% in Q3. They’re forecast to take most of Europe’s car market growth this year. #ChinaEV

The XPeng Mona L05 in person. Roomy cabin, short hood, five spacious seats for around $23,800. What do you think? #XPeng #MonaL05

XPeng chose one of Guangdong’s top venues for the Mona L05 launch, with 100+ cars on display. Expectations are high. #XPeng

Why is GPT-6.1 Sol better at writing than Astra? Astra is too obsessed with being correct, burying every point in evidence and filler. Sol is less strict, though its writing is still shit. I’d recommend Gemini. Maybe dumber models just write better. #GPT #Gemini

Based on my experience using AI for writing over the past month, here’s how I’d rank the major models: Gemini 4 Argon > Gemini 3.8 Flash > Grok 4.5 > GPT-6.1 Sol > GPT-6.1 Astra I’ll try GPT-6.1 Terra next... #Gemini #Grok #GPT #AIWriting

Using an iPhone in China is a different experience. Some ads open other apps if you move your phone. iOS 27.2 lets you stop this. #Apple

China supposedly loves iPhones most. Yet the black iPhone Duo is in stock and below retail. An early sign of failure? #Apple

The models keep improving. The stocks are almost back where they started. On October 22, Hong Kong’s two major listed AI model companies fell again. Z.ai closed at HK$460.8 (about US$59), down 7.1%. MiniMax fell 6.52% to HK$160.7 (about US$21), dropping below its HK$165 IPO price for the first time. Z.ai is now roughly 85% below its peak. MiniMax is down about 88%. MiniMax listed in January, climbed from HK$165 to HK$1,330, and has now fallen below its offering price. Someone who bought MiniMax at the IPO price and held throughout saw it rise to eight times that price, then watched the entire gain disappear. All in less than a year. Chinese AI making progress and investors making money from Chinese AI stocks are two very different things. #ZAI #MiniMax #ChinaAI #HKStocks

The iPhone Duo goes on sale today, but plenty of buyers may immediately find the matte film on the inner display hard to live with. It makes the crease less visible, but really hurts the viewing experience. If you’re willing to risk damaging the phone, there’s another option: peel off the matte film. Chinese tech creator Yang Changshun did exactly that, showing us the iPhone Duo’s inner display without it: sharp, clear, with excellent colors. The picture quality looks like it could be among the best on any current foldable. But once the film is off, the screen feels soft and squishy, losing that solid feel, and the crease becomes incredibly obvious. Worst of all, adhesive residue remains around all four edges. #Apple #iPhoneDuo #Foldable

Tencent, CATL and Geely are reportedly putting money into the same company: DeepSeek. According to Caijing, DeepSeek is nearing completion of a second funding round that has doubled from roughly $7.5 billion to $15 billion, at an unchanged valuation of about $75 billion before the investment. CATL alone reportedly plans to add around $1.5 billion. There is a shift in who Liang Wenfeng wants on board. Caijing reports that he increasingly favors industrial investors with resources DeepSeek can use. Tencent brings cloud services and applications. CATL and Geely bring batteries, cars and manufacturing. These companies could become major customers as well as shareholders. That makes this more than another huge funding headline. Some of China’s biggest companies are becoming owners of DeepSeek. When they decide which AI models to buy and deploy, where does that leave DeepSeek? #DeepSeek #Tencent #CATL #ChinaAI

The biggest argument over the fatal AITO crash in Shenmu, China, is now about what exactly “139.1 km/h” refers to. On October 17, an AITO crashed into a traffic light pole in Shenmu, Shaanxi, and caught fire, killing the driver. AITO said yesterday that the car was being driven manually and was traveling at 139.1 km/h through an intersection with a 50 km/h limit. Its preliminary explanation attributed the fire to electrical short circuits and fluid leaks following the impact. People have started analyzing the CCTV footage frame by frame. Some believe the car may have slowed to just 40–50 km/h by impact. One blogger used video timing and map distances to calculate an average speed of 31.8–44.5 km/h over the final 0.566 seconds before the crash. Others have calculated higher speeds. There is no consensus. That is the dispute: traveling through the intersection at 139.1 km/h and hitting the pole at 139.1 km/h are two different things. AITO’s statement gives the former without separately disclosing the speed at impact. To explain the collision and the fire that followed, knowing how the speed changed before impact would be much more informative than that one number alone. Even more frightening, judging by the timestamp in the upper-right corner of the CCTV footage, the car appears to catch fire within roughly two seconds of impact. How quickly the flames appeared has left many viewers shaken. #AITO #Huawei #Seres #ChinaEV

Another surprising claim from a Chinese tech blogger: the crease area on the iPhone Duo’s inner display feels soft and deforms even when you slide a finger across it. Weibo blogger “豆子发了芽” also complained that none of the hands-on videos he’d seen mentioned this. That sounds like a pretty gross thing to feel under your finger… #Apple #iPhoneDuo #Foldable