"QoderWork ranks first among all AI tools within the group in terms of daily active users, weekly active users, and token consumption."
Last Friday, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu made this internal statement during a QoderWork team meeting. According to sources familiar with the matter, Wu noted at the meeting that QoderWork is becoming 'the interface connecting large models with the entire digital world' and aims to assist all office workers in the future, evolving into something akin to an operating system.
The timing of this statement was quite delicate.
Around the same time, DingTalk had just weathered a personnel crisis. CEO Wu Zhao and Vice President Ma Ruila both departed, and a lengthy article criticizing DingTalk’s internal management and its ONE project brought long-simmering issues from the past year into the spotlight.
Beyond management issues, divisions are emerging within Alibaba regarding its B2B Agent strategy.
Chronologically, Wukong and QoderWork started almost from the same starting line. One emerged from DingTalk, backed by Alibaba’s most critical enterprise collaboration entry point; the other originated from Alibaba Cloud/Qoder and initially resembled a low-profile desktop agent. Yet in terms of internal adoption and visibility within Alibaba, QoderWork has already taken the lead.
An Alibaba employee told Zimubang that they now use QoderWork almost exclusively and rarely open Wukong anymore.
From a user perspective, the two offer overlapping capabilities. However, QoderWork feels more intuitive, while Wukong seems more like an AI bot shoehorned into DingTalk.
Industry competition is also accelerating in parallel. OpenAI...

On its first day of listing, SpaceX made Elon Musk the first trillionaire in human history.
On the same day, Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economics, published an article titled 'Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme,' directly labeling Musk as a 'real-life Ponzi scheme.'
In this scathing piece, he criticized Musk for having 'destroyed X’s business model after acquiring Twitter, turning it into a cesspool,' driving away advertisers and leaving banks stuck with $13 billion in debt. The platform later didn’t recover due to its core business but was kept alive by Trump’s political resurgence and the AI boom.
At the end of the article, Krugman stated bluntly:“Elon Musk’s massive Ponzi scheme will inevitably collapse.”
In Krugman’s view, Musk’s wealth-generating machine has long ceased to rely solely on rockets, electric vehicles, and satellite internet. Instead, it resembles a capital cycle built around the 'Musk genius myth': investors believe Musk can shape the future, so they keep buying shares in his companies; rising valuations then reinforce the belief that Musk truly can deliver that future.
SpaceX’s IPO has pushed this cycle to its most precarious stage yet.
Because this time, those footing the bill won’t just be Musk’s true believers, Wall Street players, and active investors placing bets.
Those who don’t believe in Elon Musk may also be forced to foot the bill.
01
A real-life Ponzi scheme
Paul Krugman...

The robotics sector is now welcoming a new breed of CEOs:They haven’t even graduated yet, but have already founded their own robotics companies and secured hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Not long ago, a 25-year-old Tsinghua University Ph.D. student raised over 500 million RMB. His name is Qin Shentao, born in 2001, currently a third-year doctoral candidate at Tsinghua’s School of Vehicle and Mobility. During his third year of the Ph.D. program, he founded OriginFlow, an embodied intelligence company, which has just closed a 500-million-RMB Pre-A funding round.
Early in 2025, when Qin Shentao launched his venture, another embodied intelligence startup, Zeroth Robotics, spun out of Tsinghua’s AI & Robotics Lab. Its founder, Min Yuheng, is a current master’s student at Tsinghua. Within a year and a half, the company has completed five funding rounds and reached Series A.
Liu Songming, also a current Ph.D. candidate at Tsinghua, founded Jiangxian Tech, an embodied intelligence company, during his doctoral studies. Just six months after its establishment, the company secured a 500-million-RMB angel investment from Meituan and Shunwei Capital. Most recently, it completed a Pre-A funding round led by Shunwei Capital.
Similar stories are unfolding across multiple Chinese universities. Chen Hao, a direct-track Ph.D. student in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of Mechanical and Power Engineering (class of 2022), founded Yingkan Zhiyi, an embodied intelligence startup, last year before graduating. Within six months, the company secured three rounds of funding and recently closed a tens-of-millions-of-RMB Pre-A round from Yuanhe Capital. Qijing Ventures, founded by Qi Lu, has invested in the company twice.
One...

Following the path Dong Yuhui once took, Sun Dongxu has now come back along it.
In late May, more than half a year after stepping down as CEO of Oriental Select, Sun Dongxu appeared in his own “Sun Meili” Douyin livestream, launching his first book-selling session.
The livestream lasted less than two hours, with over 20,000 viewers consistently watching simultaneously. Sun Dongxu recommended three books: 'The Body’s Infinite Possibilities,' 'A Young Person’s World History,' and 'My Mother Works as a Cleaner,' which quickly surged to the top of Douyin’s 'Books & Magazines Chart.' 'A Young Person’s World History' alone sold 16,000 copies.
Before going live, Sun Dongxu frankly admitted, 'Today, I’m ready to step out,' attempting“to chat a bit, talk about books, and sell some books”. This is precisely the approach that Dong Yuhui and Oriental Select used to build their initial success. Though the two have since parted ways, they’ve coincidentally chosen the same path.
Book-selling livestreamers like Sun Dongxu and Dong Yuhui are emblematic of Douyin’s book e-commerce ecosystem.
Since Douyin entered the e-commerce space through short videos and livestreaming, books have remained one of its core categories. Even before Oriental Select captivated the internet with its poetic, literary style, numerous major book-focused livestreamers had already emerged on this track—such as 'Fan Deng Reading,' 'Uncle Kai’s Story Time,' 'Host Wang Fang,' 'Zhao Jian’s Reading Notes,' and 'Dr. He Chuhan'—with top-tier hosts amassing over 10 million followers each.
After the rise of Dong Yuhui and other hosts affiliated with Oriental Select, the number of book-focused live streamers on Douyin surged, and the content categories diversified significantly. They are no longer concentrated solely in popular segments such as children's books, popular science, personal finance, and educational supplements; instead, numerous influencers have emerged in pure literary fields like novels, poetry, and essays.
Coupled with Mo Yan, ...

Don’t dismiss it—'writing policy essays' is actually far more useful than it appears.
Over the past few months, both OpenAI and Anthropic have started sounding very 'humanities-oriented.'
OpenAI released a policy agenda addressing youth protection, workforce transition, and global standards; published an industrial policy document emphasizing that the AI era must be human-centered, expand opportunities, and share prosperity; and on the same day it secretly filed its S-1, it also released an essay titled 'Built to Benefit Everyone: Our Plan,' framing the company’s future within the narrative of ensuring AGI benefits everyone.
Anthropic hasn’t been idle either—it established the Anthropic Institute to explore how powerful AI systems will impact society; published an article on recursive self-improvement, warning that the world needs to understand this inflection point in advance as AI begins assisting in building the next generation of AI; and integrated Claude into biological research scenarios, discussing how AI agents can enhance bioinformatics workflows and accelerate scientific discovery.
Technology is certainly crucial, but technology alone isn’t enough. On the eve of their IPOs, the most valuable AI companies are all telling stories.
Because when AI companies go public, they’re not just selling models.
They’re also selling a narrative about the future.
01
Models address capability questions,
Stories answer questions of trust
In the AI race, models are the most direct language.
Context length, reasoning capabilities, coding performance, AP...

Have you heard of tungsten hexafluoride?
It is a critical material in the production of 3D NAND and HBM. In semiconductors, it is primarily used for CVD deposition of tungsten films. In DRAM, tungsten is used in contact plugs, interconnects, word lines, and other structures.
Tungsten hexafluoride itself is toxic, highly corrosive, and reacts with water to produce hydrofluoric acid (HF), imposing stringent requirements on purity, packaging, gas cylinders, transportation, and on-site delivery systems.
Without it, the tungsten metal interconnect layers inside chips cannot be deposited, leaving advanced-node circuits non-functional.
However, starting July 1, two Japanese companies—Kanto Denka and Central Glass—will permanently cease production of tungsten hexafluoride, eliminating approximately 25% of global capacity in July.
The immediate reason for the shutdown is that China’s exports of high-purity tungsten powder to Japan will effectively drop to zero beginning January 2026.
Tungsten hexafluoride is primarily produced from tungsten powder, and about 80% of the world's tungsten resources and refining capacity come from China.
It was bad enough that the AI boom spilled over into memory markets—now even raw materials are getting caught in the crossfire.
So who stands to benefit?
A. NVIDIA, B. SK Hynix, C. Obtuse angle.
None of the above. It's ChangXin.
NVIDIA certainly wants stable memory supply, but the disruption in tungsten hexafluoride supply will inevitably drive up costs for HBM and server memory, which will ultimately be passed on to its procurement prices.
SK Hynix is a major customer of Japanese tungsten hexafluoride suppliers and now has to switch to domestic Korean suppliers SK Specialty and Foosung, but both have already notified customers of a 70% price increase in their 2026 contracts...

Bambu Lab accomplished in just five years what DJI took nine years to achieve.
Two weeks ago, Creality, a long-established industry giant, went public, becoming the 'first 3D printing stock.' Yet investors’ attention has been squarely on Bambu Lab, the young unicorn. After all, whether by market share or revenue scale, Bambu Lab ranks number one in the industry.
From obscurity to industry leadership, Bambu Lab’s rise has been accompanied by the departure of key DJI team members and intense commercial rivalries. Stripping away the dramatic veneer of this business war, however, reveals an undeniable fact: Bambu Lab is emerging as the brightest symbol of this year’s collective 'identity leap' among new brands.
During this year’s June 18 shopping festival, Bambu Lab not only retained its No. 1 position in the niche 3D printer category on Tmall but also surged to become the overall top seller in the office supplies category.
Similar comebacks are evolving from isolated cases into an industry-wide trend. AlphaRank has noted that this year, 127 new brands across multiple sectors—including apparel, home appliances, furniture, and cosmetics—have risen from niche-market champions to rank among the top 10 in their respective industries on Tmall.
Against the broader industry backdrop, this trend appears especially unusual. Although we are now in 2026, many still associate new brands with the consumer boom around 2019, when venture capitalists waved checkbooks to secure deals and 'new consumption' success stories abounded.
In recent years, however, consumer-sector investment has cooled, and traffic-driven growth has plateaued, making life increasingly difficult for new brands. On one hand, once-popular names like Zihao Guo and Zhong Xue Gao have stumbled; on the other, even newer entrants are...