Tech giants get busy, bots pay off

STORY: From new bots making their debut, to what Alphabet said to cheer investors, this is AI Weekly.

Alibaba launched a new flagship AI model as competition mounts in China’s AI market.

Qwen 3 features hybrid reasoning, which the firm says creates a more efficient platform for app and software developers.

Baidu also launched its latest model – Ernie 4.5 Turbo.

The search engine giant additionally claimed to have made big progress in developing its own chips to power AI models.

:: Meta

Facebook-parent Meta was also busy.

The company debuted a new personal assistant and a tool to help developers build on the firm’s Llama model.

Boss Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella at an event in California about how bots were taking over programming:

“The big one that we’re focused on is building an AI and machine learning engineer to advance the Llama development itself. Right. Because I mean, our bet is sort of that in the next year probably, you know, I don’t know, maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people. And then that will just kind of increase from there.”

DeepSeek is available again in South Korea, after being suspended since February over data privacy concerns.

:: April 24, 2025

The country’s data protection agency said the bot transferred user data and other information without permission back when the service first launched.

DeepSeek didn’t immediately respond to the comments, but has revised a privacy policy note attached to its app.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on the country to become self-sufficient in AI.

State media reports say he said China should deploy its “whole national system” to push forward on the tech.

Washington has imposed sanctions in a bid to slow AI development in the country, but some experts say China has narrowed the gap over the last year even so.

And Alphabet cheered investors, saying its big bet on AI was starting to deliver tangible returns.

The Google parent firm said the tech was fueling growth in its core advertising business.

Alphabet said its AI Overviews – that’s the summaries that appear above its traditional search results – now had 1.5 billion users per month.