AI Weekly Roundup: Son Rebuts AI Bubble Claims; Apple Integrates Chinese AI Capabilities & More

This week’s AI industry roundup brings key insights from global leaders, major product launches, and strategic partnerships shaping the future of artificial intelligence. From bold investment predictions to cross-platform AI integrations, the sector continues to push boundaries.

Industry Leaders’ Perspectives

SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son labeled claims of an AI bubble as "absurd" at the company’s annual conference. He projected that by 2040, AI development will require $5 trillion in annual investment— a figure he argues is justified if AI contributes 20% of global GDP by then. Son also forecasted AI data centers will need 3 terawatts of electricity, 1.8 times the world’s current total power consumption.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized AI lacks consciousness, comparing it to household tools like dishwashers: "We shouldn’t over-anthropomorphize AI; it’s software and tools at its core."

Baidu founder Robin Li proposed "Daily Active Agents (DAA)" as a core metric for the smart economy, measuring daily valuable tasks completed by AI agents. Baidu will release a DAA whitepaper with IDC at WAIC 2026 to standardize the metric.

Chinese Academy of Engineering院士 Zheng Weimin noted stable, low-cost Token production is scarce in the agent era: "Computing power expansion alone isn’t enough— we need systems that generate high-quality Tokens consistently."

Key Announcements

Apple is integrating Alibaba’s Qwen AI into its "Apple Smart" suite for Chinese users across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, allowing direct access to text/image understanding and content generation without app switching.

Step Stars launched the world’s first large model-native agentic phone, featuring Step AOS system and Amoo AI agent— though configuration and launch details remain undisclosed.

SenseTime open-sourced SenseNova-Vision, a unified visual model integrating object detection, segmentation, and 3D reconstruction into general AI frameworks.

Ant Group released two open-source security models: SingGuard (multimodal safety for text/images) and SingGuard-NSFA (agent behavior safety covering 7 risk categories).

DeepSeek’s valuation exceeded 350 billion RMB (~$48B), reflecting strong investor confidence.

Sources

• TMTPost: https://www.tmtpost.com/8070816.html