Microsoft launched Decision-1, a decision-making model built on Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B, in its Foundry platform three days after OpenAI's Decisions API launch. The model costs $0.042 per million input tokens and is being tested across Microsoft's internal teams including Xbox, Copilot, and GitHub, positioning the company to compete with TypeSafe and other rivals in the emerging decision model category.
Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen team open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1-Turbo, an image generation model that produces images in just 8 denoising steps. The model supports 2K image generation and natural-language editing, with weights available on Hugging Face and ModelScope.
Chinese hyperscalers including Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have turned negative free cash flow due to massive AI capital expenditure spending. Market analysts debate whether AI capex will drive inflation and equity valuations, with technology investment now representing 55% of U.S. capital spending and reshaping the economy across sectors including industrials, utilities, and infrastructure.
ByteDance's AI assistant Doubao has added utility payment features allowing users to initiate payments for water, electricity, and gas through voice or text commands. The service redirects users to payment pages rather than completing transactions directly, with coverage and integration still expanding across cities.