South Korea's SK Telecom scores maths gold with an open model
SK Telecom says its 688 billion parameter open-weight model, A.X K2, reached gold medal level on an International Mathematical Olympiad style test and tied for top marks on a separate AIME reasoning benchmark. The company claims it is the first model built outside the United States or China to clear that bar.
OUR TAKE
Quietly building a maths prodigy while everyone watched the usual two countries is a very Korean way to enter the room.
Alibaba opens Wan3.0 video model to public testing
Alibaba has put Wan3.0 into public beta in China. It makes clips of up to 30 seconds, twice the length of the previous version, and takes text, images, video, audio, web pages, PDFs and slide decks as input.
OUR TAKE
Feed it your quarterly slide deck and it will make a film. Whether anyone wants to watch that film is another matter.
Vietnam runs its first cancer operation with two surgical robots
Tam Anh General Hospital in Vietnam became the first in the country to use two Da Vinci Xi robotic systems at the same time during a cancer operation. Surgeons said the paired setup allowed finer control through the procedure.
OUR TAKE
Two robots, one patient, no drama. The best surgical news is the sort nobody has to write a follow up about.
Korean researchers build a scanning robot to catch breast cancer earlier
DGIST in Daegu has started a full project to build an ultrasound robot that can scan for breast cancer without a technician present. It runs under a government programme worth about 10.3 billion won, with Medical Park and Yonsei University, led by professors Yoo Jae-seok and Park Kyung-seo.
OUR TAKE
Screening only works if people turn up. A machine that removes the awkward bit is a better idea than another poster campaign.
Algeria signs off a cross-government plan for its AI strategy
Algeria has approved a roadmap that turns its national AI strategy into actual government projects, built around open-source models it controls and computing capacity held at home. Higher Education Minister Kamel Baddari chaired the work across ministries.
OUR TAKE
A strategy nobody funds is a pamphlet. Setting out who does what is the boring part that decides whether it happens.
Pakistan's SuperWize takes its own models into consumer finance
SuperWize, which builds AI models inside Pakistan, has signed a deal with embedded finance firm ABHI. ABHI will run those models behind lending and payment products aimed at Pakistani consumers and small businesses.
OUR TAKE
Local models trained on local money habits will beat an imported one that thinks everybody is paid monthly by direct deposit.
Taiwan flies three drones under one autonomous pilot
Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology and American firm Shield AI ran a field test in which software flew three Mighty Hornet III drones together on a search mission with no human at the controls. The two sides have renewed their partnership to widen use of the software.
OUR TAKE
A search mission is the polite version of this demonstration. Everyone in the room understood the other version.
Chinese hospital does heart surgery with a home-built robot
A hospital in Xiamen, in China's Fujian province, completed a complex cardiac operation using a surgical robot designed and made domestically rather than an imported system. State media framed it as proof the local medical robot industry has caught up.
OUR TAKE
Building your own is expensive right up until the day the imported one needs a spare part that will not ship.
Swedish coding startup Lovable raises 400 million dollars
Lovable, the Stockholm firm whose tools let people build software by describing it, has raised 400 million dollars in a Series C led by Menlo Ventures and backed by the EU Scaleup Europe Fund, valuing it at 13.3 billion dollars. The money goes on the platform and a bigger team.
OUR TAKE
Europe spent years complaining its best companies leave for California. This one stayed and got the cheque anyway.
Jakarta surgeons fit the smallest heart pump yet made
Doctors at RSCM in Jakarta implanted the smallest and lightest left ventricular assist device built so far, working with Singapore firm HeartSpan.ai and Fuwai Hospital in Beijing. It is the first operation of its kind in Indonesia and is meant for heart failure patients who cannot take a bulkier pump.
OUR TAKE
Three countries, one very small pump, one person who gets to go home. That is the whole point of the industry.
