One of China's largest visual AI consumer platforms has deliberately chosen not to build its own models; a startup competing against ByteDance and Alibaba is pursuing a strategy of making its models cheaper rather than better; and Alibaba launched one of its video generation models under a pseudonymous brand before revealing its identity — what its executive described as "a very big branding moment." Those were among the more pointed observations to emerge from a panel discussion on the visual AI stack at SuperAI Singapore 2026 on Thursday

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim concluded a three-day visit to Japan, during which he met with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. The two leaders pledged to strengthen cooperation in critical minerals

Breaking the inference barrier requires a rethink of the whole system architecture, not just faster compute. This was the key takeaway from a recent panel discussion at SuperAI Singapore, which brought chip makers and an AI model accelerator together to address how to overcome inference bottlenecks at a time when compute workloads are hitting up against physical limits

Robotics has progressed rapidly in the past few years, but major obstacles — including data collection and trust infrastructure — remain barriers to widespread deployment. This was the takeaway from a recent panel of robotics experts at SuperAI Singapore, where they discussed the present and future of the industry

Applied Materials plans to expand its Southeast Asia workforce by about 25% this year, adding at least 1,000 workers mainly in Singapore as the city-state becomes a more important manufacturing, logistics, and advanced-packaging hub for the US chip-equipment maker, Nikkei Asia reported