Singapore Tech News, Features & Reviews

Character.AI has begun a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in the United States and agreed to sell some of its assets to Walt Disney for $20 million. The filing was made in the bankruptcy court for the District of Delaware and is voluntary, the company said. Character Technologies, which owns the chatbot platform, put its estimated assets and liabilities between $50 million and $100 million in a court filing that also sets out the sale process.

China's smartphone shipments fell 15.4% in the third quarter from a year earlier to 57.9 million units, according to the research firm IDC. It was the sixth consecutive quarterly decline, and a far steeper one than the roughly 4% fall recorded in the first half of the year. Two forces sit behind the number, with weak consumer spending in China on one side and the rising cost of components on the other.

Unitree Robotics founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing says OpenAI's newest artificial intelligence models may bring a robotics breakthrough as soon as next year, a sharp change from the guidance he gave earlier in the year. He puts the window at one or two years. His remarks carry weight because Unitree, based in Hangzhou, is China's best known humanoid robot maker, and investors and analysts treat them as a bellwether for the domestic sector.