📈 Data to start your week

China's AI ↑ Japan's robot boom ↑ Driving miles ↑

Hi,

Here’s your Monday round-up of data driving conversations this week — all in less than 250 words.

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1. Another Chinese AI breakthrough? Autonomous agent Manus AI outperforms OpenAI Deep research on GAIA, a general agent benchmark.

2. Alibaba’s AI masters logic. Alibaba’s new Qwen model achieves DeepSeek-R1-level math performance at 1/6th the price. On logic puzzles that include reasoning on ‘when’ and ‘why,’ it outperforms R1, o1 and o3-mini.

3. AI & labor. Firms adopting AI see approximately 6% higher employment growth over five years compared to non-adopting firms.¹

4. Japan’s robot boom. Japan’s service-robot market is expected to nearly triple in size by 2030.