Tim Cook Steps Down as Apple CEO; Huawei, DeepSeek Make Headlines

In a final internal memo, Cook said he would miss the role but felt "completely at peace" with the decision, and he described Ternus as "one of the few people who truly understand what it takes to build products that change the world," according to reports. He also said he was not leaving Apple but merely stepping down as CEO. Additionally, Bloomberg reported that senior executive Phil Schiller has relinquished his responsibilities for the App Store and product launch events, though he remains an Apple Fellow.

Huawei's half-year report, disclosed on August 31, showed revenue of 467.819 billion yuan for January-June 2026, up 9.55% year-on-year. R&D spending reached a record 121.382 billion yuan, up 25.2% from the same period last year. Net profit attributable to shareholders was reported as 23.428 billion yuan by one outlet and 23.427 billion yuan by another, indicating a slight discrepancy in the same report. The company's operating cash flow turned negative in the first half, according to the report.

DeepSeek open-sourced its first multimodal model from the V4 family, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, on Hugging Face with an MIT license. The experimental model accepts image inputs and is designed for tasks such as describing images, extracting text from screenshots, and analyzing charts. DeepSeek said the model retains the text-based performance of the V4-Flash formal release and shows significantly improved agent capabilities in vision-understanding benchmarks, approaching Opus-4.8.

OpenAI's Codex product has reached 25 million active users, product lead Tibo announced. To celebrate, OpenAI reset usage allowances for paid Codex and ChatGPT Work subscribers for a second consecutive day, after investigating anomalous usage. The user base grew from 20 million about ten days earlier. Separately, Reuters reported that OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads business reached $1 billion in annualized revenue and opened its ad manager to advertisers in India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Kuaishou said in a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing that China's National Artificial Intelligence Fund will inject 1.4 billion yuan in cash into Beijing Keling, while Chia Tai Robot will invest approximately $19.29 million, as additional investors in Keling. In another development, Nvidia announced a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek as part of the latter's $3.9 billion convertible bond issuance, with Alphabet also participating. The two companies will expand cooperation on NVLink Fusion technology for custom AI chips, PC chips, and automotive AI, Reuters reported.

In other tech news, Xiaomi released a test video showing its seven-seat extended-range SUV Pengcheng N90 Max driving 1,230 kilometers from Shanghai to Beijing on a single charge and full tank, arriving with 54 kilometers of range left, according to the company. The test was led by Xiaomi's CTO with three other people and about 50 kg of camera equipment. According to Sina Tech, Xiaohongshu is beta-testing a "post daily" feature that hides posts from the profile after three days, similar to WeChat Moments, and allows "followers-only" or custom-group visibility. NetEase Cloud Music opened public testing of its HarmonyOS version, with the test period running through September 25, according to the app's test page on the HarmonyOS platform. China Film Digital Development (Beijing) announced that the film "Niu Lai" will extend its screening period to October 4, covering the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays.

Apple also filed a court request to expedite discovery in its trade secret case against OpenAI, alleging that a former engineer who joined OpenAI accessed Apple power converter circuit schematics and used them to train an AI agent, according to Reuters.