The day in one line
Two Chinese providers moved in opposite directions on price in the same week, and a US bill proposed prison terms for the thing neither of them is building yet.
DeepSeek: $1 billion run rate, after a 4.5x price rise
The Information reported on 23 September that DeepSeek reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate, roughly double its previous figure, citing numbers CEO Liang Wenfeng gave investors. The company is seeking 50 billion yuan - about $7.5 billion - at a 500 billion yuan valuation, about $75 billion.
The sequence is what matters. DeepSeek raised API prices 2.3x to 4.5x in August and quadrupled peak-hour V4 rates. Revenue doubled anyway, because a 4.5x rise on the cheapest inference in the market still leaves it among the cheapest in the market.
If you see a "$500 billion valuation" headline, that is 500 billion yuan with the wrong symbol attached.
Full story and what it means for inference budgets
Alibaba: voice APIs cut by up to 95%
Qwen-Audio 3.1 shipped on 25 September with five models - ASR, TTS and Realtime upgraded, plus new ASR-Next for audio understanding and TTS-Next for audio creation. Cuts run up to 95% on ASR, about 70% on TTS and roughly 85% on realtime. TTS covers 16 languages and 20 Chinese dialect regions; Realtime Plus carries 262K context.
Alibaba published the percentages and not the per-unit prices, and gave no effective date. "Up to 95%" is not a quote.
The five models and whether to switch
Sanders and Casar: 20 years for superintelligence
The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, introduced 23 September, creates a cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence, pauses advanced AI development until that department writes safety rules, and carries penalties of up to 20 years imprisonment plus corporate dissolution.
It defines superintelligence as AI that "exceeds human cognitive performance and capabilities across most domains" - prose, with no compute threshold, benchmark or evaluation standard attached. That is the weakness, and it is the one thing the sponsors could fix without changing the bill's intent.
Why the missing threshold is the whole problem
Also worth knowing
- ChatGPT Voice got plugins. Announced 23 September, rolling out globally from 25 September: email, calendar and Slack plugins work in voice, you can pick between GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna, and it runs inside ChatGPT Work on web and mobile.
- Google Gemini 3.8 added Live Avatar with lip-sync across 97 languages, allowlisted to Gemini Enterprise customers first.
- OpenEvidence raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation, up 25% from $12 billion in January.
- Google Project Suncatcher is scheduled to put four TPUs into orbit on a SpaceX launch on 1 October for a year-long trial.
- Meta rejected industry-wide AI slowdown proposals, with Zuckerberg declining to join the pacing consensus other labs signed up to this month.
What to watch
Whether DeepSeek raises prices again. A provider that learns a 4.5x increase costs it nothing has been handed a lever, and the next move will tell you whether August was a correction or the first of several.