China’s latest glasses aim at Meta

Alibaba slips AI into a pair of plain glasses

The frame looks ordinary until you hear the soft click of its touch sensor.

Alibaba introduced its Quark smart glasses in China, a lightweight pair powered by the company’s Qwen model and priced at 1,899 yuan. The device folds translation, shopping and payment tools into a black-rimmed design that hides most of the circuitry you would expect from a headset.

The move signals Alibaba’s push to turn its AI research into something people can actually wear, especially after years of trailing Meta, Apple and Samsung in consumer hardware. It also leans on the company’s scale, because a command spoken through Quark can pull from Taobao, Alipay and the upgraded Qwen chatbot in ways a standalone device cannot match.

Competition inside China is tightening as Xiaomi and Baidu push their own glasses, and analysts expect an international launch in 2026 to test whether Alibaba can nudge into Meta’s 80 percent grip on XR and smart eyewear.

Somewhere between novelty and habit sits the moment when wearing a display on your face starts to feel normal.

SAP folds AI and cloud into one sovereign spine

The hum of a locked European server room sits at the center of SAP’s new announcement.

SAP introduced EU AI Cloud, its attempt to give European enterprises a full-stack place to run AI inside EU borders with options that range from SAP data centers to on-site setups. Cohere North lands inside SAP BTP as part of the deal, bringing multimodal and agentic models to customers that cannot move a single file outside the bloc’s rules.

SAP is betting that sovereignty is moving from a checkbox to a procurement filter, especially for regulated industries juggling country specific rules and data residency demands. These are customers that notice details like whether an IaaS layer sits in Frankfurt or runs under a U.S. hyperscaler’s contract.

The ecosystem angle matters too, because SAP is stitching together models from Cohere, Mistral, OpenAI and others, then letting customers deploy them as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS across 27 nations with wildly different risk thresholds.

Somewhere in this patchwork, Europe is trying to find its footing and SAP is trying to catch the moment before it shifts again.

Helio AI raises $1 million to chase volume hiring at scale

A recruiter scrolling through a late night stack of resumes hears the ping of an automated shortlist.

Helio AI picked up a $1 million Seed round led by SABAH.fund, with DOMiNO Ventures, Axiom, Tetrad VC and Bas Godska joining in. The company, built by a Georgian team and already active in seven countries, claims its multilingual agent and game based assessments can automate about 70 percent of routine recruiting work.

Investors are betting on the churn-heavy world of frontline hiring, where global brands need screening, ranking and evaluation done quickly and consistently across markets. It helps that Helio is already serving hundreds of companies and can point to a tangible metric like automation of most recruiter tasks.

The raise also signals SABAH.fund’s growing appetite for early HR tech, even though its core focus has been fintech and cleantech across Central Asia and nearby regions.

Somewhere in this mix of software and psychology sits the struggle to make high volume hiring feel less like a grind.

Prohuman team

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