China’s Geely Unveils EV Charging Under Five Minutes
Automaker rivals ultrafast charging from BYD as automakers aim to entice buyers in China’s slowing market
- Geely Automobile unveiled a new electric-vehicle charging technology that it says can recharge a battery from 10% to nearly full in under five minutes.
- The technology uses an artificial intelligence model co-developed with StepFun to predict battery temperatures and adjust charging power.
- Chinese automakers are racing to slash charging times to entice buyers as the country’s overall passenger car market slows.
Geely Automobile 175 0.19%increase; up pointing triangle unveiled a new electric-vehicle charging technology that it says will recharge a battery from low to nearly full in under five minutes, escalating a race among Chinese automakers to slash charging times as demand in the domestic market slows.
The Chinese automaker said Wednesday that its latest charging technology used artificial intelligence to deliver faster charging while reducing heat and improving battery life.
Geely co-developed an AI model called Xingrui PowerMind with Chinese AI startup StepFun, which it says can predict battery temperatures up to 30 seconds in advance and adjust charging power accordingly.
In what Geely described as real-world tests, the batteries used in the Lynk & Co 10 and Zeekr 001 charged from 10% to 70% in four minutes and 30 seconds, and from 10% to 97% in eight minutes and 40 seconds.
That compares to five minutes and nine minutes, respectively, for BYD’s second-generation blade battery and flash charging technology, which the Chinese auto giant unveiled in March. BYD has made its ultrafast charging a key selling point for its electric vehicles.
Geely also released its latest smart charging station, which can deliver peak charging power of as much as 2,250 kilowatts per charging gun, the company said. The AI system is designed to keep the battery from reaching excessive levels of heat during charging.
Chinese automakers have increasingly turned to charging speed as they compete for buyers in the world’s largest EV market. Faster charging can address one of the main challenges of EVs compared with gasoline-powered cars: that plugging in still takes longer than refueling.
Retail sales of new-energy vehicles, a term used to describe both EVs and plug-in hybrid cars, accounted for a record 65.2% of total passenger car sales in August, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed. Still, the overall new-car market in China is slowing. Retail sales of passenger cars fell 23.6% from a year earlier to 1.54 million units in August, according to association data.
Geely’s battery technology also reflects a push by Chinese automakers to gain greater control over batteries and other core EV technologies. Li Auto, Xiaomi, XPeng and Leapmotor are also strengthening their in-house battery capabilities, Macquarie analysts wrote in a recent note.
The push could help automakers improve supply security and control costs as margins come under pressure. Given the capital intensity of cell manufacturing and the differing requirements across vehicle segments, Macquarie expects most automakers to rely on a mix of in-house development, joint ventures and third-party sourcing—a model analysts likened to Geely’s own approach—instead of fully integrating battery production.
Geely also plans to expand the charging network to more than 22,000 stations and 100,000 charging guns by the end of 2027. The company said that the latest charging technology is focused on the Chinese domestic market and declined to comment about whether it could be deployed overseas.
Meanwhile, Geely continues to make inroads into the European market. The automaker recently announced a joint venture with Ford Motor to produce and co-develop EVs at Ford’s plant in Spain. It has also been expanding sales of its Zeekr and Lynk & Co brands in Europe.
EV sales in the U.S. have plummeted since last year after the Trump administration and Congress ended a $7,500 tax credit for battery-powered cars, and shredded regulations pushing for a mostly electric market by the 2030s. U.S. EV sales were down 48% year-over-year in August, according to Motor Intelligence.
AI Has Cracked the Most Diabolical Problems in Math. Why Can’t It Solve Chess?
Chess engines can beat grandmasters—but they can’t agree on a single infallible strategy. And, instead of ruining the game, artificial intelligence is now uncovering new ways of playing.
- Artificial intelligence has not mathematically solved chess, but it is helping human players by unlocking new ways of playing the game.
- Instead of finding a single foolproof strategy, AI has discovered that there are more sound ways to play chess than previously believed.
- Self-taught engines like Leela Chess Zero have revived opening strategies that were long considered tactically weak by human players.
The world has spent recent weeks coming to grips with the unfathomable power of artificial intelligence.
AI left academia’s brightest mathematicians slack-jawed when it found solutions to problems that once melted their brains. And it produced an international freakout after researchers sounded the alarm on technology that could bring about the end of mankind. At this point, AI seems capable of doing practically anything—and quickly.
So why hasn’t it cracked the code of the world’s most famous board game?
The starting math of chess is relatively straightforward. Thirty-two pieces on 64 squares with perfect information for both players—no one is bluffing or hiding any cards. Yet chess hasn’t been mathematically solved, because the astronomical number of possibilities eventually exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. And even though a cellphone can now checkmate Garry Kasparov, artificial intelligence hasn’t managed to concoct a foolproof plan to win every time.
But as it turns out, the story of chess and AI isn’t one of imminent doom. Instead of simply sinking human players with a single answer, AI is now helping them navigate the board by continuously unlocking secrets of the ancient game.
“You know what you’re getting with chess, and yet it remains timeless and unsolvable,” said Chess.com’s chief chess officer Danny Rensch. “The geometry within the geometry is a fascinating infinite problem.”
In checkers, for instance, computers have reached the level where perfect play by both sides will always result in a draw. And in even simpler games, they are now unplayable: A computer that’s given the opening move in a game of Connect Four cannot be beaten or even tied.
But oddly enough, the unprecedented computing power now pointed at chess hasn’t winnowed the number of strong moves—it has actually expanded them. Rather than finding one solution, artificial intelligence has discovered that there are more ways to play sound chess than previously believed. In other words, instead of squashing creativity, AI is inspiring it.
In a game where the decision tree expands frighteningly fast, both man and machine are only beginning to explore the full extent of a game that has been around for centuries.
“Humans don’t have a good intuition for what huge numbers mean, but there’s a huge difference between a billion and then the number of possible chess positions,” said Boris Power, the head of OpenAI’s applied research team. “It’s like comparing one second to the lifetime of the universe.”
It was nearly 30 years ago when chess helped mankind properly understand that it was being outsmarted by machines. After Kasparov, then the world champion, beat IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996, the computer earned its robot revenge in a 1997 rematch. It was a watershed moment, even for those who don’t know the first thing about fianchetti.
The years that followed were a dark age for chess. As top grandmasters began studying with computers, their tactics became stale and mechanical. Some feared that a game that had been long associated with intellect and creativity was losing its soul.
But those computers, which were trained on libraries of grandmaster-level games, were cave men compared to what was coming. Three decades on, the cutting edge of chess technology is artificial intelligence programmed to rediscover the wide world of possibilities from first principles. This time, a human wasn’t teaching a machine to play chess—the machine would teach itself. Leela Chess Zero, an open-source engine based on Google’s AlphaZero, has played over four billion games in order to become one of the most powerful engines around.
“No human heuristics were injected into it,” said Folkert Huizinga, a researcher who worked on Leela. “It learned everything from scratch.”
Leela even learned to play with attitude. All by itself, the computer combined the skills of a super grandmaster with the gamesmanship of a Washington Square Park hustler. Because Leela had, in a sense, learned to extend games as long as it wasn’t losing, it didn’t always take the most direct path to checkmate. Opponents interpreted this as showboating.
But when the engines aren’t trolling humanity, they’re changing how humans understand the game. Openings that had long been considered dead because players had concluded they were so tactically weak have been revived because the engines saw sequences that world champions couldn’t. One defense, commonly known as the Damiano Petrov, had been viewed for centuries as a recipe for disaster. Beginners are taught to avoid it from the time they learn how the knight moves.
AI, however, is here to rehabilitate the Damiano name. Upon further review, the machines have found ways to turn this slow-motion trap into a perfectly sound strategy.
“There’s a lot of richness in the games that you can reach with very intelligent play,” Huizinga said. “It’s a vast game space…we don’t even know what percent is explored.”
Power, the OpenAI researcher, said that even if there are simply too many combinations for a formal mathematical proof solving chess, there may come a day when optimal play is discovered and the game has been solved on a practical level. For now, he uses chess to understand artificial intelligence—and not the other way around.
When the company comes out with new versions of ChatGPT, Power likes to use chess as a benchmark for its capabilities. He has found that if he gives the latest models enough time to think, they create a chess engine from scratch that can reach grandmaster quality. But forced to calculate on their own, without coding, they’re substantially weaker.
“We want to see: Do the models get better at reasoning and being able to think in context?” Power said. “So, can the models spend more time thinking to come up with better solutions—a bit like a human does?”
Turkey arrests founder of brokerage at centre of $18bn alleged Ponzi scheme
Episode that torched savings of hundreds of thousands of investors has raised questions why regulators did not act sooner
Turkey has arrested the founder of an investment brokerage at the centre of an $18bn alleged Ponzi scheme that has torched the savings of hundreds of thousands of investors and raised questions about why regulators did not act earlier to stop it.
Emre Tezmen, chair of Tera Yatırım, was arrested early on Wednesday alongside Tera board members Kerem Alkin and Emre Alkin, local media reported.
Kerem Alkin served as Turkey’s ambassador to the OECD from 2021 to 2024 and previously sat on the boards of state-controlled Halkbank and Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund. His brother Emre Alkin, a prominent economist, is a frequent television commentator as well as rector of Istanbul’s Topkapı University.
Two other executives were also jailed pending trial, as part of the investigation into aggravated fraud and membership of a criminal organisation.
The scale of the scandal was laid bare on Wednesday when Turkey’s Capital Markets Board, or SPK, said it had affected more than 455,000 investors who held stakes in 131 funds with a total of about $18bn in assets. The funds are now being liquidated.
“God willing, the necessary steps will be taken in a short time to address grievances,” said justice minister Akın Gürlek, adding that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was “closely following the investigation”.
Prosecutors have frozen the assets of executives at financial firms linked to the scandal and restricted transactions by their spouses and close relatives, state-run news agency Anadolu reported.
Amid multiple news reports of figures who have been linked to the scandal wiring millions of dollars to Swiss bank accounts, prosecutors have also requested data on money and crypto transfers sent abroad since 2024.
The episode has come at an awkward time for finance minister Mehmet Şimşek, who has worked to restore confidence in Turkish economic management. So far there are few signs it could develop into a broader financial crisis.
The benchmark Bist 100 share index appears to have steadied after it fell 8 per cent last week. There is also little evidence that panicked local investors have rushed to buy hard currency or gold. Instead, lira deposits rose by $12bn in the week to September 15, Goldman Sachs estimated.
Attention is now increasingly turning to why regulators did not intervene earlier to forestall the crisis, which erupted last week after some funds struggled to meet investor redemptions. Many funds had concentrated their portfolios in illiquid shares whose prices rose sharply when the funds bought them.
Those higher share prices then boosted reported fund returns, attracting further investor money that was used to purchase the same or related stocks — a self-reinforcing pattern that Gürlek has compared to a Ponzi scheme.
A letter sent by the Istanbul chief prosecutor to the SPK in February 2025, which surfaced this week, shows that prosecutors asked it to investigate unusual share trading by Muhammed Yarız, the 28-year-old chair of Pusula Portföy — one of the funds now implicated in the scandal.
Ramazan Başak, a former deputy head of Turkey’s financial crimes agency Masak, has also said he repeatedly warned authorities about suspicious transactions but that his warnings went unheeded.
Başak was detained in April for disseminating misleading information in two social media posts, one of which questioned the plausibility of a fund’s reported 10,128 per cent return.
“We warned so many times, but no precautions were taken,” Başak said in an online interview this week. “Without political and bureaucratic support from above, carrying out these organised operations is simply not possible,” he alleged.
Ryanair boss tells investors to ‘grow up’ over his €150mn share scheme
Michael O’Leary warns that air fares could rise by a fifth as he defends latest airline contract
Ryanair’s investors who object to Michael O’Leary’s €150mn share rewards scheme need to “grow up”, the combative airline boss has said.
After 40 per cent of Ryanair’s investors voted against a contract for O’Leary this month, the airline now has to hold shareholder meetings to smooth out objections to the pay scheme, he complained on Wednesday.
Earlier this month, six out of 10 Ryanair investors backed O’Leary’s next contract from 2028, which will give him access to shares worth €150mn only if the airline increases its share price by 40 per cent or hits €4bn post-tax profit.
Some investors who objected “didn’t think the targets were aggressive enough”, O’Leary told the FT. “Ah lads, grow up . . . these are very ambitious, very aggressive targets, and if they’re delivered, all of you shareholders will almost double your money from where the share price is today,” he said.
Other investors objected because of their “ESG teams who just don’t like big egregious pay”, he added. They did not mind when footballers or their managers received £25mn in pay, he said.
Because the incentive scheme failed to secure 75 per cent approval, the airline now has to hold consultations with investors, even though the scheme itself will not change.
O’Leary, whose airline is the largest in Europe, also warned about rising airfares and said the company was cutting winter flights to save money.
He saw air fares for next summer rising 10 to 20 per cent if fuel prices remained at current levels. The price of jet fuel, which has nearly doubled during the Iran conflict, “may well be the norm for the next six to 12 months”, he told the FT.
He also warned that air fares could nearly double within the decade if jet fuel prices remain at higher levels.
“If [jet] fuel stays at $140 a barrel for the next five years, the average air fare will go from €50 to €80-€90 a ticket,” in the next six to eight years, he said. “There is no doubt in my mind, we’re underpricing air travel in Europe.”
Michael O’Leary: ‘There is no doubt in my mind, we’re underpricing air travel in Europe’ © Yui Mok/PA Wire
Deregulation of air travel in the US a decade ago meant that formerly low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines now has average air fares of $175, compared to Ryanair’s €50, he pointed out.
The airline will not cut flights next summer, when it believes customers will tolerate higher fares. But it is stripping back capacity this winter, taking out services on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as well as Saturday afternoons and early Sunday mornings in November and December, as well as in mid-January.
The carrier is significantly less hedged on jet fuel than in the past, as it waits for global prices to drop. Historically Ryanair has bought about 80 per cent of its fuel a year in advance; however, it is only 40 per cent hedged at the moment.
“We’ve made the decision to not hedge aggressively into next year because we think current prices are too high,” he said. “But we may call that wrong.” The carrier wanted to lock in prices below $100 a barrel, he said, in the hope that the US midterm elections in November may provide a catalyst for lower prices globally.
The industry’s reticence to lock in higher prices means that “none of our competitors are well hedged either”, he said, “so we’re all in this much more floating marketplace, which is why [the industry is] looking at fuel surcharges and higher fares next summer”.
Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence
Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have been speculating that the reason the AI works so well is because it’s OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Meta now says those comparisons aren’t entirely off-base. According to an X post by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.”
However, he clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.”
Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said that the team at Meta had fallen in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be “something like OpenClaw” that could be scaled to billions of people.
Because OpenClaw is an open source project, it wouldn’t be surprising that Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially given its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator earlier this year. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that involves taking promising products, then copying their best features — something it did most notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format.
Friedman’s statement on X was made in response to a post that had gone viral among the AI crowd, where Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.”
Nanda’s X post had included a conversation with Muse, where the AI agent said that the similarity between its own system files and those belonging to OpenClaw was not just “a coincidence” but rather “a match.”
Soon, this thread (and X more broadly) began blowing up as others shared their own comparisons and findings. For instance, one person pointed out that Muse also had a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file (written in a simple formatting language called Markdown) that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise.
A third noted that the files weren’t just named the same between the two assistants; their content was almost entirely the same.
Following his X post, Friedman also responded to a question about why Muse had copied the exact file names that made up the AI agent’s workspace and had “nearly identical content” for the SOUL.md file. Instead of disputing these claims, Friedman simply replied that “we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things exactly right.”
“We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw. After I used OpenClaw in January, I bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw (and other personal agents), Friedman said on X. (TechCrunch has corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability.)
“@steipete [Peter Steinberger] is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I think a lot of people were inspired by it. Our goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people,” he wrote.
The Muse app has been something of a hit so far, having recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. Data indicates that it’s now outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when the platforms and market availability are compared directly.
Reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement, saying the company had nothing more to add beyond that.