If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition. Apparently, it's asking way too much to expect a human to figure out how to make a small repair, or write a note to a friend, or plan a meal to feed a child. I've got a perverse favorite among these ads, for Apple Intelligence. A sharp-looking Black man of maybe fifty named Lance sits down at a drab, clean conference table full of colleagues. Somebody asks him if he's read a "prospectus," and Lance decides to lie about it.

CloudWalk, an artificial intelligence enterprise, was officially listed on the Shanghai Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market) on Friday. During its first day of trading, its share price rose 56% to 24 yuan ($3.58) per share before settling at a closing price of 21.4 yuan and a current market value of 15.85 billion yuan. CloudWalk was born in a laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founder Zhou Xi graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2011, Zhou returned to China to set up an AI team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2015, he founded CloudWalk.

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up SenseTime Group has postponed its $767m Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) after being placed on a US investment blacklist. SenseTime said it remained committed to completing the offering and would publish a supplemental prospectus and an updated listing timetable. Reuters first reported earlier on Monday the company's plan to withdraw the offering and update its prospectus to include the potential impact of the US investment ban, with the aim of relaunching the IPO process. SenseTime had planned to sell 1.5 billion shares in a price range of HK$3.85 ($0.49) to HK$3.99 ($0.51), according to its regulatory filings. That would raise up to $767m, a figure that had already been trimmed earlier this year from a $2bn target.

SenseTime, whose products are used in smart cities, police surveillance and autonomous driving, had planned to raise as much as $767 million in an initial share sale on the Hong Kong stock exchange this month. On Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department named SenseTime among 25 individuals and entities that it said were connected to "human rights abuse and repression in several countries around the globe," and added it to a list of companies that it says are supporting China's military. U.S. authorities cited the use of SenseTime's facial-recognition technology in China's effort to suppress and assimilate mainly Muslim ethnic minorities in western China. The designation prevents Americans from investing in the company. On Saturday, SenseTime said the accusation was baseless and reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding of our company."

Last November, the Chinese government ordered Ant Group, a business spun out of Alibaba that operates the ubiquitous Alipay mobile payments platform and other financial services, to cancel its hotly anticipated IPO at the last moment. Shortly after ride-hailing giant DiDi went ahead with an IPO in New York this summer despite government concerns, officials removed the company's app from Chinese app stores and ordered it to comply with an extensive cybersecurity review. Soon after, ByteDance, operator of wildly popular news and entertainment apps, as well as the short-video sensation TikTok outside of China, shelved its own plans for an IPO to comply with tighter government rules around data protection and security. So it's a little odd that two titans of China's artificial intelligence industry, SenseTime and Megvii, are proceeding with plans for IPOs seemingly unbothered, with listings on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges, respectively. After a decade of unchecked growth, many Chinese tech firms now face a stark new reality, with canceled IPOs, stricter regulations, and hefty fines.

TYSONS, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--QOMPLX, a leader in cloud-native risk analytics, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire RPC Tyche LLP ("Tyche"), a rapidly growing insurance software modeling and consulting firm based in London, Cambridge, Paris and Chicago. Tyche bolsters QOMPLX's insurance analytics offerings, and the combined business will offer more comprehensive insurance underwriting, pricing, risk modeling, capital modeling, and reserving functionality. It is an exceptional software business that combines innovative technology with actuarial expertise to help reduce the time and costs that insurers, reinsurers and intermediaries face in producing actionable data feeding today's commercial and regulatory decision-making. Tyche and QOMPLX's combined team are building the insurance data factory of the future with superior capabilities for data integration, transformation, analysis, and contextualization for corporations, employees, and consumers. Tyche's core modeling platform focuses on the complex challenges facing insurers: pricing risks, modeling and reserving capital, and improving efficiency.

One of China's most valuable artificial intelligence chipmakers Cambricon is one step closer to its initial public offering, and its prospectus reveals a rare snapshot of where Chinese companies stand in relation to their international counterparts in this critical field. Cambricon got the nod in early June to list on the Star Market, China's new Nasdaq-like stock exchange conceived to attract high-potential tech startups. This week, the chipmaker received the final green light from the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the stock market watchdog, for its first-time sale. The company is aiming to raise 2.8 billion yuan ($400 million) from its IPO and spend the proceeds on cloud-based algorithm training and inference, edge computing, and cash flow boost. It was last valued at 2.5 billion yuan in 2018 and expects its market cap to exceed 1.5 billion yuan when it floats.

In recent times, regulators have begun to explore the use of technology to help them perform their regulatory and supervisory functions. Known as RegTech (a contraction of the terms "regulatory" and "technology") and also SupTech (a contraction of the terms'supervision' and'technology"), innovation in this area includes the use of natural language processing (NLP) – a form of artificial intelligence – to facilitate and enhance the review of documents by regulators to assess compliance with disclosure requirements. There is a broad range of documents to which such technology might be applied, including corporate accounts, corporate announcements, company prospectuses and financial product disclosure documents. Developments in RegTech have accompanied developments in FinTech (for a discussion about FinTech and smart contracts, see China Business Law Journal volume 7 issue 8: FinTech and smart contracts). This column explores the potential that NLP offers in the area of corporate disclosure, and the legal and regulatory implications that arise as a result. These implications include the following: (1) whether technology will change the way in which the language of corporate disclosure and disclosure standards are interpreted by regulators; (2) whether regulators will be able to maintain transparency in relation to how technology is used to monitor and review corporate disclosure; and (3) how to maintain an appropriate degree of human involvement and guarantee trust in the process.

Chinese AI firm Megvii Technology, backed by Alibaba, has filed in Hong Kong to conduct an IPO targeting proceeds of at least $500 million, two people said, just as the city faces political unrest and its first recession in a decade. Beijing-based Megvii, widely known for facial recognition platform Face, may raise as much as $1 billion in the initial public offering, said one of the people, who expect the share sale in the fourth quarter of the year. The filing comes as companies postpone or slow down listing plans in a recession-bound city blighted with nearly three months of anti-government protests, and where the benchmark Hang Seng share price index fell to seven-month lows this month. Reuters reported last week that China's biggest ecommerce firm, Alibaba Group, had delayed its up to $15 billion Hong Kong listing. Megvii has decided to press ahead with its IPO plans because it has little business in Hong Kong and expects the unrest to ease later this year, said a third person.

Thousands of machine-learning scientists have said that they will boycott a new closed-access Nature journal in a dispute that illustrates unease over how publishers use prestigious brands to muscle in to new disciplines. More than 2,500 researchers have signed a petition declaring that they will not submit to, review or edit for Nature Machine Intelligence, set to launch in January, which will charge subscription fees for access in a discipline where "virtually all" publication outlets are open. Academics are concerned that the Nature brand could entice researchers away from open-access alternatives. Christoph Lippert, head of a statistical genomics lab at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, who has signed the petition, said that researchers in the field "are not used to brand-name journals. In fact, no journal in the field has more than a single-digit impact factor," he said, referring to a controversial measure of journal prestige based on average paper citation counts.