Category: 3. Business

Riverlane is the world leader in Quantum Error Correction (QEC), the technology that unlocks quantum computing’s promise of a new age of human progress.

We partner with over 60% of the world’s quantum computer companies and leading high-performance computing (HPC) centres, to solve the error problem blocking their path to ‘utility-scale’ systems that can transform multiple industries.

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Founded in 2016 as a spin-out from Cambridge University, Riverlane is headquartered in Cambridge and has offices in Boston in the US. The company has over $120 million in private funding, including an $85 million Series C round in 2024.

On 20 November 2025 in Ho Chi Minh City, TRAFFIC and the Vietnam Forestry Administration (VNFOREST) marked the successful completion of a five-year effort to help protect the Congo Basin rainforest — one of the world’s most important forest ecosystems.

The project brought together partners in Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, Vietnam and China to strengthen how timber is tracked and verified along its entire journey, from African forests to Asian factories.

At the closing event, 30 representatives from government, timber industry associations, research institutes, and civil society came together to reflect on Vietnam’s progress and agree on next steps to ensure the timber entering the country is legal, sustainable, and responsibly sourced.

Achievements and results for Vietnam

In Vietnam, the initiative primarily aimed to build on-the-ground expertise, training more than 300 forest rangers and customs officers across 47 provinces to identify illegal timber, understand sustainable forestry practices, and enforce Vietnamese and international timber laws.

Smart technology was also introduced by equipping customs officials with Xylorix Enforcer: a smartphone app that quickly identifies wood species in the field, making it harder for illegal timber to pass undetected through Vietnam’s borders.

These efforts created a nationwide network of trained inspectors, who now provide consistent screening across Vietnam’s entry points, significantly reducing illegal timber in the country’s manufacturing supply chain.

At the same time, the initiative promoted industry accountability by bringing together 100 timber companies to develop a voluntary Code of Conduct, a shared commitment to sourcing legal, sustainable wood, and keeping supply chains transparent.

As a result, 78 companies that demonstrated compliance with the Code of Conduct now have easier access to buyers in Europe, North America, and other markets where legal sourcing is increasingly required, turning responsible practices into a competitive advantage.

Mr. Nguyen Van Dien from VNFOREST commented:

“We’ve given our frontline officers the skills to tell legal timber from illegal timber. This not only protects our global forests but also makes Vietnamese wood products more trustworthy to international buyers, especially in strictly regulated markets like the European Union.”,

Mr. Tran Le Huy, Vice Chairman of the Gia Lai Forest Product Association (formerly of Binh Dinh province), noted:

Proving the legal origin of wood is now essential for competing in global markets. This initiative gave our businesses the knowledge and systems we need to show international buyers that our products meet their standards.”

Next steps

Looking ahead, partners agreed to move toward a second phase of the project to continue strengthening the legal, sustainable timber trade and global forest protection.

Priorities include continuing to train enforcement officers as regulations evolve, exploring new partnerships, and extending responsible sourcing practices to other sectors, including online timber sales.

Chen Hin Keong, TRAFFIC’s Senior Advisor on Forest Governance and Trade, concluded:

This project has shown that government and businesses working together, both within Vietnam and across borders, is essential for sustainable timber trade and protecting forests at their source. By strengthening how we verify and track timber across borders, we’ve enhanced Vietnam’s reputation as a reliable supplier in international markets.”

The two had just done something unusual for the moment: they built a small large-language model (LLM) trained not on massive internet data dumps, but on a tiny, carefully chosen set of high-quality conversations. And they taught it to improve itself using reinforcement learning (RL), a technique where a model learns the way a person or animal does: by making decisions, receiving feedback, and then refining behavior through rewards and penalties.

At the time, almost no one was doing this with language models. The only other group exploring RL for LLMs was DeepSeek, the Chinese OpenAI competitor that would later terrify Silicon Valley.

The two students, William Chen and Guan Wang, called their model OpenChat, and they open-sourced it on a whim.

To their shock, OpenChat blew up.

“It got very famous,” Chen told Fortune. Researchers at Berkeley and Stanford pulled the code, built on top of it, and began citing the work. In academic circles, it became one of the earliest examples of how a small model trained on good data, as opposed to more data, could punch above its weight.

Then it landed somewhere Chen never expected: Elon Musk’s inbox.

Musk sent an email through what, at the time, was his new company, xAI, which wanted to recruit the students in a multi-million dollar pay package, Chen says. It was the kind of offer young founders dreamed of. 

They hesitated. Then, they turned it down.

“We decided that large-language models have their limitations,” Chen said. “We want a new architecture that will overcome the structural limitation of [large-scale machine learning].”

Instead of taking the deal, they left the comfortable momentum of OpenChat behind and pursued something far more ambitious: a “brain-inspired” reasoning system they believed could outperform current AI models.

That decision would lead, two years later, to Sapient Intelligence — and to a model that outperformed some of the world’s biggest AI systems on tests of abstract reasoning. They are confident their model is going to be the first to achieve “AGI,” or “artificial general intelligence, the so-called holy grail in AI research where a machine’s intelligence can match or surpass that of a human in any cognitive task.

Between the two worlds of the arms race

Chen’s path to turning down Musk didn’t begin in Beijing, but in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and with a childhood obsession that drove his parents crazy.

“When I was young, I would break things apart and never put them back together,” he said. “That’s what got me started.”

Chan was born in China, raised partly in San Diego and Shenzhen, and eventually sent to attend Cranbrook Schools — a prestigious private boarding school in Michigan — around the time he met Wang, a boy his age who attended a different school but had an equally unusual obsession.

On the first day they met, the two fell into a long conversation about what Chen calls their “metagoals,” the ultimate purpose of their lives.

For Wang, that metagoal was AGI, long before the term became popular. He described it in high school as an “algorithm that solves any problem,” since the terminology didn’t exist yet. Chen’s metagoal was different but complementary: optimizing everything, from engineering problems to real-world systems.

“It was an instant alignment,” Chen said. 

Today, the two still ask every single person they hire what their metagoals are. 

Chen founded the school’s drone club, petitioned administrators to let students fly quadcopters on campus, and spent hours tinkering in robotics labs. The two were the kids who stayed late, broke hardware, and kept experimenting.

“It was a great time,” Chen said. 

When college admissions rolled around, Chen was accepted to Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech — the obvious, prestigious paths for a gifted robotics student. Wang, meanwhile, had been admitted to Tsinghua University, China’s elite engineering powerhouse, often described as “China’s MIT.”

Chen visited the Beijing campus, toured the labs, and made a decision few American high schoolers would: He followed Wang to Tsinghua. 

The transition wasn’t easy. The coursework was intense, and the two struggled, even flunking some classes.

“Most of the Chinese kids are really — I hate to be stereotypical — but they’re really good at studying,” Chen laughed. “They’re really sharp.”

Still, he was surprised by how supportive his professors were once they learned what he and Wang were building.

“They were like, ‘Hey, I know this thing you’re trying to make — it’s a very good thing. I actually believe in the concept of AGI,’” he said.

By then, nearly everyone in Tsinghua’s Brain Cognition and Brain-Inspired Intelligence Lab knew what the two undergraduates were attempting: a new approach to machine intelligence that challenged the dominant assumptions of the field.

A 3 a.m. breakthrough

It was at Tsinghua’s brain lab where they developed the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), the architecture they believe can surpass transformers entirely.

If OpenChat was their proof of concept, HRM was the moonshot they had been building towards. And the moment it proved itself came, appropriately, in the dead of night.

On a random early morning in June this year, at 3 a.m., Chen and Wang stared at the benchmark results returned by their small experimental model. Their tiny HRM prototype — just 27 million parameters, microscopic compared to GPT-4 or Claude — was outperforming systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek on tasks designed specifically to measure reasoning.

It solved Sudoku-Extreme, found optimal passages through 30×30 mazes, and achieved startlingly high performance on the ARC-AGI benchmark — all without chain-of-thought prompting or brute-force scaling.

“It was crazy,” Chen said. “Just with a change in the architecture, it gave the model a lot of what we call reasoning depth.” 

Unlike a transformer, which predicts the next word based on statistical patterns, HRM uses a two-part recurrent structure modeled loosely on how the human brain mixes slow, deliberate thought with fast reflexive reactions. The system can plan, dissect problems, and reason using internal logic rather than imitation. “It’s not guessing,” Chen said. “It’s thinking.”

Chen says their models hallucinate far less than traditional LLMs and already match state-of-the-art performance in time-series forecasting tasks like weather prediction, quantitative trading, and medical monitoring.

They are now working on scaling HRM into a general-purpose reasoning engine, with a simple but radical thesis: that AGI won’t come from bigger transformers, but smaller, more efficient architecture. Today’s frontier models are massive — in some cases, hundreds of billions of parameters — but even their creators admit they struggle with reasoning, planning, and multi-step problem decomposition, Chen said. 

He believes that limitation is structural, not temporary.

“You can stack more layers,” he says. “But you’re still hitting the limits of a probability model.”

Sapient is now preparing to open a U.S. office within the next month, raise additional funding, and maybe change their name to begin deploying the second version of their model. The founders believe continuous learning — the ability for a model to absorb new experiences safely, without retraining from scratch — is the next major frontier. 

“AGI is the holy grail of AI” Chen says. And he expects it to emerge in the next decade. 

“One day, we’re going to have an AI that’s smarter than humans,” Chen said. “Guan and I always say it’s like Pandora’s box, if we’re not going to make it, someone else will. So we hope that we’re going to be the first one to make that happen.”

Americans are feeling rattled about the state of the economy. Donald Trump has batted away question after question from reporters on concerns over higher prices, just a year after he won an election promising to bring down costs.

While the White House has tried to reduce concern, floating tariff-funded $2,000 stimulus checks and removing import levies on certain agricultural imports, many consumers remain anxious.

Preparing for the holiday season, and bracing for the spending it often demands, Guardian readers across the US expressed apprehension – and explained how they plan to spend – in this economy. Many said the higher cost of necessities, like groceries, was imposing on their ability to buy gifts for family and friends.

“I love giving people gifts,” said Grace Brown, 34, of Charlotte, North Carolina. “I’m a person that pays attention all year and will keep notes in my phone if someone mentions something in July they may want.”

But this year is different. As prices have climbed over the last year, Brown said that her budget for gifts has shrunk. Things already feel squeezed: she and her fiance are already limiting eating out, and have agreed they won’t exchange gifts with each other this holiday.

“Prices for everything have gone up,” Brown said. “It’s kind of hard to have luxuries.”

Collection of key pricing data was halted during the shutdown, so it’s unclear how much higher prices have been rising. In September, the latest available reading, prices went up 3%, compared with 2.3% in April.

Regardless of the official data, consumers feel like prices have been climbing. On Tuesday, the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence had fallen to its lowest level since April, when Trump first announced his full slate of tariffs. The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, another measure of consumer sentiment, similarly showed drops in confidence after the summer.

“Being on a fixed income, we have had to cut way back on our spending for the holiday,” said Jeffrey Larimore, 68, of Caldwell, Idaho. “We had enough disposable income to go out to dinner, take weekend trips and spoil [my granddaughters]. Since the tariffs have raised the cost of living, we have cut out all of that.”

Ryan, a retired law enforcement officer in Texas, who wished to withhold his last name, said his family “can barely put food on the table” let alone do holiday shopping for his young children.

“I’m scrambling to find some way to preserve some aspect of magic for them,” he said. “I spent my life in service to my country. What he [Trump] has done in less than a single year breaks my heart.”

Recent surveys indicated that Americans are set to cut back on holiday shopping this year. Deloitte estimated that spending could be down 4% compared with last year, while the National Retail Federation said that after hitting a record high last year, the amount of money Americans are planning to spend this year is down 1.3%.

In addition to prices going up, more Americans are concerned about the labor market. While expectations of unemployment dropped after Trump’s election, it has been climbing up over the last year. This sentiment tracks with the slow rise in unemployment, which was 4.4% in September – the highest it’s been since October 2021. For many, this means that higher prices aren’t the only concern.

“My homeowner’s insurance is up, 2026 health insurance is up, property taxes are up for 2026,” said Sarah Tenbensel of Minneapolis. “I may need a second job very soon.”

Shari Dunn, 57, of Oregon, said that in addition to prices going up, “there is fear regarding employment and contacts”. “It’s more than just tariffs – it’s everything. The instability and fear,” she said.

Dunn said she is participating in the economic boycott taking place over the Black Friday shopping holiday, one of a handful of consumer boycotts that have been organized since Trump started his second term.

For some, this past year has meant opting out of the economy in frustration with national politics. Linda McKim Bell, 79, of Portland, Oregon, said that she has tried not to buy anything new since Trump took office.

“I have shopped all year at online thrift stores for my family gifts,” she said. “I am making the rest of our holiday gifts: orange marmalade and homemade pastries make great gifts. Will continue to buy items that are used as much as possible.”

Brown said that even though she and her fiance have agreed not to exchange gifts, she may make a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, and support local artists there as the community continues to recover from Hurricane Helene.

“Whenever we have money to spend, we try to spend it there with small businesses,” Brown said. “One thing I just remember from high school is my teacher would always tell us ‘you vote with your dollars’.”

US–Vietnam trade continues to grow, with key states leading most of the activity. Vietnam depends on US exports for production inputs, forming an integrated trade network supported by major transport hubs.

Recent data show trade between Vietnam and the US is continuing on its robust growth trajectory, as tariff pressures are partly relieved by the prospect of a new bilateral agreement. Vietnam’s exports to the US reached a record of US$126.16 billion in the first ten months of 2025 – up 28 percent year-on-year.

The most recent data was released a week after the fifth round of direct negotiations on the US–Vietnam Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade Agreement, which took place in Washington, D.C., from November 12 to 14. Alongside the negotiation agenda, both sides participated in activities aimed at enhancing bilateral economic and investment cooperation, expanding trade connections, and garnering support for the ongoing negotiations of the reciprocal trade agreement.

Speaking to Vietnam Briefing, Dan Martin – Assistant Manager of International Business Advisor at Dezan Shira & Associates – noted that the US–Vietnam trade relationship has grown into something much more strategic than tariff schedules or export numbers suggest. “What’s taking shape is a new layer of industrial interdependence across the Pacific. Vietnam is moving into higher-value manufacturing, and American supply chains are adapting around that shift. It’s less about diversification for its own sake and more about building a second anchor in Asia that can sustain long-term production stability,” said Martin. 

Recent developments present a positive outlook, highlighting resilient growth in trade between the two countries. This growth is fueled by strengthening bilateral relations, the global shift in manufacturing orders, and the increasing demand of the US market for a wide variety of Vietnam’s products, from electronics to agricultural goods.

See also: US-Vietnam Framework for Trade Agreement: Key Terms and Expectations

Two-way trade overview

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The US remained Vietnam’s largest export market in the first 10 months of 2025, accounting for more than 30 percent of Vietnam’s total shipments.

Vietnam-US trade is dominated by Vietnam’s tech-oriented exports, alongside strong traditional sectors such as textiles, footwear, and wood products.

Vietnam’s imports from the US mainly comprise production inputs such as electronics components, cotton, machinery, and plastic raw materials, underscoring a vertically integrated trade relationship in which Vietnam ships finished goods and relies on the US for key manufacturing materials.

Vietnam’s integration with the US economy runs deeper than many realize. The trade balance masks a complex ecosystem in which American inputs feed Vietnam’s factories, and finished goods return to US consumers. That loop has become a critical stabilizer in global manufacturing. For American firms, the competitive edge now lies in how effectively they can manage that loop – through technology transfer, supplier oversight, and resilient logistics. – Dan Martin, Assistant Manager of International Business Advisor, Dezan Shira & Associates

Key US transport hubs in Vietnam–US trade flow

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Examining transport destinations, US–Vietnam trade flows are heavily concentrated in just a few key states, with California leading through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the Los Angeles and San Francisco international airports. These ports and airports account for the largest share of total value and emphasize the state’s central role in managing electronics-heavy, high-volume shipments.

Illinois follows thanks to Chicago O’Hare’s strong air-cargo throughput, while New Jersey and Georgia contribute mid-tier volumes via Newark and Savannah. Alaska and Washington appear as strategic air and seaport transit points, and Texas rounds out the list with Houston’s energy-linked capacity, showing that while multiple states participate, US–Vietnam trade is overwhelmingly West Coast-centric, with Illinois as the major inland exception.

Top US states importing from Vietnam

Imports from Vietnam to the top US states grew steadily from 2018 to 2024, though there were notable shifts. While California continues to dominate, Illinois and the South are emerging markets, and Texas illustrates the importance of monitoring sector trends and diversifying sourcing strategies.

From 2018 to 2024, California was the largest importer of Vietnamese commodities, rising from US$13.6 billion to US$38.5 billion, driven by tech and consumer goods. Illinois also grew rapidly, reaching US$12.7 billion in 2024, signaling emerging demand in manufacturing and logistics.

Texas, meanwhile, showed more volatility, peaking in 2022 before declining, reflecting possible supply chain or sector-specific changes. Southern states like Tennessee and Georgia experienced steady growth, reaching US$8.1 billion and US$6.7 billion, respectively, highlighting their increasing role in industrial and manufacturing trade.

Top US states exporting to Vietnam

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A majority of US exports to Vietnam are concentrated in a small group of states, with Texas and California consistently among the top contributors, each maintaining US$1.6 billion to US$2.3 billion annually, reflecting strong demand for machinery, tech goods, and agricultural products.

Washington and Illinois remain smaller but steady exporters, each following a moderate, stable trend.

Oregon case study: How the US can reduce its deficit with Vietnam

While the data shows US exports to Vietnam are anchored mainly by West Coast states and Texas, Oregon’s 2024 spike is an interesting example of how new dynamics are shaping trade between the two countries.

FIND BUSINESS SUPPORT

According to Business Oregon, Vietnam is Oregon’s fifth-largest export market worldwide and the second-largest in Southeast Asia. The sharp increase was fueled by strong growth in electronics and machinery exports, particularly semiconductor-related products. As Vietnam seeks to position itself as a regional hub for emerging technologies, especially in AI and data-driven sectors, Oregon’s high-tech exports have become an important source of critical inputs supporting that ambition.

Oregon is also actively seeking deeper collaboration with Vietnam. The state’s leadership recently explored opportunities in Da Nang City, focusing on priority sectors such as chip technology, logistics, and free trade zone (FTZ) development. Continued investment expansion could further boost exports from Oregon.

Oregon’s experience demonstrates a practical way for the US to cut its trade deficit with Vietnam. By aligning state-level efforts with Vietnam’s strategic goals, other US states and businesses can follow this model. Building partnerships, spotting emerging sectors, and supporting investment in related industries could help balance trade and strengthen long-term economic connections between the countries. – Dan Martin, Assistant Manager of International Business Advisor, Dezan Shira & Associates

Vietnam’s top importers by industry

According to the latest Vietnam customs and importers data, the country has over 32,000 importers operating across different industries. Total imports reached US$379 billion, up 6 percent from the previous year.

Takeaways

For US businesses, understanding which states lead trade with Vietnam is critical. Companies should focus on high-growth sectors like semiconductors, machinery, and textiles, align exports with Vietnam’s strategic priorities, and leverage key transport hubs in California, Illinois, and Texas.

Emerging states such as Oregon demonstrate that state-level engagement can expand export potential, while monitoring supply chain shifts ensures resilience and maximizes opportunities in the growing Vietnam-US trade relationship.

Also see

Volatus Aerospace (TSXV:FLT) just wrapped up a follow-on equity offering, raising over CAD 20 million. The company also completed a private placement with significant participation from new international backers, including Unusual Machines, Inc.

See our latest analysis for Volatus Aerospace.

After raising fresh capital and drawing in new strategic investors, Volatus Aerospace’s momentum is grabbing attention. The company’s 1-year total shareholder return of 380% signals major value creation, even as the last month’s share price return pulled back. With momentum building again in recent days, these funding events may represent a turning point in market perception and growth prospects.

If these strategic moves have you interested in what else is happening across advanced aviation and defense, discover See the full list for free.

With shares still trading at a meaningful discount to analyst targets, investors have to wonder: is Volatus Aerospace offering real upside at today’s price, or are markets already factoring in its ambitious growth plans?

Volatus Aerospace is currently trading at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 13.4, a striking premium relative to both its North American Airlines industry peers and its own revenue prospects. At the last close of CA$0.60, this high multiple stands out against an industry average of just 0.5x and an estimated fair P/S ratio of 1.9x.

The P/S ratio shows how much investors are willing to pay for each dollar of revenue. For a growth-focused, unprofitable company like Volatus Aerospace, the metric can reflect expectations for rapid future expansion or premium segment leadership. It also exposes how much optimism is already built into the current share price.

Compared to peers, the gap is enormous. The market is currently valuing Volatus at levels much higher than both the typical airline and what regression analysis suggests is reasonable for a business at this stage. If investor enthusiasm holds, it could imply lasting belief in substantial top-line growth that may not yet be realized. However, history shows these premiums rarely remain if business results fail to keep up.

Explore the SWS fair ratio for Volatus Aerospace

Result: Price-to-Sales of 13.4x (OVERVALUED)

However, volatile earnings and lofty revenue expectations may leave the share price vulnerable if Volatus Aerospace’s business execution falls short of investor hopes.

Find out about the key risks to this Volatus Aerospace narrative.

While the current price-to-sales ratio suggests Volatus Aerospace is trading at a steep premium, our SWS DCF model shows a different picture. According to this approach, shares are actually trading nearly 59% below fair value. Does this mean the market is overlooking Volatus’s longer-term growth prospects?

Look into how the SWS DCF model arrives at its fair value.

Simply Wall St performs a discounted cash flow (DCF) on every stock in the world every day (check out Volatus Aerospace for example). We show the entire calculation in full. You can track the result in your watchlist or portfolio and be alerted when this changes, or use our stock screener to discover 927 undervalued stocks based on their cash flows. If you save a screener we even alert you when new companies match – so you never miss a potential opportunity.

If you see things differently or want to dive into the numbers yourself, you can shape your own Volatus Aerospace story in just a few minutes. Do it your way

A great starting point for your Volatus Aerospace research is our analysis highlighting 2 key rewards and 1 important warning sign that could impact your investment decision.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

Companies discussed in this article include FLT.V.

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