Rare Whiskies and Asia's Cocktail Elites Take Centre Stage at Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026

Over 500 expressions, an exclusive collector's bottling, 16 regional bars and MICHELIN Starred Dining headline a two-day celebration at Grand Lisboa Palace

MACAU, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SJM Resorts, S.A. ("SJM"), in collaboration with Whisky Magazine, will present Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026 at Grand Lisboa Palace Resort Macau on 27 and 28 November, bringing together an international showcase of fine whisky, exceptional cocktails, gastronomy and live entertainment. This year's programme features more than 500 premium whiskies and fine spirits from over 80 international brands, alongside an exclusive event bottling, expert-led masterclasses and an expanded Asia Bar Show featuring 16 bars.

Asia's Cocktail Talent Converges at Grand Lisboa Palace

The Asia Bar Show will return with 16 bars, showcasing contemporary cocktail craftsmanship and distinctive drinking cultures. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet acclaimed bartenders and discover the stories behind each serve.

Representing Grand Lisboa Palace, MESA Bar at THE KARL LAGERFELD MACAU, winner of the Best Restaurant's Bar in Macau award, will join a distinguished line-up from Asia. This includes Seoul's Villa Records, selected for the 50 Best Discovery guide in 2026; Seoul's Alice Cheongdam, ranked No. 13 and Beijing's TIAO, ranked No. 50 on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026; Hong Kong's Tell Camellia and Taipei's Bar Mood, ranked No. 81 and No. 82 respectively on the extended list. Other participating bars include Hong Kong's The Old Man, Artifact, Clan & Company Community Bar, and Uncle Ming's, along with Macau's Wood House and Taipei's Some Fun.

Exclusive Bottling Celebrates the Art of Japanese Whisky

An exclusive event bottling adds further appeal for discerning collectors and whisky enthusiasts, continuing the Whisky Live tradition of offering a rare annual release. The Ichiro's Malt & Grain Single Cask Blended Whisky is limited to only 232 bottles worldwide. Finished in an Imperial Stout cask and matured in Chichibu, it reveals rich aromas of dark chocolate, roasted coffee and caramel malt, with notes of vanilla and a lingering smoky finish.

Meet the Masters Behind Exceptional Whiskies

A series of expert-led masterclasses will bring visitors face to face with international whisky figures, offering first-hand insights into the craftsmanship of celebrated distilleries.

Featured speakers include Martin Markvardsen, Senior Brand Ambassador of Highland Park and a Master of the Quaich, who will explore the Orkney distillery's signature character. The programme will also welcome leading distillery representatives, including Hiroyuki Doda, Founder of Niigata Kameda Distillery; Michiaki Shinozaki, eighth-generation President of Shinozaki Co., Ltd., the company behind Shindo Distillery; Yasuaki Makishi, Master Distiller of The Ontake Distillery; and Kit Cheung, Co-Founder of Tankyu Distillery, the trailblazer behind Hong Kong's craft spirits.

SJM's Culinary Heritage Elevates the Whisky Experience

The event will feature gourmet booths showcasing SJM's MICHELIN-Starred and signature culinary portfolio. A dedicated VIP Lounge will offer guests the chance to savour selected rare spirits alongside refined canapés and dim sum, while enjoying live performances.

Grand Lisboa Palace's two One-MICHELIN-Starred restaurants, Palace Garden and Don Alfonso 1890, will host exclusive whisky pairing dinners. On 27 November, Palace Garden will present its refined interpretation of Qing Dynasty Taishi cuisine and dishes infused with whisky, paired with the classic flavours of Tormore and Port Askaig whiskies. On 28 November, Don Alfonso 1890 will pair Highland Park's whiskies with its signature South Italian cuisine.

Two Evenings of Music and Entertainment

A lively entertainment programme will complement the festive atmosphere of the event. Renowned Hong Kong jazz pianist Ted Lo and pop-jazz singer Ashia Liu will take the stage in turn with a four-piece band, while DJ SAIYAN and vocalist Filipe Tou will team up for an energetic performance on opening night. The following night, Malaysian singer Karen Kong will perform pop and R&B with a four-piece band, while Hong Kong producer and singer-songwriter JNYBEATZ will present a mix of hip-hop, electronic music and reimagined Cantopop favourites.

A Complete Festival Getaway at Grand Lisboa Palace

SJM will introduce three accommodation packages for a sensory journey combining a stay at Grand Lisboa Palace with admission to the event, tasting tokens, and a host of premium privileges, starting from MOP2,488++.

Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026
Date: Friday, 27 November and Saturday, 28 November 2026
Time: 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Venue: The Grand Hall, Grand Lisboa Palace Resort Macau
Early Bird Period: Now to 15 November 2026

Tickets are now available at: www.whiskylivehkmacau.com

Hotel packages available at: https://www.grandlisboapalace.com/en/offers/whisky-live-macau-2026-hotel-packages

Other Ticketing Channel: mPass, mFood, ICBC e-Life, Aomi, Kong Seng, Daimai, Ctrip, Trip.com, Dianping

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Rare Whiskies and Asia's Cocktail Elites Take Centre Stage at Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026

Rare Whiskies and Asia's Cocktail Elites Take Centre Stage at Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026

Rare Whiskies and Asia's Cocktail Elites Take Centre Stage at Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026

Rare Whiskies and Asia's Cocktail Elites Take Centre Stage at Whisky Live & Fine Spirits Macau 2026

A state-of-the-art general-purpose model in its class, built through automated AI research and designed to advance AI and scientific discovery.

BEIJING, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Apex Intelligence has released Apex-35B-V1.0, its first model. Built on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and further developed through mid-training and post-training, the 35B general-purpose model incorporates extensive proprietary datasets and research trajectories.

According to Apex Intelligence's evaluations, Apex-35B-V1.0 leads the similarly sized models tested in research and development capabilities while maintaining strong general-purpose performance. On selected benchmarks, it is competitive with substantially larger models.

AI participated autonomously in the model's development, including data construction, experiment design, code execution, analysis of training results and training optimization. Apex-35B-V1.0 can perform coding, agent workflows, question answering and deep search. It can also carry out end-to-end computational research workflows in AI research, computational science and robotics simulation.

Benchmark performance

Across 21 benchmarks, Apex-35B-V1.0 outperformed the similarly sized Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on 20 and Recursive Flint (40B) on 18, tying Recursive Flint on one. Beyond its strong performance on research tasks, the model demonstrated broad competitiveness in agentic tasks, coding, and reasoning, and surpassed larger models on selected benchmarks. Further details are available in the technical article.

Tech Blog：https://www.apexin.com/apex-35b/

Building Apex-35B-V1.0 Through Recursive Self-Improvement

Apex Intelligence developed Apex Research, an automated research system designed to enable recursive self-improvement. The system identifies model weaknesses, generates hypotheses, runs experiments and turns findings into measurable improvements. It contributed to the development of Apex-35B-V1.0 through self-evolving training data, automated experimentation, training recipes, GPU kernels and inference optimization.

Apex Research generates targeted training data to address weaknesses revealed by evaluation. When evaluations identified failures in computational fluid dynamics, the system analyzed the reasoning gaps, synthesized and validated new scientific training examples, and incorporated them into subsequent training rounds. Apex Intelligence reports that this process improved performance on its internal CFD-Bench by 32.1 points.

The system also analyzes evaluation results and agent trajectories to identify recurring failure patterns and refine training strategies. After identifying excessively long reasoning contexts and imbalanced data mixtures as factors affecting agent performance, it explored sequence-length distributions, short-to-long trajectory sampling ratios and token-aware batch compositions to improve agent reliability and training efficiency.

Apex Research extends this optimization to training and inference infrastructure. On the training side, its work on GPU load balancing, communication and computation overlap, dynamic batching, and token-aware workload distribution delivered 45–60% higher training throughput, according to Apex Intelligence. On the inference side, optimizations to attention kernels, KV-cache management and prefill/decode execution delivered 1.6–1.8 times faster decoding and 30–35% lower time to first token under comparable workloads.

Together, these improvements across data, training and infrastructure form a feedback loop in which each research iteration supports the next.

Availability

The weights for Apex-35B-V1.0 are available on Hugging Face. Accompanying code, a deployment guide and usage examples are available on GitHub. Developers can download and run the model for AI development, scientific computing and other research tasks. Model versions, hardware requirements, supported inference frameworks and licensing information are detailed on the project pages.

GitHub：https://github.com/apexin-ai/Apex-35B-V1.0

Hugging Face：https://huggingface.co/Apexintelligence-AI/Apex-35B-V1.0

About Apex Intelligence and what comes next

Apex Intelligence was founded by Yongchao Chen, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University's College of AI. The company aims to build the next generation of self-evolving foundation models for research. By "self-evolving," it means enabling AI to participate in research, experimentation and validation, then using the resulting discoveries to improve the model itself.

Apex Intelligence aims to advance AI from an assistant to a research collaborator capable of contributing to new discoveries. Its long-term vision is to develop models whose collective research capability matches and progressively surpasses that of 100,000 leading AI scientists across disciplines.

Following Apex-35B-V1.0, the company plans to release a larger self-evolving foundation model with stronger AI research capabilities and expanded applications in scientific fields including chip design and quantum computing. Apex Intelligence plans to announce further details on the model's capabilities, benchmark results and availability.

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Apex Intelligence Releases Apex-35B-V1.0, a General-Purpose Model Built With Automated AI Research