Chinese companies are making announcements about artificial intelligence again – this time about applications. Search engine giant Baidu earlier this month revealed, among other AI tools, a platform for creating advertising campaigns – similar to Google’s AI-powered ads. Early corporate testers of Baidu’s AI ad platform, called QingGe, told reporters conversion rates are up 20% – at a fraction of the typical time an agency would usually need. “Early movers in the [large language model] market have already started the commercialization process, and regulatory approval for 10+ LLMs to open to the public has further cleared roadblocks to monetization,” Nomura analysts said in a Sept. 10 note, citing meetings with businesses and industry experts in Beijing in the few days prior. Around the same time, Tencent announced it is integrating its AI model into advertising content creation, and its own Zoom-like video conferencing app. The company also opened the waitlist for a ChatGPT-like chatbot that sits within its social messaging app WeChat. Known locally as Weixin, the app has more than 1 billion users. That scale is the advantage China has had, coupled with an ability to ramp up internet penetration to support an online ecosystem – from Taobao e-commerce sales to scan-to-ride bike shares. Open-minded consumer Locals are still eager to participate. Luckin Coffee teamed up with Chinese alcohol giant Kweichow Moutai this month to sell a spiked latte. It sold more than 5.4 million cups on the first day, Luckin said. That surge in popularity just “reinforces our understanding and our belief that Chinese consumers are very open-minded with new products,” Joey Wat, CEO of KFC parent Yum China , told me on Friday. Her company is also exploring how to use generative AI to boost business, but she said the tech needs to understand more about internal operations before it can be really helpful. It’s also not clear how powerful China’s AI applications currently are, beyond demos and select business partnerships. “Overall we see generally Chinese language model[s] still lag behind the most advanced ChatGPT version 4,” CLSA’s Tony Zhang said in a phone interview in the last week. But “China’s LLM is developing very fast and improving very fast.” He said some new AI tools in China — such as integration with word processing, in commercial advertising or in consulting – could be the first few fields with real commercial use. “There are some kind of applications…
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