Scammy AI prep courses flourish, LLMs enter Chinese hospitals, and cracks appear in China's rare earths dominance - plus, hot takes from Shanghai's annual AI summit
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Scout is ETO's discovery tool for Chinese-language news and commentary on technology issues. See the latest editors’ picks, browse the feed by topic, or sign up for customized e-mail alerts at https://scout.eto.tech.- Students in second- and third-tier Chinese cities are flocking to expensive, questionably effective "AI trainer" certification courses. (Caijing, 08/02/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3677
- Domestic manufacturers, Intel, and AMD are all eager to seize NVIDIA's share of the Chinese chip market, but despite barriers to access and rising dissatisfaction with the company, NVIDIA's advantages remain considerable. (36kr, 08/01/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3676
- AI summer camps are gaining popularity in China, but high fees and questionable results raise concerns. (36kr, 07/23/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3648
- An academic disquisition on "innovation infrastructure clusters" highlights emerging Chinese hubs in quantum, biotech, and advanced materials, as well as room for further reforms. (Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 07/17/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3647
- Shanghai’s new regulations on the management of disruptive technology projects provide funding and guidance for technologies in different stages of development, from reproduction in the lab to commercialization. (CSET curation, 06/07/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3656
- An analysis of major Chinese public- and private-sector LLM procurements in 2024 finds that big tech companies outshone AI startups, with buyers including SOEs, government agencies, and private companies. (36kr, 07/23/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3643
- Chinese cities are building new infrastructure and revising regulations to support the expansion of autonomous driving technology. (S&T Daily, 07/19/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3633
- Chinese LLM providers are launching collaborations with major regional hospitals in China, but challenges include high costs and the need for "local" (hospital-specific) knowledge. (Caijing, 07/14/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3613
- Chinese solar panel makers are struggling, with falling prices and rising debts leading many to fire workers and sell off assets. (36kr, 07/12/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3621
- Chinese company Haivivi's new product BubblePal is an AI-enabled plush toy trained on a corpus of cartoons and children's conversations. (36kr, 07/09/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3612
- Chinese computing hardware makers' latest achievements and evolving business strategies were on display at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai; some are shifting to inference chips and concrete applications, while others keep scaling up their computing power clusters. (Caijing, 07/08/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3606
- A commentator recaps the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, exploring the evident contrast between enthusiasm and anxiety over AI's future and the different strategies and strengths of large and small Chinese AI companies. (36kr, 07/08/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3607
- A netizen commentator recaps the buzzy World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and observes that products at the conference tended to be very similar to one another, which may suggest a slowdown in the development of novel AI - for now. (36kr, 07/07/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3601
- The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence announced a new LLM family, a full-stack open-source AI platform, and major progress on R&D fronts from medical robotics and protein structure prediction to lightweight multimodal models. (Zhidx, 06/14/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3600
- Two Chinese geologists warn in 2019 that rare earths are no longer as much of a Chinese-controlled “chokepoint” as before and propose solutions. (CSET curation, 07/01/19) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3634
- Reporters writing for a Chinese state newspaper argue in 2018 that despite recent advances, China’s rare-earth applied technologies still lag decades behind Japan and the United States. (CSET curation, 09/10/18) https://scout.eto.tech?id=3622