Plus: new rules for facial recognition, a massive order for H20 chips, and Beijing's flood of returnees
👀
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.- China's official readout of a Chinese Politburo collective study session on AI, at which Xi Jinping spoke. (CSET curation, 04/26/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4366
- The Chinese investment community is split on when, if ever, embodied intelligent robots will achieve large-scale commercialization. (36kr, 04/03/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4365
- By 2024, Beijing will be home to over 1.2 million Chinese "returnees" who studied abroad, driving research and innovation across the city's universities and tech companies. (S&T Daily, 03/30/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4325
- The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released RoboOS and RoboBrain, new open-source resources for coordination and inter-operation across different robotics systems. (AI Tech Talk, 03/30/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4324
- Chinese oil giant Sinopec is using AI (including DeepSeek technology) to monitor drilling equipment and site safety conditions, with ambitious next steps planned. (S&T Daily, 03/27/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4313
- Ant Group's Ling team has trained a 300 billion parameter mixture of experts (MoE) LLM on Chinese AI accelerators in resource-constrained environments. (EE Times China, 03/26/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4334
- Chinese city governments are enthusiastically funding and forming partnerships with AI companies, with "tiger" startup Zhipu raking in billions of yuan from three city governments in recent weeks. (36kr, 03/24/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4308
- AstraZeneca is investing $2.5 billion to establish a new R&D hub in Beijing and will launch a new joint venture with a Chinese partner there, citing the city's vibrant world-class life science ecosystem as a major draw. (S&T Daily, 03/22/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4307
- A new regulation defines the acceptable use of facial recognition in China, with extensive privacy requirements - and notable exemptions. (CSET curation, 03/21/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4262
- A deeply reported profile of Hangzhou's booming AI ecosystem highlights rapid growth in local tech enterprises, the Alibaba-linked "Six Little Dragons," robotics, brain-computer interfaces, satellites and more. (Caijing, 03/18/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4294
- A wistful personal commentary from a Chinese chip industry insider laments overcapacity, low-end price wars, and fickle funding, with innovation still constrained by low profits. (EEFocus, 03/17/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4282
- Three Chinese government ministries plan to make a huge portion of China's datasets discoverable and usable in a single catalog by 2029. (CSET curation, 12/31/24) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4330
- Tencent placed a massive order with NVIDIA for H20 chips to accelerate its LLM buildout and serve DeepSeek models to users. (Caijing, 03/13/25) https://scout.eto.tech?id=4260