Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
For years, the growth of AI was built on scaling up its GPUs, but innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, sees now a move to more collaboration. Chip maker Nvidia is not the only winner anymore, as competition is growing and AI models can develop through more experience and need less capacity to grow, as China’s Deepseek proved earlier this year, he says at the Big Bang Future Lab.
Drastic changes have been influencing e-commerce and the position of global brands in this fast-moving industry in China. Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenokprovides an overview of the changes in the past few years on her website, Chozan.
Ashley Dudarenok:
China’s e-commerce sector is poised for a transformative shift by 2025, driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), immersive shopping experiences, and a strategic pivot towards direct-to-consumer (DTC) models. These developments reshape the digital retail landscape, influence consumer behaviors, and redefine business strategies.
Immersive Retail and Predictive Infrastructure
While content remains king, China’s retail infrastructure is evolving to make digital shopping more tactile, immersive, and real-time. Shoppers can now try on lipstick shades using AR filters, tour 3D virtual stores during festivals, or interact with AI-powered assistants that mimic a live consultation.
At the same time, fulfillment and supply chains are becoming smarter and more responsive. AI is used to:
Predict product demand based on platform activity and livestream events
Sync inventory across online and offline systems
Enable same-day or under-one-hour delivery in top markets
Support real-time order routing and smart warehousing
Experimental platforms like Baidu’s XiRang and ByteDance’s Project Puff also explore the metaverse layer, where digital avatars browse virtual malls, try on clothes, and attend product launches in immersive environments.
The result is an intelligent,multi-channel, and frictionless retail stack. Shopping no longer begins with a search bar—it starts in a video feed, a private community, or a personalized app homepage. And it ends wherever the customer chooses: in a live stream, in-store, or with a package arriving in 20 minutes.
Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, worked in both the US and China on AI and compares the strategy of both countries. While China focuses on a multipolar approach, with mainly economic targets, the US does the opposite and looks at military strategies, he tells Veronica Hylak at Hey AI.
AI tools to generate videos, like TikTok, have been challenged by a new wave of innovations using AI as filmmakers, says Winston Ma, author of The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspaceat CNBC. “Just like TikTok took the global markets by storm with short videos in the mobile internet age, Chinese AI companies could well lead the Generative AI revolution in visual digital entertainment,” said Ma.
CNBC:
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has also stayed on top of the trend by releasing the latest version of its video generation AI model this week called Wan2.2. The company claimed that with the open-source model, users can control lighting, time of day, color tone, camera angle, frame size, composition and focal length.
Open source allows users to download a model for free, and customize, if not commercialize, products with it. Alibaba claimed that since open sourcing the “Wan” model series in February, the models have been downloaded more than 5.4 million times from the Hugging Face platform and a similar one in China called ModelScope.
“The age of AI in film is over. We’ve entered the age of AI as filmmaker,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He pointed out that China’s 1.4 billion population has given local companies “enormous” amounts of video-watching data to work with.
Technology veteran Kaiser Kuo explains how AI developments with DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, and iFlyTek emerged as winners in China’s technology scene. Especially, the coordination between the state, the market, and academia helps technology to move in the same direction, he adds at the World Economic Forum.
Kaiser Kuo:
One of the less visible but profoundly consequential enablers of China’s rapid advance in generative AI is the unusually tight coordination among its public sector institutions, academic research bodies and private firms. While this kind of alignment is sometimes viewed with suspicion outside of China, particularly when it is framed in terms of state-led industrial policy or state-backed enterprise, the practical effect has been to lower barriers between research and application, to accelerate funding decisions and to unify long-term technological goals across domains.
Consider how China’s most capable research universities — Tsinghua, Peking University, Shanghai Jiaotong, Zhejiang University — serve not only as training grounds for AI talent, but as intellectual incubators for commercial ventures. Many of the leading generative AI firms in China, including Zhipu AI and Baichuan, emerged directly from university research labs, often with seed funding from state-affiliated venture arms and built-in partnerships with municipal development zones or digital economy clusters.
State guidance funds, particularly those aligned with the “New Infrastructure” initiatives launched in the late 2010s, have prioritised compute infrastructure, AI chips and cloud services. These funds offer long-horizon capital to projects that would likely struggle to gain equivalent traction in private markets, particularly during periods of economic tightening or when returns on investment are uncertain. Yet at the same time, the market incentive remains intact. Leading Chinese AI startups face intense domestic competition from rivals like DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and iFlyTek, all of which operate in a fast-moving environment that rewards iterative gains and rapid deployment.
Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok says human programmers will still be needed in her vlog. But AI is already replacing a range of jobs in China. For example, Alibaba introduced its first AI employee, Tongyi Lingma, last summer, and it made huge inroads into the work process, she notes.
We see some dangerous signs AI is not going to benefit all, but potentially becomes a high risk tool, argues Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, at the Delphi Economic Forum earlier in April. We should all work together to prevent AI from being used as a weapon, he says.
Who will be winning the race in innovation, China or the US? Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok expects China will have advantages, not only with Deepseek playing its way into AI development but also for robotics to NEVs, quantum computing, and eVTOL she explains at the Jing Daily.
Ashley Dudarenok:
From AI and robotics to NEVs, quantum computing and eVTOL, the country is setting the pace for global advancements. These developments reflect a broader vision to transition from being the “Factory of the World” to the “R&D Center of the World.” For businesses, the opportunities are vast, but so are the challenges. Success will depend on the ability to adapt, forge meaningful collaborations, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. As China continues to shape the future of technology, the question is not whether to engage, but how to do so effectively and safely.
Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Get in touch or fill out our speakers’ request form.
Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.
The number of billionaires has increased more in the US compared to China for the first time in ten years, according to the latest 14th annual Hurun Global Rich List, according to Barrons. “It’s been a tough year for luxury, telecommunications, and real estate in China”, writes Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report.
Barrons:
The number of U.S. billionaires in the world reached 870 in mid-January, outpacing the number in China for the first time in 10 years, according to a snapshot of the wealthiest in the world by the Hurun Report.
The U.S. gained 70 billionaires since last year, powered by a rising stock market, a strong dollar, and the insatiable appetite for all things AI, according to the 14th annual Hurun Global Rich List. China gained nine billionaires overall for a total of 823. Hurun is a China-based research, media, and investment group.
“It’s been a good year for AI, money managers, entertainment, and crypto,” Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said in a news release. “It’s been a tough year for luxury, telecommunications, and real estate in China.”
Overall, the Hurun list—which reflects a snapshot of global wealth based on calculations made Jan. 15—counted 3,442 billionaires in the world, up 5%, or 163, from a year ago. Their total wealth rose 13% to just under $17 trillion…
The overall list this year contained 387 new billionaires, while 177 dropped off the list—more than 80 of which were from China, Hurun said. “China’s economy is continuing to restructure, with the drop-offs coming from a weeding out of healthcare and new energy and traditional manufacturing, as well as real estate,” Hoogewerf said in the release.
Among those who wealth sank was Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings —the parent company of e-commerce platforms Temu and Pinduoduo—who lost $17 billion.
Also, Zhong Shanshan, the founder and chair of the Nongfu Spring beverage company and the majority owner of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, lost $8 billion from “intensifying competition” in the market for bottled water. The loss knocked Zhong from his top rank in China, which is now held by Zhang Yiming founder of Tik-Tok owner Bytedance. Zhang is ranked No. 22 overall.
Financial and innovation expert Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU, discusses how AI is reshaping the Chinese industrial revolution at state-owned CGTN. Not only has DeepSeek emerged as a leading AI tool, but other companies are following this lead and expanding into industrial sectors rapidly.
China’s tech industry seems ahead of the US, especially now that DeepSeek has come onto the playing field. Tech and finance adjunct professor at NYU Winston Ma discusses how the US restrictions on tech might have hampered US-China trade relations at CNBC’s Squawk Box.
