Meituan (美團) cofounder Wang Xing (王興) is clambering aboard a global investment wave to create ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI) bots.
Wang, who’s largely stayed out of the limelight in the past few years, said on WeChat that he would join a Series A investment round for fellow Meituan cofounder Wang Huiwen’s (王慧文) AI start-up.
The billionaire becomes the latest Chinese tech executive to throw his weight behind the quest to top OpenAI’s creation.
Photo: REUTERS
“The AI model makes me excited about the huge productivity that will be created, but also worried about its future impact on the whole world,” said Wang Xing, who rarely posts on WeChat and prefers a social media service he himself founded years ago. “Wang [Huiwen] and I have been together on the road of entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years. Since he is determined to embrace this big wave, I must support him.”
The declaration comes days after Chinese regulators said they are planning to introduce rules to govern the use of AI across a swath of industries. The introduction of regulations might be intended to ensure ChatGPT-like services hew to the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship of controversial or undesirable content online.
However, it could also be a boon to companies such as Baidu Inc (百度), providing clearer ground rules for future services.
Baidu has reaffirmed the rollout of its “Ernie Bot” conversational AI this month, while Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) has said it is working to integrate generative AI in several of its products.
Other high-profile Chinese enterprises, including brokerage China International Capital Corp (中國國際金融), are experimenting with the technology’s potential and limitations.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS