Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency – one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent. Yet, as he noted, that staggering volume “doesn’t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department”. That currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens. “Using AI has become part of almost every task now,” said the employee, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised by the company to speak to...
Chinese tech industry experts say the rapidly increasing use of AI tokens is giving rise to a token-based economy, with the tiny units underpinning artificial intelligence services evolving beyond a technical metric and into the basis for delivering and pricing AI services. “The [Chinese] digital economy has gone through the stages of the data economy and the computing economy. Today, the token economy is emerging,” Yin Hao, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on Wednesday...
Xiaomi, the smartphone vendor that has become one of Tesla’s biggest challengers in mainland China after entering the electric vehicle (EV) market, has doubled down on research and development to combat a slowdown in domestic sales. The Beijing-based tech giant announced on Thursday it would assemble and sell models under a new sport-utility vehicle (SUV) line known as Sky Nomad, a product range analysts said would be likely to include extended-range battery technology to lure consumers away...
A Saudi Arabian tech giant has made Hong Kong its first stop on its maiden visit to Asia, expressing strong interest in partnering with local authorities to co-develop a smart city and establish a strategic gateway to the broader regional market. The remarks on Wednesday followed the opening of LEAP East 2026, the inaugural Hong Kong edition of the global tech event, where Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po highlighted deepening ties between the two regions. Chan said he would lead a business...