China's AI push has scale. But substance?

WHEN IT COMES to the sheer number of generative artificial intelligence users in China, the question shouldn’t be how many there are, but how they’re using it.Anew report from the China Internet Network Information Center indicates the nation had some 515 million users as of June, up by 266 million since December, according toa readout from Xinhua.Ata first glance, the figure suggests that Beijing’s push to spread the technology throughout industries to boost productivity — the so-called Al Plusinitiative — is bearing fruit.

- CATHERINE THORBECKE

Inthe US-China tech competition, usage is an important metric towatch.An outsize amount of attention is paid to leading-model benchmarks, but the best way to measure the impact of AI in the long run is how quickly it spreads across the economy. Beijing may see the dataas an early win, but it still fails to answer the more important question: Is it spurring an economic revolution or simply a chatbot craze?

On this front, data is more opaque. It’s possible that the rocketing domestic consumer demand, marked bya boom of various Al assistant apps, stems from a dearth of search engines. Baidu Inc.,and toa lesser extent Microsoft Corps Bing, have dom: inated. But a fragmented super-app ecosystem behind the Great Firewall and th absence of Alphabet Inc’s Google have long created appetite for basic search func tions. It’s very likely that the recent free-to-use AI products have helped fill this void.