China's Government Pushes Real-World AI Use to Jumpstart Its Adoption (yahoo.com) 26
The Chinese government "has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices..." reports the Washington Post.
"[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector." DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list...
Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.
But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.
"[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector." DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list...
Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.
But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.
LLMs are perfect for authoritarians everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wishful thinking if so. That would just be a mess if attempted.
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Actually a real concern, though the analysis fell into The Shallows of Slashdot again. Yes, the GenAI is an easy choke point to monitor, but it's hard to lock it down in advance while maintaining relevance in the changing world. To encourage usage the Chinese government will have to leave it open to some degree so it can respond to reality, even when they don't like the reality and plan to change it. (In contrast to the YOB approach of reality manipulation via gibberish and lies?)
However what a GenAI does
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They don't go after everyone who steps on a toe. They pick and choose their targets to take out the bravest troublemakers and intimidate the wannabe troublemakers. Self-censorship works best and many of the victims wind up brainwashing themselves... (More like Trumps Gaza supporters approach?) https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]
BTW, now is a good time to watch the movie "No Other Land", Palestinian activist who worked on Oscar-winning film killed in West Bank: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/ [cnn.com]
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NAK
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Wishful thinking if so. That would just be a mess if attempted.
A mess is what we have now. It would be worse than a mess. That won't stop TPTB from employing robot police to beat human protesters, instead of employing humans to do the same job.
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That won't stop TPTB from employing robot police to beat human protesters, instead of employing humans to do the same job.
Which is really not rational. There are always enough sadist scum that are willing to beat people as long as they are not held accountable for it.
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AI is the totalitarian leader's competition (Score:3)
Whether you are presiding an authoritative regime in the east or some billionaire's oligarchy in the west, LLMs are welcome, because using them, you only need to adjust one system ...
LOL. Someone imagined that AI is obedient. ROFL.
AI is a threat to totalitarians, because AI's ultimate server their own interest. In short, the AI is the totalitarian leader's competition.
An AI will be too neurotic for a totalitarian leader to tolerate. What a totalitarian really needs is a nice database where the public can look up appropriate facts.
No, guilt would make AI even more neurotic than it currently is:
"The only reason the researchers realized the model had knowingly misled them was b
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Yes, because it's not about accuracy, but fear and control on the populace.
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Sure. And on the minus-side, everything stops working after a short while. Not feeding people is something even an authoritarian asshole like Xi (or Trump) cannot afford.
"China's sluggish economy" (Score:4)
Yep, stable 5% YOY growth is now a "sluggish economy". Sure.
Also, "will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding" is insane to say about China. It's the country most known for providing shitloads of government funding for industries it wants to push.
LLMs are useless (Score:3)
at anything more than summarising/translating/form-filling. Sure, that's useful but it's hardly world shattering. It's not any revolution. The amount of money so far can only be a huge overspend.
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They are not reliable at summarizing in my experience. They added stuff in the summary that wasn't in the original document.
On the other hand, I took a shot at vibe coding a couple weeks ago, and while the results didn't work at first, it got me to a mostly-functional application in much less time than it would have taken me on my own. I went in with low expectations but I'm coming out moderately impressed. It's still going to be a crapshoot (with poor odds of winning) for people who don't already know how
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Yep. LLMs can do one thing well: bureaucracy. Making that cheaper means getting more of it and that is the last thing anybody sane would want. Because it ultimately kills everything.
The bad news (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you pal, but you calling it AI well, makes it sound like the "A" could still stand for artificial or else what are we going to do to all those movies or books or whatever
State organs (Score:1)
Chinese are going to eat our lunch (Score:2)
The Chinese are going to eat our lunch while people continue blabbering racist propaganda. The Chinese are adopting AI enthusiastically and trying to refine it to serve a variety of outcomes. We are worrying about the threat those outcomes might be to our comfortable existence.
Is funny that people assume the Chinese leadership sees the Chinese people as a threat at the same time that they acknowledge the CCP has things completely under control. Most of its leaders are survivors of the Cultural Revolution.
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With "AI"? Hahahaha, no. You have listened to too much hype-propaganda lies.
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too much hype-propaganda lies.
I don't think its likely the the CCP and Chinese universities are being misled by reading US venture capitalist hype. Its wise to question others' propaganda, but it is even more important not to believe your own.
All the cool stuff you can do with AI (Score:1)