AI Business Asia: China's home ground AI race intensifies

• How is China’s AI scene rising to the occasion in the midst of the global AI ecosystem split?

• Curated News from the East & West

• 5 new AI tools in the spotlight

• 6 senior AI roles in the region

Read time: 4-6 mins

Deep dive: How is China’s AI scene rising to the occasion in the midst of the global AI ecosystem split?

This development has accelerated the race among Chinese tech giants, established AI specialists, and emerging startups to develop homegrown AI technologies, while navigating the challenges posed by the ongoing "AI Cold War" between the two global superpowers.

This is 1st of a 2-part piece that aims to give readers a deeper understanding of the Chinese AI space, its players, and the ramifications of the China-US AI ecosystem split.  

Key topics include:

• The dynamics between leading tech giants; AI specialists and emerging AI app startups

• How these groups differ from and play off of each other

Read more here.

News from Asia:

• ByteDance, Alibaba, SenseTime lead GenAI infrastructure services market in China, taking more than 50% together

• UNESCO and Huawei announces AI training collaboration program for Eastern Africa.

• Google.org commits $15 million to boost AI skills in Asia Pacific

• Huawei urges developers to focus on improving computing architectures, than to worry about hardware restrictions.

• Governments, companies in Asia-Pacific to get access to AI strategies personalised to their needs via Singapore’s NCS Group system.

News from the West:

• NATO released revised AI strategy; focusing on accelerating AI use cases, mitigating risks and highlighting concerns about the threats from adversarial use of AI.

• AMD acquires Finnish startup Silo AI for $665 million to counter Nvidia.

• Microsoft and Apple recuse themselves from OpenAI Board “effective immediately” amidst antitrust concerns.

• Deloitte launches AI and Data accelerator as part of multi-year strategic partnership with AWS

• Stability releases more AI features for Stable Assistant: Search & Replace, and Stable Audio.

• Sora’s video generation model is still in the works with no public release date - OpenAI CTO in an John Hopkins University interview.

Trending Tools & Apps

1. Quillbot (US) - Write quickly, effectively and grammatically correctly with AI

2. Seekall.ai (China) - An AI search aggregator with a browser plugin

3. Tiangong (China) - One of China’s most popular AI assistant chatbots

4. Fotor (US/China) - A simplified AI photo editing tool

5. ThinkAny (China) - China’s answer to Perplexity.ai

Senior AI Jobs

• Director, AI Innovation at MasterCard (Singapore)

• Senior Advisor, Data & AI, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (Regional)

• Head of Technology Innovation Group, Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center (Singapore)

• Head of Applied AI, ST Engineering (Singapore)

• Data/AI Business Architecture Associate Director, Accenture Southeast Asia (Singapore)

• Director, Data Science and Innovation, at Standard Chartered Singapore (Singapore)