Why China Fears the ‘A.I. Girlfriend’

China has a bigger problem than the U.S. with falling birthrates, falling marriage rates. Are China’s leaders looking at A.I. through that lens and worrying about the A.I. girlfriend, A.I. boyfriend future? Definitely. They are very worried about that. And, in fact, they are already rolling out policies and regulations around A.I. boyfriends and A.I. girlfriends. It’s so funny — they have a very negative view of wasting time, basically of what they see, the folks in Beijing, what they see as nonproductive activity. And in that earlier era of…

China Is Worried About A.I. Too

new video loaded: China Is Worried About A.I. Too transcript Back transcript China Is Worried About A.I. Too What if you weren’t worried about A.I. taking your job? That seems to be closer to the reality in China, where keeping pace with the new technology is a much bigger focus than economic disruption. On “Interesting Times,” Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, explains how the countries differ in their anxieties over artificial intelligence. If you are going to try to distill the mood in China, the…

China Doesn’t Worry About A.I. Like We Do

The closer you are to the machine God, the more its voice whispers in your ear. That’s right. Yeah I don’t think that Beijing is AGI pilled. Kyle Chan, welcome to “Interesting Times.” Great to be here. So at the moment, there are really only two countries that matter for the A.I. future, the United States and China. Their leaders are meeting in Beijing, and the atmosphere is similar to a kind of Cold War atmosphere where people think and argue and talk about them being in a kind of…

The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future

Within an hour of landing in Shanghai, I was sitting in the back of a Didi cab while the driver pleaded with me to game the company’s algorithm. Didi is the “Uber of China” and has a ubiquitous footprint in the country, dispatching tens of millions of rides per day. Could I cancel the ride and pay him directly through WeChat? There was an oversupply of drivers competing for too few fares, he explained. After dropping me off, he would be sent straight back to the airport, where he would…

Is China Winning the A.I. Race?

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. natalie kitroeff From “The New York Times,” I’m Natalie Kitroeff. This is “The Daily.” [MUSIC PLAYING] President Trump is preparing to make a crucial trip to China this week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. A key question hanging over that meeting is artificial intelligence and whether the global race in AI may…

Why the Trump-Xi Summit Matters, Even if Little Seems to Come of It

President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are scheduled to meet in Beijing this week for a high-stakes summit that could shape the next stage of rivalry between the world’s two major powers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi are expected to discuss the war in Iran, trade, Taiwan and other points of contention during a two-day summit beginning on Thursday. Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi last met in October in South Korea, where they agreed to pause a bruising trade war in which the U.S. imposed triple-digit tariffs on Chinese…

Why China Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. Than the U.S.

Every evening as our children eat dinner, my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school. An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at. It’s kind of creepy, but kind of helpful, too. In China, surveillance technology and A.I. surround our everyday life. It’s built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps; almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery…

American Factories Lag in Adopting A.I. This Drugmaker Is an Exception.

In a sterile Bristol Myers Squibb lab about an hour north of Boston, scientists in scrubs and hairnets transfer living cells to a 2,000-liter stainless steel bioreactor that grows them for weeks. The goal is to produce proteins that are genetically engineered to attack cells that cause disease. Tiny variations in heat, light or pH level can stop the cells from growing, causing drug shortages that endanger patients. Typically scientists would have to wait to see what went wrong during that fragile process, but now artificial intelligence is used to…

This Is What Should Unite the Right and the Left on A.I.

We come from different parties and have guided artificial intelligence policy under very different presidents. But we agree: A.I. has become so powerful that, along with its tremendous promise, the technology poses immediate risks to national security. The United States is competing with authoritarian powers for control of A.I.’s future. Yet the country lacks a strong plan to protect the nation from A.I.’s profound dangers. There are clear steps the government can take that both parties can agree on. But Washington lacks urgency. Unless we change course, A.I. systems will…

DeepSeek’s Sequel

Remember the “DeepSeek moment?” The Chinese start-up announced in early 2025 that it had created an artificial intelligence model that could rival ChatGPT. Not only that, it had created it at a fraction of the cost of its American competitors. If China had been considered behind the United States on A.I., DeepSeek changed that. Almost instantly, its model became the most downloaded free app in the U.S. Some in Silicon Valley started calling it “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” DeepSeek released its latest model last week. Today, my colleague Meaghan Tobin, who…