Butterfly Effect: China's frenetic AI boom

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• 00:05

  Hi, it's Alice Su here.

• 00:08

  I co-host Drum Tower, our weekly podcast on China.

• 00:11

  Here's an article handpicked from the latest edition of The Economist, read out loud.

• 00:16

  I thought you might enjoy it.

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  A flood of visitors caused its registration site to crash.

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  Butterfly Effect, the company behind the bot,

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  claims its technology outperforms that of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.

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  It is now granting previews by invitation only, as it struggles to handle the traffic.

• 00:51

  Touts are said to be selling registration codes.

• 00:55

  Manus is but the latest example of the mania that has swept over China

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  since January when DeepSeek,

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  the country's hottest AI startup,

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  shook the world with a whizzy model that cost a fraction of similarly powerful Western ones to train.

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  The effect on Chinese markets has been staggering.

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  Stocks are experiencing their best start to the year on record,

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  leaving American ones in the dust.

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  The Hang Seng Tech Index,

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  which tracks the biggest Chinese tech companies listed in Hong Kong,

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  is up by more than 40% since mid-January.

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  Many in China are betting that cheaper AI will help innovators develop new applications for the technology.

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