DeepSeek · Alibaba · China · AGI · OpenAI · Anthropic · Rest of World
At Beijing’s AGI Bar, customers who buy a drink and connect to the Wi-Fi can get unlimited access to DeepSeek
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Artificial intelligence tokens, once a term familiar only to techies, are rapidly entering everyday life in China.
Key facts
- China Unicom introduced monthly plans ranging from 15 yuan ($2.10) for 6 million tokens to 45 yuan ($6.30) for 18 million for business users
- China Telecom offers consumer plans starting at 9.9 yuan ($1.40) a month for 10 million tokens, with larger allowances available for heavier users and businesses
- Nearby, Beijing’s Jingu Yuan dumpling restaurant gives customers 10 yuan ($1.40) worth of computing credits after a meal
- In Changsha, an upcoming 24-hour coffee shop uses a similar approach for promotion, offering customers AI tokens with their coffee
Summary
Banks, cafes, and telcos, among other small and big businesses, are offering free AI tokens as incentives to attract more customers. An AI token is a unit of computing that an AI model uses to process text. The massive popularity of AI has led to has sharply increase in token consumption globally. Token prices have become a new front in the global AI race as U.S. and Chinese AI companies aggressively lower them to compete for wider adoption of their models.