'AI milk tea' a taste of new smart economy

Personal assistants

Outside consumer apps, another symbol of this transformation that has taken the country by storm is OpenClaw, nicknamed the "AI lobster" for its red lobster logo.

The AI-powered digital personal assistant was developed by an Austria-born millennial inventor and acquired by the US-based company OpenAI.

China's State-backed national supercomputing network announced on Monday that OpenClaw services have been connected to its major interactive workplace platforms, including ByteDance's Feishu and Tencent's WeCom. The network is known for its cost-effective use of large and high-performance digital models.

On the same day, tech giant Tencent Holdings rolled out WorkBuddy, an AI agent designed to integrate with Chinese workplace and messaging tools and compatible with OpenClaw's core skills.

Zhou Hongyi, a member of the 14th CPPCC National Committee and founder of 360 Security Group, said the AI lobster has transformed cloud software into a digital personal assistant on a user's computer and is incredibly easy to operate.

Historically, high-end AI models were restricted to tech giants and came with high operating costs, he said on the sidelines of the two sessions.

Zhou Di, a professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University in Zhejiang province and a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress, China's top legislature, said China develops AI differently from the US.

Zhou said China doesn't rely only on building bigger models that require huge computing power, but instead develops efficient and lightweight models like AI lobster. This allows real-world problems to be solved in areas such as industrial inspection and medical diagnostics.