At the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, several hundred children ran across the stadium floor holding dove lights, and snowflakes bloomed under their feet in real time — the first large-scale show built on zero-latency AI interaction rendering. It was a spectacle, and also a status report: AI has moved from astonishing demos to everyday deployment.
Already everywhere
Face recognition and face payment, infrared fever screening, machine-assisted diagnosis, driverless vehicles. Dubai’s airport runs ‘smart gates’ that complete check-in, exit and boarding in 5 to 10 seconds each, no staff contact. Singapore runs patrol robots on busy streets displaying public-health reminders. China’s progress is substantial — AI invention patents granted rank first globally, the core industry keeps growing, and a complete industrial chain spans base-layer technology, algorithms and applications.
The patent numbers frame the race: over 2.24 million AI-related applications across 126 countries and regions, nearly 687,000 in force, with China, the US and Japan the top three filers.
The bottleneck is compute
Three hurdles remain: compute is expensive and algorithms have a high entry bar; data sits with large companies in silos; and the industry has not yet produced economy-wide gains. What unlocks them is an open, affordable, full-stack platform — and compute is the base of the three.
That is the logic behind city-level AI computing centres: government-led, built intensively, delivered fast, green and powerful. More than 20 Chinese cities are building or preparing them. As the model spreads, compute becomes something a city switches on — for its industries, its hospitals, its traffic — the way it once switched on electricity.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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