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Reality Check

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ByteDance’s AI subscription gamble: chatbot faces reality check in China
NEWS
5/7/2026

ByteDance’s AI subscription gamble: chatbot faces reality check in China

Chloe Wang, a 26-year-old fund employee in Shenzhen, said she “definitely wouldn’t” pay for a subscription to Doubao, Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s artificial intelligence chatbot, at its proposed price. “I’m willing to pay for AI tools, but I don’t think it’s worth that much – even though I find Doubao relatively easy to use among domestic AI products,” said Wang, who uses the app occasionally for work-related queries. “If I had to pay for an AI tool as a productivity aid, I’d probably rather...

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SCMP Economy
Hype or real cash flow: China’s robot boom faces reality check as commercialisation lags
Tech
5/5/2026

Hype or real cash flow: China’s robot boom faces reality check as commercialisation lags

A desk with a laptop and a stack of books. A shirt waiting to be folded. A kitchen counter, a milk-tea stand and pile of building blocks – all in a single room. Robots of different shapes face their tasks with focus, controlled by a human operator. Pick up. Place. Fold. Repeat. This is not a film set, it is a data collection factory for embodied intelligence – a de facto “data foundry”. The facility, in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, is run by Agibot, a fast-rising robotics company. The...

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SCMP Tech