When Wang Huiwen, co-founder of delivery and services giant Meituan, announced in February a $50 million personal investment to build a Chinese version of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, followed a month later by the acquisition of a machine learning startup, it signaled that China’s artificial intelligence gold rush was well and truly underway.
With the acquisition of Beijing OneFlow Technology Ltd., the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Lightyear Technology launched by the billionaire who retired from Meituan in 2020, joined a growing list of Chinese tech companies, including both industry giants and nascent ventures, to jump on the chatbot bandwagon.