China's Government Pushes Real-World AI Use to Jumpstart Its Adoption

The Chinese government 'has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices...' reports the Washington Post.

'[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap' with America: 'aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector.'

DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps 'quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends,' which 'greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting,' a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called 'Efficiently Using DeepSeek' on its official book recommendation list...

Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a 'top-down' directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.

But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.