NPR｜Welcome to the front lines of China's AI chatbot wars

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When it comes to AI chatbots, U.S. companies are trying to attract customers by offering the best technology. In China, it's less about being on the cutting edge and more about getting people to use their apps all the time by enticing them with freebies. NPR's John Ruwitch has the story.

JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Nineteen-year-old Li Hao is a delivery driver and one of the hundreds of millions of new AI users in China who companies are trying to lure with things like free milk tea. I caught up with him sitting on his scooter on a Beijing street, scrolling his phone on a break.

LI HAO: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: Like many people in China today, Li says he's done searching the internet the old way.

LI: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: For stuff he doesn't know, he asks an AI chatbot called Doubao. It's embedded in Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, like a human contact he can chat with.

LI: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: It's the AI he knows and he's used to, although he says he was recently enticed to try another one, Alibaba's Qianwen, known in English as Qwen. They were giving away milk tea over the Lunar New Year holiday when people typically hand out red envelopes of cash for luck.

LI: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: And Li says he got one. The giveaway was meant to attract new users and show people they can actually buy stuff right in the chatbot. The competitive landscape in China among AI apps is fierce, and they're dumping money into the market to try to win customers. The investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that the top apps spent over $1.1 billion on promotions during the holiday. Welcome to China's chatbot wars.

GEORGE CHEN: The competition between domestic Chinese tech players are heating up again, which I believe is a good thing from the perspective of innovation.

RUWITCH: George Chen is a tech analyst with The Asia Group in Hong Kong. The AI landscape is dominated by some of China's top tech companies, like Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance. There are also prominent startups, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Chen says the promotions give him a sense of deja vu. A decade ago, Alibaba and Tencent engaged in a similar promo slugfest over their online payment apps, and that helped the industry.

CHEN: You know, I will argue, you know, because of the competition, you know, that really pushes China's e-commerce to grow this rapid.

RUWITCH: China's e-commerce ecosystem is now one of the most developed in the world, with ubiquitous super apps where you can do everything from paying a utility bill to booking a cruise.

CHEN: So now we are seeing something like history is repeating.

RUWITCH: The new battleground is AI, and the companies want consumers to use their apps to actually do stuff, not just look things up. Producer Jasmine Ling and I gave Alibaba's Qwen a go in Beijing.

JASMINE LING, BYLINE: So now I'm typing in, Qwen, I want to order a milk tea.

RUWITCH: And the chatbot takes over from there. Not only does it give recommendations...

Oh, that one looks pretty good. What's that one?

LING: Koi.

RUWITCH: (Speaking Mandarin).

LING: Yeah. Boba.

RUWITCH: ...It handles the ordering, the payment, the delivery, all within the chatbot. Oh, and it already knows our office address, where 20 minutes later...

It's delivered to the gate. And milk tea is just a starting point. I could have ordered anything - a house plant, a plane ticket - without being redirected to another app or website. Kyle Chan follows Chinese tech at the Brookings Institution think tank. He says Alibaba wants Qianwen to be the new everything app.

KYLE CHEN: They kind of see the AI model as being the starting point for interfacing with sort of everything else you do in the online world and maybe even to a certain extent in the offline world, in the real world.

RUWITCH: The Lunar New Year giveaways sparked chaos at some takeout shops when orders shot through the roof. And the number of daily active users on Chinese AI platforms hit records. Alibaba hasn't disclosed figures, but the Chinese research firm QuestMobile says Qwen's daily users hit more than 73.5 million in early February. Keeping those customers, though, is another matter. Daily use has dropped back down since the holiday.

LI: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: After availing himself of a free milk tea, delivery driver Li Hao says he went back to using Doubao, the AI that he's familiar with.

LI: (Speaking Mandarin).

RUWITCH: He's used to it, he says. And habits, even relatively new ones, seem to die hard. John Ruwitch, NPR News, Beijing.

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