China Displays Its Gizmos and Ambition, but Fewer Answers on Trade

Newly developed products include a device for grading school exam papers and an A.I. chatbot that can answer questions spoken into a microphone in one of half a dozen different languages, including Chinese, English and Russian. The answers appear on a screen. Cheng Chen, the general manager of iFlyTek's consumer business group in charge of A.I. translation, said the aim of the exam machine, which allows teachers to grade papers without reading them, was not to eliminate teachers but to "help them use their time better on more creative, essential things." On-again, off-again restrictions on the export of advanced American-made A.I. chips to China which she said were "the best for training large language models," had not hurt the company, she insisted, adding that the Chinese company Huawei was providing adequate substitutes. Recent U.S.-China trade frictions have had little impact on its market value.