Every Wednesday and Friday, TechNode's Briefing newsletter delivers a roundup of the most important news in China tech, straight to your inbox. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and now CEO of Sinovation Ventures, announced on Monday that he's building a new AI company called Project AI 2.0 that will focus on developing ChatGPT-like apps, as well as an ecosystem for AI-powered productivity tools. Lee shared his thoughts on the latest AI trends, including the concepts of AI 1.0 and 2.0 on March 14, at Sinovation Ventures' headquarters in Beijing. He said he considers ChatGPT to be a major breakthrough in deep learning, driving AI into the 2.0 era. Why it matters: As a renowned AI expert and venture capitalist, Lee said he sees AI as providing an opportunity to reconstruct almost all existing applications, just as Microsoft redesigned Microsoft Office into Copilot, giving Word, Excel, and other mainstream productivity tools AI and generative capabilities.

Robots are now 90% as effective as humans at collecting debts, China's real estate is being mapped in 3D for full virtual reality tours at scale, and the Chinese automotive industry is going on the blockchain to eliminate almost all inefficiency. This Week In China Tech is your way to stay on top of the tech stories that matter most from China each and every week. Here are the headlines you need to know. A robot looks at a man as he uses his mobile phone at the 2018 World Robot Conference in Beijing on August 15, 2018. There are plenty of artificial intelligence (AI) trends emerging from China these days, but arguably the most intriguing are those that show just how close humans are to meeting their match at the hands of machines.

Airplanes fly over Xiamen City, southeast China's Fujian Province, July 18, 2018. After a short holiday, we have a lot to catch up on. AI made huge leaps and has made insurance claims 176,000 times more efficient than humans, China has opened their low-altitude airspace for the booming drone industry, and classrooms are getting quantified using AI and brain research. Let's get you the news. Yes, you read that correctly.

China has 100,000 citizens' DNA records that can be accessed using their face in WeChat, the northern part of the country beats a green energy record, and Baidu's AI lab in Silicon Valley surpasses Harvard and MIT in tumor recognition accuracy. This Week In China Tech stays on top of the most important tech stories coming out of the second fastest growing economy in the world. This week, the Shenzhen Huada Forensic Science and Technology Company announced they are storing DNA from over 100,000 individuals from across China. The company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huada Group which was established in 1999, is the world's leading genomics research and development institution. The new DNA database has lots of important applications like helping to identify lost or abandoned children, locating missing persons, identification after natural disasters and lifelong record creation (article in Chinese).

This week saw a lot of Greater Bay Area announcements with electronic border crossings powered by WeChat, one of the world's largest logistics hubs powered by Alibaba and artificial intelligence powering Chinese courtrooms. China is pushing the boundaries of technology more than any other country and This Week In China Tech is the best way for you to stay on top of the stories that matter most. Tencent's WeChat E-Pass To Allow Seamless Border Crossing In The Greater Bay Area China's Greater Bay Area is one of the country's most important strategic initiatives, connecting 11 cities and 67 million people into the world's first true "megacity." The Greater Bay is focused on rivaling America's Silicon Valley, but one of the largest challenges has been the multiple borders between Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangdong. Enter Tencent, China's version of Facebook, with their WeChat E-Pass that will allow their 1 billion users with Chinese IDs to link their IDs to their cell phone and cross these three borders seamlessly (article in Chinese).

This week we saw a huge milestone with China beating Amazon to successfully establish fully commercialized drone delivery, a new type of online to offline buying experience combining China's Spotify with retail, and artificial intelligence (AI) predicting which roads will flood in advance in order to reduce traffic congestion. China is pushing the boundaries of technological advancement faster than any country on Earth and This Week In China Tech is the place to stay on top of the news that you won't find in the Western media. Aerial photo taken on May 10, 2018 shows a drone carried with parcels, taking off from a branch post office in Weicheng Township, Qingzhen City of southwest China's Guizhou Province. You probably remember how Amazon captured the consumer imagination when they announced their concept for delivery drones at the end of 2016, but they never really materialized. Chinese retailers have now delivered fully operational drone delivery systems, confirming 17 authorized routes last week (article in Chinese).

This week saw a lot of machines taking over for humans in both the pharmacy and warehousing industries and augmented reality finally go mainstream in retail. China continues to commit to innovating faster than any other country and This Week In China Tech is our way to keep you on top of the most important stories coming from the mainland. Here are this week's headlines. JD.com, one of China's largest e-commerce companies, announced the new Augmented Reality (AR) Innovation Alliance (article in Chinese) and brought three new AR products to market. The alliance brings together hundreds of corporations, including Intel, Wal-Mart, Vipshop, Lenovo, and Carslan.

Some big trends have emerged this week in red hot areas like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and edtech. The bottom line seems to be that China is investing in a big way to ensure it remains on the cutting edge when it comes to the technology of tomorrow, whether it's investing billions into AI or leveraging the country's most important social media platform to embrace blockchain. Here are the some of the most interesting tech stories out of China you might not have heard about. Everyone is adopting blockchain technologies, but it's hard for big companies to move at the speed of technological innovation. This is not the case for Tencent in China, makers of WeChat, a social media messaging app with 1 billion active users.