Alex Colville

3 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by the subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside.

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Hundreds of gigabytes of data lurking on an unsecured server in China linked to Baidu, one of the country’s largest search engines and a major player in the fast-developing field of artificial intelligence (AI), offer a rare glimpse into how the government is likely directing tech giants to categorize data with the use of AI large language models (LLMs) — all to supercharge the monitoring and control of content in cyberspace.

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Shanghai’s Fudan University (复旦大学) is one of China’s most prestigious universities, with a raison d’etre unchanged, it claims, since the institution was founded in 1905: improving China’s position in the world through education. As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm — and becomes a crucial priority from top to bottom in China — the means of achieving that mission is changing, according to the university’s president, Jin Li (金力).

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

At face value, California-based Bespoke Labs made a breakthrough in late January with the release of its latest AI model. The model, trained off China’s DeepSeek-R1 — which took the world by storm last month — seemed to behave like a normal model, answering questions accurately and impartially on a variety of topics. Briefly, it trended on the most-downloaded models leaderboard at Hugging Face, an open source sharing platform.

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

At face value, Indian AI firm Ola Krutrim had found a way to tame DeepSeek. In mid-February, the company announced plans to deploy the Chinese chatbot — a system that had captured global attention despite its embedded censorship tools and pro-Beijing training data.