Alex Colville

London

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Articles

From Mao to MAGA

1 week ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

The Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in modern China, yet it has never been more relevant. While scholars have long pointed to the excesses of Maoism as a parallel for Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership, they have also spotted echoes in the chaotic populist forces Donald Trump has conjured up within American democracy.
China's AI Job Mirage

2 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

With 12 million fresh graduates soon rushing into China’s already competitive job market, help is on the way, according to the People’s Daily. On April 7, the newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the country’s leadership, ran an article listing how AI was turbo-charging supply and demand in the job market, pointing to over 10,000 AI-related jobs on offer at a spring recruitment center in the city of Hangzhou.
DeepSeek: A Tool Tuned For Social Governance – Analysis | Flipboard

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Alex Colville

2 days agoPerplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser warAravind Srinivas discusses his partnership with Motorola, fighting Google, and why AI assistants are coming for browsers. Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones.
DeepSeek: A Tool Tuned for Social Governance

2 weeks ago | jamestown.org | Alex Colville

Executive Summary: The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not just envision its “AI+ initiative” as bolstering the national economy but aiding its plans for modernizing its social stability system. DeepSeek has been designed, thanks to regulations, in a way that makes it a perfect tool to support the “public opinion guidance” system that aligns the public with state policy through propaganda.
Bringing AI Down to Earth

3 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

As luminaries, including several Nobel laureates, mingled last month at the Zhongguancun Forum, an exchange in Beijing on high-tech innovation, a soaring report from China’s official Xinhua News Agency celebrated the spectacle of robots serving freshly ground coffee and performing backflips — concluding that the forum’s participants had “given aspirations wings to soar.” Judging from the reports filed by the four Xinhua journalists covering the forum, an annual showcase for China’s tech...
Deadly Blunders in Bangkok

1 month 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.
China’s AI Content Dragnet

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.
Shrinking Humanities for AI

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).
Rehabilitating DeepSeek

2 months 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.
Leapfrogging to Autocratic AI

2 months 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.