China’s AI boom is reaching astonishing proportions

[SHANGHAI] Just hours after the launch on Mar 6 of Manus, a Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) bot, a flood of visitors caused its registration site to crash. Butterfly Effect, the company behind the bot, claims its technology outperforms that of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. It is now granting previews by invitation only as it struggles to handle the traffic. Scalpers are said to be selling registration codes.

Manus is but the latest example of the mania that has swept over China since January when DeepSeek, the country’s hottest AI startup, shook the world with a whizzy model that cost a fraction of similarly powerful Western ones to train.

The effect on Chinese markets has been staggering. Stocks are experiencing their best start to the year on record. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the biggest Chinese tech companies listed in Hong Kong, is up by more than 40 per cent since mid-January.