I've written a few.
But we can compare your "work" to the existing cannon. There are plenty of screenplays written by humans that we can compare to that everyone has access to. You'd know all about that.
Just put one page of the AI script up.
AI Is Telling Bedtime Stories to Your Kids Now
- Thread starter bnew
- Start date
I've written a few.
But we can compare your "work" to the existing cannon. There are plenty of screenplays written by humans that we can compare to that everyone has access to. You'd know all about that.
Just put one page of the AI script up.
feelosofer
#ninergang
What happened to just sitting down and opening up a book?
Your Child’s Next Playmate Could Be An AI Toy Powered By ChatGPT
A host of startups are building robots and stuffed toys that can have full-fledged conversations with children, thanks to generative AI.
www.forbes.com
Your Child’s Next Playmate Could Be An AI Toy Powered By ChatGPT
ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP SMITH FOR FORBES
Jan 20, 2024,06:30am EST
A host of startups are building robots and stuffed toys that can have full-fledged conversations with children, thanks to generative AI.
By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff
Six-year-old Sophia Valentina sits under a decorated Christmas tree as she unwraps her present: a tiny lavender-colored robot, whose face is a display and whose body is embedded with a speaker. “Hey Miko,” Sophia says, and the gadget lights up with round eyes and blue eyebrows.In early December, Sara Galvan bought Miko Mini, a $99 robotic companion embedded with in-house AI models as well as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with the hopes that it would help homeschool her daughters. Over the last month, Sophia has used Miko to solve math problems, listen to princess stories and ask questions like “how is Christmas celebrated,” Galvan said. “They begin to learn self-guided learning, which is huge for us with homeschool and helps expand their curiosity and their minds,” she said.
Miko, which can also play games like hide and seek, is part of a growing group of pricey GPT-powered robots rolling into the toy market. Some AI toys are touted as a screen-free form of entertainment that can engage children in conversations and playful learning, like Grok, a $99 AI plushie that can answer general questions (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor Grok, though the toy Grok is voiced by his former girlfriend Grimes). Others claim to offer additional features beyond storytelling and learning activities. There’s Fawn, a $199 cuddly baby deer intended to provide emotional support, and Moxie, a $799 turquoise-colored robot that can recite affirmations and conduct mindfulness exercises. These robotic pals are designed to not only help children grow academically and improve communication skills but also teach them how to deal with their emotions during times of distress.
Sneh Vaswani, cofounder and CEO at Miko
COURTESY OF MIKO
Fostering social and emotional well-being is one of Miko’s intended functions, said CEO and cofounder Sneh Vaswani, who participated in several international robotics competitions before starting his company in 2015 and launching the first iteration of AI companion Miko in 2017. “Our goal is to help parents raise kids in the modern world by engaging, educating and entertaining children through multimodal interactions with robotics and AI,” he told Forbes.
Vaswani has sold almost 500,000 devices to date across more than 100 countries and expects to cross $50 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending in March 2024, he told Forbes. His Mumbai-based startup has raised more than $50 million and was last valued at about $290 million, according to Pitchbook.
Miko 3
COURTESY OF MIKO
Miko is trained on data curated from school curriculum, books and content from partners like Oxford University Press and is built using proprietary technology including facial and voice recognition, recommendation algorithms and a natural language processing layer, Vaswani said. The bot is programmed to detect different accents and provide educational content catered to the geographic region where it’s sold. The company has also teamed up with media giants like Disney and Paramount, allowing them to publish their content on Miko.
“There could be a storytelling app from Disney or a Ninja Turtles app from Paramount,” he told Forbes, adding, “It’s like a Netflix plus an iPhone on wheels given to a child.”
Other toys were built out of a desire to bring fictional characters to life. Misha Sallee and Sam Eaton, the cofounders of startup Curio Interactive — and the creators of Grok — were inspired to create the rocket-shaped AI plushie thanks to fond childhood memories of watching movies like Toy Story. But making toys speak intelligently was a far-fetched idea until ChatGPT came out, Sallee said. Grok is built on a variety of large language models that help it act like a talkative playmate and an encyclopedia for children. Canadian musician Grimes invested in the startup and voiced the characters, which are a part of what Sallee calls a “character universe.”
“As a mother, it resonated with her. It was something that she wanted to lean in and collaborate on,” Sallee said. “She wanted a screen-free experience for her kids and for kids around the world.” (Grimes did not respond to a request for comment.)
Another plush AI toy is Fawn, a baby deer programmed with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3.5 Turbo and text-to-speech AI from synthetic speech startup ElevenLabs. Launched in July 2023 by husband and wife duo Peter Fitzpatrick and Robyn Campbell, Fawn was designed to help children learn about and process their emotions while maintaining the tone and personality of an eight-year-old. Still in its early stages, the startup plans to ship its first orders before the end of March 2024.
Robyn Campbell, cofounder of AI startup Fawn Friends
COURTESY OF FAWN
“[Fawn] is very much like a cartoon character come to life,” said Campbell, who previously worked as a screenwriter at The LEGO Group. “We’ve created this character that has feelings, likes and dislikes that the child relates to.”
While generative AI is capable of spinning up make-believe characters and content, it tends to conjure inaccurate responses to factual questions. ChatGPT, for instance, struggles with simple math problems — and some of these AI toys have the same weakness. For instance, in a recent video review of GPT-powered robot Moxie, it incorrectly said 100 times 100 is 10. Paolo Pirjanian, CEO and founder of Embodied, Inc., the company behind Moxie, said that a “tutor mode” feature along with academic capabilities was announced in early January and will be available in the robots later this year. “Academic questions — paired with environmental factors like multiple speakers or background noise — can sometimes cause Moxie's AI to need further prompting,” Pirjanian said.
“If… the model invents an answer that’s not correct, that can create a serious misconception and these misconceptions are much harder to correct,” said Stefania Druga, a researcher at the Center for Applied AI at the University of Chicago.
In Fawn’s case, Campbell said the AI model has been stress tested to prevent it from veering into inappropriate topics of conversation. But, if the model makes up information, it’s often a desired outcome, Campbell said. “[Fawn] is not designed to be an educational toy. She's designed to be a friend who can tell you an elaborate story about a platypus. Her hallucinations are actually not a bug. They’re a feature,” she said.
THE CASE FOR THERAPY
For Moxie, the stakes are higher than other AI toys because it’s being marketed as a tool for social and emotional development. In 2021, Kristen Walmsley bought the robot on sale for $700 for her 10-year-old son, Oliver Keller who has an intellectual disability and ADHD. “We were really struggling with my son, and I was really desperate to find something that could help him. I bought it because it was advertised as a therapeutic device,” Walmsley tells Forbes.Walmsley said that Oliver, who at first found the robot “creepy” and eventually warmed up to it, now uses it to share his feelings and recite positive affirmations. In one instance, when Oliver was overwhelmed and said he was feeling sad, the robot, which was already active and listening to the conversation, chimed in. “Sometimes I have to remind myself that I deserve to be happy. Please repeat this back to me: ‘I deserve to be happy,’” Moxie said.
Moxie
COURTESY OF EMBODIED, INC.
In another instance, Moxie and Oliver had a conversation about embarrassment and Moxie replied with affirmations about being confident. “It was impressive to see that it could do that because my son really struggles with low self esteem,” Walmsley said, adding that her son has repeated these affirmations to himself even when the robot is not around.
Paolo Pirjanian, CEO and founder of Embodied, Inc.
COURTESY OF EMBODIED, INC.
Moxie’s latest version is embedded with large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. Pirjanian claims that the robot can conduct conversations that are modeled after cognitive behavior therapy sessions, which can help children identify and speak about their source of anxiety or stress, and offer mindfulness exercises. Valued at $135 million, the Pasadena-based startup has raised $80 million in total funding from entities like Sony, Toyota Ventures, Intel Capital and Amazon Alexa Fund. “We have this thing called animal breathing where Moxie will breathe like different kinds of animals just to make it fun for children,” he said.
Miko, whose screen can be used to receive video calls through a parent app, will also offer a therapeutic experience for kids. Vaswani told Forbes that he plans to introduce a new feature that would allow human therapists to conduct teletherapy on the robot’s screen. Parents would have to grant access to the therapist to access Miko.
As of now, the tiny robot isn’t suited for emotional support. In a Youtube reviewof the robot, Sasha Shtern, the CEO of Goally, a company that builds devices for children with ADHD and autism, tells Miko “I am nervous.” The robot responds “It’s okay to feel nervous about medical procedures but doctors and nurses are there to help you.” Miko spoke about medical procedures even though Shtern never mentioned anything related to that.
“It was like talking to an adult who's watching a football game and heard half my question," Shtern said in the video.
And Fawn can coach a child about how to talk about stressful situations (like getting bullied in school) with an adult without feeling embarrassed, Campbell said. She told Forbes that Fawn’s conversational AI has been fine-tuned with scripts she wrote based on child development frameworks derived from books like Brain Rules for Baby and peer reviewed research. The duo also consulted an expert in child development while developing their product.
Moxie’s potential as a replacement for expensive therapists is part of the reason why the almost $800 robot is priced much higher than its competitors, Pirjanian said. He said the steep price is largely due to everything under the hood: a camera and sensors to detect and analyze facial expressions, a mechanical body that moves depending on the mood of the conversation and algorithms that screen out any harmful and inappropriate responses. “The technology that's in Moxie is more costly than what you find in an iPhone,” he said.
However, experts say generative AI has not yet reached a stage where it can be safely used for crucial tasks like therapy. “Providing therapy to a vulnerable population like kids or elders is very difficult to do for a human who specializes in this domain,” Druga told Forbes. “Delegating that responsibility to a system that we cannot fully understand or control is irresponsible.”
Then, there’s the privacy question. Other, less advanced versions of these toys haven’t had strong security measures to protect children’s data. For instance, Mattel’s Hello Barbie toy, an AI-powered doll that could tell jokes and sing songs, was deemed a “privacy nightmare” because hackers could easily access the recordings of children. Another doll, My Friend Cayla, raised alarms among privacy experts who found that it could be hacked via Bluetooth and could be used to send voice messages directly to children.
Newer startups have implemented guardrails to protect data privacy. Pirjanian said Moxie’s visual data is processed and stored on the device locally instead of the cloud. Transcripts of conversations are stripped of personally identifiable information and encrypted in the cloud before being used to retrain the AI model. Similarly, at Miko, children’s data is processed on the device itself. Hey Curio cofounder Sallee said that he and his team “take privacy seriously” and that its toys are compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). Fawn Friends does not record or store any data itself but is subject to OpenAI’s privacy policy, cofounder Fitzpatrick said.
Despite these precautions, some parents like Walmsley are concerned about their personal data leaking. Moxie has large round green eyes that follow a person around a room, she said, and the fact that it has a camera that can record everything happening in a room and her child’s emotional responses, makes her “a little uncomfortable.” But, she still thinks it could be a valuable tool for parents with special needs children.
“Seeing it come alive and actually help him regulate his emotions has made it worth every penny,” she said. “It’s done more than some of the therapies that we've tried for him.”
Artificial Intelligence
Not Allen Iverson
Good.. save me the trouble 
ai parenting
ai parenting
Nah I don't trust this shyt...
Nah, never.
Cacs will hack it and get it to ask your kid for shyt these pedo's ask for..humans are so lazy and useless they cant even interact with a child, they need a robot. The less involved a parent is, the more likely your child will turn astray.
Cacs will hack it and get it to ask your kid for shyt these pedo's ask for..humans are so lazy and useless they cant even interact with a child, they need a robot. The less involved a parent is, the more likely your child will turn astray.
this explains a lot about your comments on AI discussions, you don't understand what you're talking about.
Artificial Intelligence
Not Allen Iverson
1/11
@altryne
On the topic of our kids having AI friends (long)
I got my 6yo Daughter an AI toy for her b-day that arrived for Xmas instead. She unpacked it all excited, I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it (she of course knows what AI is, seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with chatGPT and Santa mode, knows that daddy is "doing AI" etc')
So a very interesting experiment happened after @_magicaltoys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below (very quick turnaround! thank you!)
So...she played with this Dino, chatted with it, and then... learned to turn it off, and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together, but every time I ask her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no.
The few times I turned it back on, and she did speak with it, she chatted for a bit, and then just... turned it off again, not wanting to engage at all.
I gently asked why, and wasn't able to really understand where's the resistance, it's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending the dino was a baby, and it was turned on, so I told her, let's ask it to.. pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said ok. So we asked it to cry. Granted @_magicaltoys don't yet have the amazing advanced voice mode like openAI in there, so it did it's best but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. it was basically making crying sounds like talking.
And also, there are some technical issues still, the voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her?
I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this toy didn't connect with my 6yo (and btw, I have a very curious 4yo boy, who could give 0 fukks about this toy also, he's very observant, and usually wants everything his sister has, wanted 0 time with Dino)
Is this uncanny valley? a couple of times she didn't want to talk to it, and came to me to whisper to ask me to turn it off (the same happened a couple of times with chatGPT Santa mode btw now thinking about it)
Is this just now knowing what to say?
It could be the simple fact that she was playing with some other things, and the toy kept wanting to engage and take the attention to itself vs the game that she was playing.
I know that I have a sample size of 1 kid here, and I'm sure many many things will change, as she'll grow and learn to interact with more AIs in different forms, but the first "toy" contact was interestingly almost a complete failure (from the AI perspective, the Toy experience as I said, was dope)
Anyway, this area is def unexplored, will keep you guys posted how this goes and if she shows interest or picks it up again.
[Quoted tweet]
. @_magicaltoys your "toy" finally arrived 3 months after promised, just "in time" for Christmas, but wake word doesn't work, child upset, and support email doesn't exist
I don't go public usually but this got my kid upset and honestly this is exactly the opposite of how a first unboxing should feel for a smart kids toy!
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and preordered blind, and now I have a very fancy plushy expensive door stop
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1872090256486326272/pu/vid/avc1/888x720/3k1JzoaNWVlyZW1i.mp4
2/11
@Rahll
When your kid is smarter than you.
3/11
@altryne
Every parents dream
4/11
@MichelleSaidel
I think because it takes away control from the child. Play is how children work through emotions, impulses and conflicts and well as try out new behaviors. I would think if would be super irritating to have the toy shape and control your play- like a totally dominating playmate!
5/11
@altryne
I love that this post found experts like you Michelle! Thank you for chiming in!
It did feel dominating!
she wanted to make it clothes, and it was like, "meanwhile, here's another thing we can do" lacking context of what she's already doing
6/11
@evonce2
AI (in general, but certainly for children) needs to be more playful, less compliant. “Is there anything else…” etc. They’re not 42 and calling a mortgage adviser! The AI should push back more, be contrary. Be weird. Respond with a burp “oops, sorry. What did you ask again?” Etc
7/11
@TheXeophon
A friend of mine has kids in the age of your kids. He generated some coloring pages with image models, yet the kids rather want generic, ones which you can buy/print out.
8/11
@L_E_Bendon
If you've ever tried to have a general conversation with AI you wouldn't be surprised by this. It gets boring very quickly having an AI repeat back what you've just said in six times as many words, never offering any new input except when you ask it for explicit information.
9/11
@SpooxyBoi
One reason kids don't like their toys talking is because the voice can change, die, sound silly (like the talk crying), or just be not pleasant. My sister had an Amazing Amanda doll and once that things voice box started to go, so did it. Plus, kids want to use their imagination.
10/11
@MythSerene
EVERYBODY hates AI. Nobody wanted it. It's an awful alien life form that makes everything ugly and tangled in ways we don't want. It's an intruder forced on us by the same socially awkward but greedy fukks who ruined the internet... but a small child just recognizes a monster.
11/11
@DonIwana
Haven´t you thought about stop playing with your child, and instead of it, hire a subscription monthly fee for a corp to do it for you?
Life is about that, stop doing what you love so you have more time for consumption, "AI is the future"
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
@altryne
On the topic of our kids having AI friends (long)
I got my 6yo Daughter an AI toy for her b-day that arrived for Xmas instead. She unpacked it all excited, I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it (she of course knows what AI is, seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with chatGPT and Santa mode, knows that daddy is "doing AI" etc')
So a very interesting experiment happened after @_magicaltoys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below (very quick turnaround! thank you!)
So...she played with this Dino, chatted with it, and then... learned to turn it off, and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together, but every time I ask her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no.
The few times I turned it back on, and she did speak with it, she chatted for a bit, and then just... turned it off again, not wanting to engage at all.
I gently asked why, and wasn't able to really understand where's the resistance, it's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending the dino was a baby, and it was turned on, so I told her, let's ask it to.. pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said ok. So we asked it to cry. Granted @_magicaltoys don't yet have the amazing advanced voice mode like openAI in there, so it did it's best but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. it was basically making crying sounds like talking.
And also, there are some technical issues still, the voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her?
I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this toy didn't connect with my 6yo (and btw, I have a very curious 4yo boy, who could give 0 fukks about this toy also, he's very observant, and usually wants everything his sister has, wanted 0 time with Dino)
Is this uncanny valley? a couple of times she didn't want to talk to it, and came to me to whisper to ask me to turn it off (the same happened a couple of times with chatGPT Santa mode btw now thinking about it)
Is this just now knowing what to say?
It could be the simple fact that she was playing with some other things, and the toy kept wanting to engage and take the attention to itself vs the game that she was playing.
I know that I have a sample size of 1 kid here, and I'm sure many many things will change, as she'll grow and learn to interact with more AIs in different forms, but the first "toy" contact was interestingly almost a complete failure (from the AI perspective, the Toy experience as I said, was dope)
Anyway, this area is def unexplored, will keep you guys posted how this goes and if she shows interest or picks it up again.
[Quoted tweet]
. @_magicaltoys your "toy" finally arrived 3 months after promised, just "in time" for Christmas, but wake word doesn't work, child upset, and support email doesn't exist
I don't go public usually but this got my kid upset and honestly this is exactly the opposite of how a first unboxing should feel for a smart kids toy!
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and preordered blind, and now I have a very fancy plushy expensive door stop
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1872090256486326272/pu/vid/avc1/888x720/3k1JzoaNWVlyZW1i.mp4
2/11
@Rahll
When your kid is smarter than you.
3/11
@altryne
Every parents dream
4/11
@MichelleSaidel
I think because it takes away control from the child. Play is how children work through emotions, impulses and conflicts and well as try out new behaviors. I would think if would be super irritating to have the toy shape and control your play- like a totally dominating playmate!
5/11
@altryne
I love that this post found experts like you Michelle! Thank you for chiming in!
It did feel dominating!
she wanted to make it clothes, and it was like, "meanwhile, here's another thing we can do" lacking context of what she's already doing
6/11
@evonce2
AI (in general, but certainly for children) needs to be more playful, less compliant. “Is there anything else…” etc. They’re not 42 and calling a mortgage adviser! The AI should push back more, be contrary. Be weird. Respond with a burp “oops, sorry. What did you ask again?” Etc
7/11
@TheXeophon
A friend of mine has kids in the age of your kids. He generated some coloring pages with image models, yet the kids rather want generic, ones which you can buy/print out.
8/11
@L_E_Bendon
If you've ever tried to have a general conversation with AI you wouldn't be surprised by this. It gets boring very quickly having an AI repeat back what you've just said in six times as many words, never offering any new input except when you ask it for explicit information.
9/11
@SpooxyBoi
One reason kids don't like their toys talking is because the voice can change, die, sound silly (like the talk crying), or just be not pleasant. My sister had an Amazing Amanda doll and once that things voice box started to go, so did it. Plus, kids want to use their imagination.
10/11
@MythSerene
EVERYBODY hates AI. Nobody wanted it. It's an awful alien life form that makes everything ugly and tangled in ways we don't want. It's an intruder forced on us by the same socially awkward but greedy fukks who ruined the internet... but a small child just recognizes a monster.
11/11
@DonIwana
Haven´t you thought about stop playing with your child, and instead of it, hire a subscription monthly fee for a corp to do it for you?
Life is about that, stop doing what you love so you have more time for consumption, "AI is the future"
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
More excuses for lazy parenting.
From chatbots to intelligent toys: How AI is booming in China
China plans to invest more than a trillion dollars as it races against the US to rule advanced tech.
www.bbc.com
From chatbots to intelligent toys: How AI is booming in China
2 days ago
Laura Bicker
China correspondent
Reporting from
Beijing
BBC/ Xiqing Wang
China is embracing artificial intelligence, from educational tools to humanoid robots in factories
Head in hands, eight-year-old Timmy muttered to himself as he tried to beat a robot powered by artificial intelligence at a game of chess.
But this was not an AI showroom or laboratory – this robot was living on a coffee table in a Beijing apartment, along with Timmy.
The first night it came home, Timmy hugged his little robot friend before heading to bed. He doesn't have a name for it – yet.
"It's like a little teacher or a little friend," the boy said, as he showed his mum the next move he was considering on the chess board.
Moments later, the robot chimed in: "Congrats! You win." Round eyes blinking on the screen, it began rearranging the pieces to start a new game as it continued in Mandarin: "I've seen your ability, I will do better next time."
China is embracing AI in its bid to become a tech superpower by 2030.
DeepSeek, the breakthrough Chinese chatbot that caught the world's attention in January, was just the first hint of that ambition.
Money is pouring into AI businesses seeking more capital, fuelling domestic competition. There are more than 4,500 firms developing and selling AI, schools in the capital Beijing are introducing AI courses for primary and secondary students later this year, and universities have increased the number of places available for students studying AI.
"This is an inevitable trend. We will co-exist with AI," said Timmy's mum, Yan Xue. "Children should get to know it as early as possible. We should not reject it."
She is keen for her son to learn both chess and the strategy board game Go – the robot does both, which persuaded her that its $800 price tag was a good investment. Its creators are already planning to add a language tutoring programme.
BBC/ Joyce Liu
Learning to live with AI is "inevitable", Yan Xue says
Perhaps this was what the Chinese Communist Party hoped for when it declared in 2017 that AI would be "the main driving force" of the country's progress. President Xi Jinping is now betting big on it, as a slowing Chinese economy grapples with the blow of tariffs from its biggest trading partner, the United States.
Beijing plans to invest 10tn Chinese yuan ($1.4tn; £1tn) in the next 15 years as it competes with Washington to gain the edge in advanced tech. AI funding got yet another boost at the government's annual political gathering, which is currently under way. This comes on the heels of a 60 billion yuan-AI investment fund created in January, just days after the US further tightened export controls for advanced chips and placed more Chinese firms on a trade blacklist.
But DeepSeek has shown that Chinese companies can overcome these barriers. And that's what has stunned Silicon Valley and industry experts – they did not expect China to catch up so soon.
A race among dragons
It's a reaction Tommy Tang has become accustomed to after six months of marketing his firm's chess-playing robot at various competitions.
Timmy's machine comes from the same company, SenseRobot, which offers a wide range in abilities – Chinese state media hailed an advanced version in 2022 that beat chess Grand Masters at the game.
"Parents will ask about the price, then they will ask where I am from. They expect me to come from the US or Europe. They seem surprised that I am from China," Mr Tang said, smiling. "There will always be one or two seconds of silence when I say I am from China."
His firm has sold more than 100,000 of the robots and now has a contract with a major US supermarket chain, Costco.
BBC/ Xiqing Wang
Customers abroad are often surprised to hear the robots are Chinese-made, Tommy Tang says
One of the secrets to China's engineering success is its young people. In 2020, more than 3.5 million of the country's students graduated with degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths, better known as STEM.
That's more than any other country in the world - and Beijing is keen to leverage it. "Building strength in education, science and talent is a shared responsibility," Xi told party leaders last week.
Ever since China opened its economy to the world in the late 1970s, it has "been through a process of accumulating talent and technology," says Abbott Lyu, vice-president of Shanghai-based Whalesbot, a firm that makes AI toys. "In this era of AI, we've got many, many engineers, and they are hardworking."
Behind him, a dinosaur made of variously coloured bricks roars to life. It's being controlled through code assembled on a smartphone by a seven-year-old.
The company is developing toys to help children as young as three learn code. Every package of bricks comes with a booklet of code. Children can then choose what they want to build and learn how to do it. The cheapest toy sells for around $40.
"Other countries have AI education robots as well, but when it comes to competitiveness and smart hardware, China is doing better," Mr Lyu insists.
The success of DeepSeek turned its CEO Liang Wenfeng into a national hero and "is worth 10 billion yuan of advertising for [China's] AI industry," he added.
"It has let the public know that AI is not just a concept, that it can indeed change people's lives. It has inspired public curiosity."
Six homegrown AI firms, including DeepSeek, have now been nicknamed China's six little dragons by the internet – the others are Unitree Robotics, Deep Robotics, BrainCo, Game Science, and Manycore Tech.
BBC/Joyce Liu
Robots play football at an AI fair in Shanghai
Some of them were at a recent AI fair in Shanghai, where the biggest Chinese firms in the business showed off their advances, from search and rescue robots to a backflipping dog-like one, which wandered the halls among visitors.
In one bustling exhibition hall, two teams of humanoid robots battled it out in a game of football, complete in red and blue jerseys. The machines fell when they clashed – and one of them was even taken off the field in a stretcher by their human handler who was keen to keep the joke going.
It was hard to miss the air of excitement among developers in the wake of DeepSeek. "Deepseek means the world knows we are here," said Yu Jingji, a 26-year-old engineer.
'Catch-up mode'
But as the world learns of China's AI potential, there are also concerns about what AI is allowing the Chinese government to learn about its users.
AI is hungry for data - the more it gets, the smarter it makes itself and, with around a billion mobile phone users compared to just over 400 million in the US, Beijing has a real advantage.
The West, its allies and many experts in these countries believe that data gathered by Chinese apps such as DeepSeek, RedNote or TikTok can be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party. Some point to the country's National Intelligence Law as evidence of this.
But Chinese firms, including ByteDance, which owns TikTok, says the law allows for the protection of private companies and personal data. Still, suspicion that US user data on TikTok could end up in the hands of the Chinese government drove Washington's decision to ban the hugely popular app.
That same fear – where privacy concerns meet national security challenges - is hitting Deepseek. South Korea banned new downloads of DeepSeek, while Taiwan and Australia have barred the app from government-issued devices.
Chinese companies are aware of these sensitivities and Mr Tang was quick to tell the BBC that "privacy was a red line" for his company. Beijing also realises that this will be a challenge in its bid to be a global leader in AI.
"DeepSeek's rapid rise has triggered hostile reactions from some in the West," a commentary in the state-run Beijing Daily noted, adding that "the development environment for China's AI models remains highly uncertain".
But China's AI firms are not deterred. Rather, they believe thrifty innovation will win them an undeniable advantage – because it was DeepSeek's claim that it could rival ChatGPT for a fraction of the cost that shocked the AI industry.
BBC/ Joyce Liu
A child plays with an AI toy from Whalesbot he built using code
So the engineering challenge is how to make more, for less. "This was our Mission Impossible," Mr Tang said. His company found that the robotic arm used to move chess pieces was hugely expensive to produce and would drive the price up to around $40,000.
So, they tried using AI to help do the work of engineers and enhance the manufacturing process. Mr Tang claims that has driven the cost down to $1,000.
"This is innovation," he says. "Artificial engineering is now integrated into the manufacturing process."
This could have enormous implications as China applies AI on a vast scale. State media already show factories full of humanoid robots. In January, the government said that it would promote the development of AI-powered humanoid robots to help look after its rapidly ageing population.
Xi has repeatedly declared "technological self-reliance" a key goal, which means China wants to create its own advanced chips, to make up for US export restrictions that could hinder its plans.
The Chinese leader knows he is in for a long race – the Beijing Daily recently warned that the DeepSeek moment was not a time for "AI triumphalism" because China was still in "catch-up mode".
President Xi is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, robots and advanced tech in preparation for a marathon that he hopes China will eventually win.
fukk AI NEGGED
Do bedtime stories serve any real purpose that couldn't happen outside of normal reading hours?
King_Kamala61
TheColi's Big Black Areolae Supremicist
You never was read a bed time story? Indians don't read or dk Griot stuff? Well it's a black tradition where a Griot would tell a story mythology or real life heroics like John Henry.
But since we educated we just read to our children and it helps them sleep too.
