Latest news with #Luo
Mint
11 hours ago
- Business
- Mint
‘DeepSeek moment' in AI vs humans: Artificial intelligence influencers outperform human rivals in livestream sales
Artificial intelligence (AI) avatars are now selling more than real people. A live stream hosted by Chinese tech firm Baidu and popular live streamer Luo Yonghao confirms this. On Baidu's platform, Youxuan, Luo and his co-host Xiao Mu used digital versions of themselves to livestream for over six hours. Their AI avatars helped them earn 55 million yuan (about $7.65 million), CNBC reported. This was much more than Luo's earlier livestream using his real self. The earlier stream lasted four hours and made fewer sales. Luo admitted it was his first time using virtual human technology. 'The digital human effect has scared me ... I'm a bit dazed,' CNBC quoted him as saying. Luo became famous through livestreaming on Douyin (China's TikTok). He has over 24 million followers. He started selling online in 2020 to pay off debts from his failed phone company. The avatars were built using Baidu's AI model, which was trained on five years of videos and copied Luo's humour and style. China's livestreaming and digital avatar industry is growing fast. AI company DeepSeek is gaining attention for creating technology like ChatGPT, but at a lower cost. DeepSeek uses open-source tools and is backed by Chinese tech giant Baidu. AI-powered digital avatars are helping companies save money. They can livestream nonstop, without needing breaks or big production teams. Earlier, companies like Baidu were unsure about using digital humans. But, today, their technology has improved greatly. Since the pandemic, livestream shopping has become popular in China as people looked for new ways to earn money. Livestreamers now earn through commissions and digital gifts. The trend is so strong that Douyin became the second-biggest online shopping platform in China. It has overtaken and competing with market leader Alibaba. 'This is a DeepSeek moment for China's entire livestreaming and digital human industry,' Wu Jialu told CNBC. Wu is the head of research at Be Friends Holding, another company owned by Luo. Neuro-sama, an AI streamer, is gaining popularity on Amazon's platform Twitch. She appears as an anime girl who chats, sings and plays games like Minecraft. Her replies come from a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. Her creator, Vedal, built her using the Unity game engine and works on this project full-time, according to Bloomberg. Despite being an AI avatar, Neuro-sama has become a hit. Around 5,700 viewers watch her streams regularly, making her one of Twitch's top streamers.
CNBC
a day ago
- Business
- CNBC
AI humans in China just proved they are better influencers. It only took a duo 7 hours to rake in more than $7 million
BEIJING — Avatars generated by artificial intelligence are now able to sell more than real people can, according to a collaboration between Chinese tech company Baidu and a popular livestreamer. Luo Yonghao, one of China's earliest and most popular livestreamers, and his co-host Xiao Mu both used digital versions of themselves to interact with viewers in real time for well over six hours on Sunday on Baidu's e-commerce livestreaming platform "Youxuan", the Chinese tech company said. The session raked in 55 million yuan ($7.65 million). In comparison, Luo's first livestream attempt on Youxuan last month, which lasted just over four hours, saw fewer orders for consumer electronics, food and other key products, Baidu said. Luo said that it was his first time using virtual human technology to sell products through livestreaming. "The digital human effect has scared me ... I'm a bit dazed," he told his 1.7 million followers on social media platform Weibo, according to a CNBC translation. Luo started livestreaming in April 2020 on ByteDance's short video app Douyin, in an attempt to pay off debts racked up by his struggling smartphone company Smartisan. His "Be Friends" Douyin livestream account has nearly 24.7 million followers. Luo's and his co-host's avatars were built using Baidu's generative AI model, which learned from five years' worth of videos to mimic their jokes and style, Wu Jialu, head of research at Luo's other company, Be Friends Holding, told CNBC on Wednesday. "This is a DeepSeek moment for China's entire livestreaming and digital human industry," Wu said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. DeepSeek, China's version of OpenAI, rattled global investors in January with its claims of rivaling ChatGPT at far lower costs and using an open-source approach. AI avatars can sharply reduce costs since companies don't need to hire a large production team or a studio to livestream. The digital avatars can also stream nonstop without needing breaks. "We have always been skeptical about digital people livestreaming," Wu said, noting the company had tried out various kinds of digital humans over the years. But he said that Baidu now offers the best digital human product currently available, compared to the early days of livestreaming e-commerce five or six years ago. Livestream shopping took off in China after the pandemic forced businesses to find alternative sales channels. More people are turning to livestreaming to earn money from commissions and virtual gifts amid slower economic growth. Livestreaming generated so many sales on Douyin last year that the app surpassed traditional e-commerce company to become China's second-largest e-commerce platform — and ate into the market share of lead player Alibaba, according to a report from Worldpanel and Bain & Company last week. Both and Alibaba's Taobao also offer livestreaming sales portals. Meanwhile, other Chinese companies, including tech giant Tencent, have developed tools to create digital people that can be used as news anchors. In late 2023, several businesses started trying out virtual human livestreamers during the Singles Day shopping holiday. But analysts have cautioned that products sold via livestreams tend to have a high return rate as they are often impulse purchases. The biggest challenge for using virtual humans to livestream is no longer the technology, but compliance and platform requirements, Wu said. Digital humans need to be trained to adhere to regulations about product advertising, while major livestreaming platforms may have different rules about allowing virtual people to host the sessions, he said. For example, Douyin has rolled out restrictions on using the technology, especially if the virtual people do not interact with viewers. While Luo's next virtual human appearance hasn't been set yet, Wu said he expects it will be very soon. And in the future, he said, digital humans could easily livestream in multiple languages to reach users outside China.
Asia Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Asia Times
When police states collide, the people's truth will not be erased
'Make America Great Again' and 'Never let the Century of Humiliation return' are the slogans of two opposed superpower governments – producing one unsettling convergence. These are the ideological battle cries of the United States and the People's Republic of China – each invoking a grand civilizational mission to justify extraordinary state power. Beneath this geopolitical theater lies a shared strategy: Both MAGA-style authoritarianism and China's nationalist revivalism have co-opted the rhetoric of public interest to justify surveillance, censorship and the suppression of dissent, while suppressing the public's right to speak for itself. On June 14, demonstrators across the US rallied under the banner 'No Kings,' rejecting what they saw as authoritarian overreach under the Trump 2.0 administration. Protesters challenged the surveillance state, creeping censorship and politicized law enforcement. Civil liberties groups decried creeping executive power, while digital activists broadcast their dissent through livestreams and encrypted chats. 'No Kings' protesters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, on June 14, 2025. Photo: Susan R. Martin The response was swift: unmarked federal agents, digital surveillance and coordinated efforts to discredit and delegitimize the movement. A familiar pattern has emerged where dissent is framed as extremism, and protest as threat. Thousands of miles away, another protest has unfolded – not in the streets, but across a vast digital terrain. Chinese netizens have erupted in outrage over the death of Dr. Luo Shuaiyu, a young intern surgeon at Xiangya Second Hospital who allegedly exposed illicit organ harvesting practices implicating senior hospital officials before dying under suspicious circumstances. After his May 8, 2024, death was labeled a suicide by the sanitized official provincial official narrative, despite troubling evidence to the contrary, citizens turned to digital forums to demand truth and justice. Luo's story, like the earlier case of missing teen Hu Xinyu, became a lightning rod for public grief, anger, and forensic online investigation. Hashtags, screenshots, voice notes and digital sleuthing kept his memory alive even as censors tried to erase it. On Chinese platforms including WeChat and Weibo, netizens mobilized to generate their own narratives in response to the lack of credibility they perceived in the official account of the doctor's sudden death. His story, like so many others – from Hu Xinyu's disappearance to past vaccine scandals – became a catalyst for a digitally-driven reckoning with the state's moral authority. In China, this takes the form of rights-based advocacy for 'Dao' (Changdao, 倡道). While the interest-based advocacy under Party's control (Changdao,倡导) – state-led ideological guidance – remains dominant, digital spaces have opened new channels for citizens to assert moral claims, circulate forensic counter-narratives, and amplify injustice. In Luo's case, fragments of voice recordings, hospital screenshots and encrypted group chats were enough to bypass censorship and spark mass questioning. Online outrage became a kind of public referendum – one that the government could not ignore, even as it moved to erase, suppress or redirect the conversation. In the United States, the MAGA narrative has done more than reshape electoral politics. It has become a blueprint for state overreach under the guise of immigration enforcement. Agencies such as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) have increasingly acted as autonomous arms of ideological policy, empowered not just to detain and deport but to surveil, intimidate, and over-police immigrant communities. Under Trump's 2.0 administration, ICE has not only expanded its detention infrastructure but blurred the line between civil immigration proceedings and criminal enforcement. The agency now mirrors the very logic of authoritarian policing: using opaque watchlists, secret evidence and vague national security claims to justify raids, detentions, and prolonged surveillance. While presented as a 'public interest' defense of national sovereignty, this campaign routinely ignores rights-based advocacy, silencing immigrant voices and bypassing due process. Just as China's public interest rhetoric masks political control, MAGA's immigration agenda uses patriotism to conceal systemic injustice. Across the Pacific from each other, two governments – one claiming democratic legitimacy, the other insisting on single-party stability – are confronting a shared challenge: the rise of digitally empowered, rights-based public advocacy. From the United States' 'No Kings' protests to viral outrage over the suspicious death of Dr. Luo Shuaiyu in China, citizens are resisting state narratives using the very tools once designed to control them. These protests—one physical, one digital—are not isolated. These two seemingly disconnected events – one anchored in American civil liberties, the other in Chinese public health scandal – share a deeper infrastructure. They both illuminate the power and signal the emergence of what I call an inter-network society: a transnational digital public sphere where global digital platforms enable ordinary citizens, armed with smart phones and moral outrage, engaged in distributed forms of civic engagement that challenge state-imposed narratives. But this emerging civic infrastructure faces a dual pressure: one from traditional authoritarian censorship, and another from ideological capture – in which 'public interest' becomes whatever serves state goals. In both countries, governments present themselves as defenders of a public good. In China, it is 'national rejuvenation' – a tightly managed story of unity, sacrifice, and historical destiny. In the US, it is MAGA's restoration fantasy – evoking a purified past to rationalize hardline policies in the present. Both narratives appropriate the function of public advocacy, framing dissenters as traitors, radicals or foreign agents. What gets erased in this process is rights-based advocacy. This form of public engagement draws from moral, legal, and civic principles to hold power accountable. While the interest-based advocacy under the Communists Party's control – state-led ideological guidance – remains dominant, digital spaces have opened new channels for citizens to assert moral claims, circulate forensic counter-narratives, and amplify injustice. In Luo's case, fragments of voice recordings, hospital screenshots, and encrypted group chats were enough to bypass censorship and spark mass questioning. Online outrage became a kind of public referendum – one that the government could not ignore, even as it moved to erase, suppress or redirect the conversation. It is messy, often uncomfortable and politically inconvenient. And that is exactly why it matters. This is more than spontaneous protest. Rights-based digital activism has taken the form of forensic public engagement: citizens compiling timelines, documenting abuses, and demanding accountability for the truth underneath the death of figures like Dr. Luo. Though heavily censored, this grassroots movement constitutes an incipient counter-power. Although the state retains control over laws, infrastructure, and coercive force, these digital publics insert new variables into governance: a demand for legitimacy, a challenge to propaganda, and a capacity for decentralized accountability. For now, it does not seek to overthrow the system, but to negotiate with it, expanding the space for justice within an otherwise tightly controlled ecosystem. In the new era of ideological policing, between the emerging digital resistance and the fragility of rights-based advocacy lies the paradox: Both regimes treat public interest as something to be defined from the top down, not claimed from the bottom up. Under whatever banner – national security, civilizational revival or cultural greatness – both of the states now position themselves as the exclusive interpreter of 'the people's will'—while undermining the people's voice. In the US, the rise of surveillance, 'lawfare' and state-led counter-disinformation campaigns reveals how dissent is increasingly framed as destabilization. There's a tendency to believe that constitutional protections shield people from the worst abuses of power. But the 'No Kings' protests reveal a troubling convergence: militarized policing, retaliatory surveillance and the erosion of civil discourse. Even in such a formal democracy, dissenters face digital tracking, criminalization and marginalization – not dissimilar in structure to their counterparts, the authoritarian regimes they claim to oppose. Whether in Beijing or in Washington, the state is learning to police not just individuals but information ecosystems. And yet, the people persist. And the public is learning, too. Thus, this is a nuanced and urgent call to defend public truth from the ground up. It is assembling evidence, forming alliances and refusing to be gaslit into submission. What unites the stories of Luo Shuaiyu, Hu Xinyu, and the 'No Kings' protestors is not ideology but method. Digital advocacy – especially in its rights-based form – has become a crucial lever of engagement. It may not yet dismantle structural power, but it undeniably reshapes its contours. What's new are the transnational logic of repression and the global, networked resistance it has provoked. If there is hope, it lies in the connective tissue of our time: the inter-networked public sphere. It is imperfect, fragmented, and surveilled – but it remains a space where people, across borders and regimes, still ask the hardest questions: Who decides what truth is? Who benefits from silence? Who speaks for justice? And most importantly: Who dares to dissent? It's a digitally connected society that resists monologue with dialogue, propaganda with documentation, erasure with remembrance, The challenge ahead is not simply one of state versus society. It is about who gets to define truth, and how. In both China and the US, people are witnessing an epistemological battle – between authoritarian certainty and democratic doubt, between managed silence and messy transparency. The advocates persist by reclaiming the power through physical demonstration also the digital lifelines, the encrypted circles and the fragmented solidarity of the global internet. A digitally connected society now resists monologue with dialogue, propaganda with documentation and erasure with remembrance. This is the frontier of public life in the 21st century: where networked publics must confront not only authoritarian power but the seductive narratives that claim to speak in their name. To Dr. Luo – and to the countless unnamed advocates across borders who dare to ask inconvenient questions and keep disguised truths alive – we salute you. The people's truth cannot be twisted. It echoes through silence, reassembles through fragments, and survives every attempt to erase it. Yujing Shentu, PhD, is an independent scholar and writer on digital politics, international political economy and US-China strategic competition.
Express Tribune
7 days ago
- Health
- Express Tribune
Pakistan, WHO rally for life-saving blood donation
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Pakistan's Health Ministry launched a joint appeal on Friday to the general public to "urgently and voluntarily" donate blood to address a deficit that was severely limiting hospitals' capacity to save lives. The appeal came on the eve of World Blood Donor Day, which is being observed on Saturday (today) to acknowledge voluntary, unpaid blood donors and raise awareness about the importance of safe blood and blood products. The year's theme is "Give blood, give hope – together we save lives". In the connection, nearly 150 volunteers participated in a blood donation drive organised by the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in collaboration with WHO. One of the first volunteers to donate blood was WHO Representative in Pakistan Dr Dapeng Luo. Voluntary blood donations can save lives and give hope to those in need. With a single donation, each of us can save up to three lives," said Dr Luo, speaking on the occasion. "Every patient who needs blood should be able to receive it," Luo added. He said that WHO would continue to work with Pakistan to strengthen a blood service.
AsiaOne
13-06-2025
- AsiaOne
Man, 39, accused of housebreaking jumps bail, arrest warrant issued, Singapore News
A Chinese national facing charges for breaking into a private residence and stealing over $570,000 worth of jewellery has jumped bail. An arrest warrant has been issued to Long Zhihua, 39, after he failed to turn up for a pre-trial conference on May 23. In response to AsiaOne's queries, the Singapore Courts said that Long has been uncontactable since April 5, four days after he was granted bail. Long, a member of a housebreaking syndicate, had broken into a home on Windsor Park Road on June 21, 2024, with his accomplice, Luo Changchang, 44. They were arrested five days after the heist, before they had planned to fly back to China on June 29. Several stolen items were found in their hotel room in Geylang, but the victim, a 53-year-old woman, still suffered a loss as more than $390,000 in jewellery remains missing. According to court documents, Long and Luo initially pleaded guilty last December and were awaiting sentencing, but retracted their plea, prompting the court to schedule a pre-trial conference. Long, who had been granted bail, failed to show up in court on April 25. He did turn not turn up to the rescheduled pre-trial conference on May 23, which led to the arrest warrant being issued. Meanwhile, Luo has remained in remand since his arrest. His case is scheduled to be be heard again on July 25. Offenders convicted of housebreaking can be jailed up to 10 years, and fined. [[nid:697687]] chingshijie@
