China’s ‘Lipstick King’ touts AI tokens in first for Singles’ Day festival

BEIJING — The Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza in China unveiled a new attraction this year as it graduates beyond a long association with cut-price cosmetics and home appliances: computing credits used to access artificial intelligence tools.

The launch is the first time AI token packages have been offered as a significant consumer product category during Singles’ Day, the world’s largest shopping festival originally held on Nov. 11 each year.

Top livestreamer Austin Li sold 100,000 monthly memberships of Alibaba’s QwenWork office AI service within half an hour during a Taobao Live broadcast on Monday, the company said.

That is equivalent to about 2 trillion AI tokens, or units of text processed by AI models.

“Chinese consumers are now very accustomed to using AI productivity tools,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the tech research firm Omdia.

Frequent users can run short of credits, he added, which makes extensive purchases during a sales period “a very reasonable action.”

It was unclear how much the token plans were discounted from normal prices, however.

The livestream was the first sale of AI products by Li, who earned the “Lipstick King” moniker for amassing a huge following while selling vast volumes of lipstick…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/world