Hi everyone! This is Cheng Ting-Fang, your #techAsia host for the week, sending a warm hello from Taipei!
I just returned to Asia from Barcelona — a city bursting with Gaudi’s artistic architecture and fresh tapas, from garlic prawns to grilled cuttlefish and patatas bravas. Every spring, the global wireless industry gathers in this Spanish city for the latest market insights. This year, the buzzword once again was “artificial intelligence.”
At the Mobile World Congress, I was able to try out various Chinese AI applications first-hand. There were long queues at the booth of telecom operator China Unicom, which showcased a photo station capable of instantly transforming snapshots into centuries-old historical figures — blending my face, for instance, with Empress Wu Zetian’s Tang Dynasty attire in the blink of an eye. The company said its own Yuanjing large language model was the engine behind this transformation.