AI

Pronounced as the English letters — 'ay-eye' (or in pinyin terms, ài-ài). Modern Mandarin freely embeds English letter-acronyms in speech (CEO, KPI, OK, AI, MBTI). The full Chinese name 人工智能 (réngōng zhìnéng, 'artificial intelligence') exists and appears in formal/written contexts, but conversational speech overwhelmingly says AI.

Since the rise of large language models (~2023), Chinese tech ecosystems have prominent local AI chatbots: 文心一言 (Ernie Bot, Baidu), 通义千问 (Qwen, Alibaba), 豆包 (Doubao, ByteDance), 讯飞星火 (Xunfei Spark), DeepSeek. ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini are blocked, so AI in China conversations almost always refers to one of the local models.