| Hey, this is Newley Purnell reporting from a city with a complicated relationship with AI chatbots. If you’re ever visiting Hong Kong and craving easy access to bots like ChatGPT or Claude, you might be surprised. But first... Three things you need to know today: • As investments dry up, VCs are fundraising to offer startups loans
• TSMC’s August sales rise 33% signaling sustained AI demand
• The new iPhone 16 has a camera button As a tech reporter, I'm eager to stay up to date on global artificial intelligence trends and services. But here’s what I see when I try to access US offerings such as those from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini from my perch on the western side of Hong Kong Island: “Unable to load site.” “App unavailable.” “Account not supported.” Hmm. Okay, much like TikTok’s absence here, ChatGPT is simply not offered in the city, but we can at least look at videos on Douyin — TikTok’s sibling app for China — so perhaps I should just go local with Baidu Inc.’s Ernie Bot? Not so fast. You need a Baidu account for that, which I don’t have, and good luck if you’re not a fluent Chinese reader. ByteDance Ltd.’s Cici, another offering from the mainland, displays a message that says “due to regional restrictions, Cici is not available.” When it comes to AI chatbots, Hong Kong is uniquely out of luck. Most Western tech giants don’t make their services available here, treating what’s one of Asia’s biggest financial centers the same way they do restricted geographies like North Korea, Iran and Syria. Meanwhile, Chinese tech firms seem more focused on their massive mainland market than this city of about 7.5 million. That’s unusual, to say the least. China’s Great Firewall has never enveloped the city, leaving us free to tweet to our heart’s content, binge YouTube cooking tutorials and post on Facebook about the latest US presidential debate. And that’s still the case — no specific government edict is preventing OpenAI from dishing up its latest software to Hong Kongers. It just might be quite a headache, given the number of sensitive political topics around the city and AI bots’ tendency to fabricate facts. Foreign tech firms, though they haven’t said so publicly, may be wary that their bots’ output could run afoul of a national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong four years ago. Most of the aforementioned companies did not respond to my queries on this topic, and Google only confirmed that its Gemini AI isn’t available. The US just last weekend said firms operating in Hong Kong now face heightened legal risks. A Hong Kong government spokesman in response said the laws that protect the city’s national security have resulted in a safe and stable environment for business and investment. But the thing is, unfettered access to information is part of that stable business environment and a key draw for global firms here. Looking ahead, multinational and local companies alike, along with individuals, won't want to miss out on productivity gains an AI revolution could bring. When asked about the availability of AI services in Hong Kong and the security law, a government spokesperson said every sovereign state has a right to enact such laws. "Any suggestions that businesses would only experience concerns when operating here in Hong Kong but not in other countries are simply ungrounded and even biased," the spokesperson said. The Hong Kong government says it's working on building a chatbot too. An official in July told local media that the city is testing its own solution, which it will ultimately open to the public, as my colleague Vlad Savov reported. He and I wonder about that bot’s prospects of replacing the cornucopia of international services we’re not privy to. To be sure, there are workarounds for the AI-curious. One popular option is Poe, a platform operated by Quora Inc. that allows users to ask questions of various chatbots, including ChatGPT, regardless of their location. The tradeoff? You’re often interacting with older versions of those bots than people going directly to the source. Google searches in Hong Kong for ChatGPT skyrocketed when the service launched in late 2022, but since then more people are searching for Poe, according to Google Trends data. Many users also turn to VPNs, or virtual private networks, to mask their location in order to access some chatbots. Some VPN providers have posted guides with instructions for people in the city that involve connecting to servers in the US, opening a private browser window, signing up for ChatGPT, then using a foreign phone number to create an account. It’s an option, even if it’s not one I’d casually offer to my elder relatives. And then there are the outliers: some services are freely accessible, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot, built upon OpenAI tech. In addition, Doubao, another of Bytedance's chatbots that's increasingly popular in China, also works in Hong Kong. It’d just be nice for that to be the norm. Looming on the horizon, we have the incoming iPhone 16 from Apple Inc., which will receive AI enhancements in a trickle over the coming months, and I’ll be very curious to see how much of that makes it into Hong Kong. Like Microsoft, Apple’s using some OpenAI tech. Now the question to watch is whether Hong Kong gets treated like a western locale or the same as mainland China.—Newley Purnell Huawei sought to steal the limelight from Apple’s iPhone 16 launch, at home in China at least, with the debut of the first commercial trifold phone. The new device, costing $2,800 and on sale in 10 days, will be usable as a regular phone, a square foldable or as a 10-inch tablet. Oracle’s shares rose after AI-related cloud demand helped its profit beat expectations. Chai Discovery, an AI drug discovery startup founded six months ago, has raised nearly $30 million from Thrive Capital and OpenAI. Amazon’s Audible will start generating AI voice replicas for popular book narrators (with their consent). Esports company NIP Group, which began trading on the Nasdaq in July, is branching out into game publishing for the $50 billion China market. | 
