Tencent Summit – general Large Language Models and chatbots "no longer meet business needs" for enterprise Artificial Intelligence

The pizazz feels welcoming and familiar: the expectant crowd filling a hangar-sized convention hall; a stage the width of a football field; the pounding music and widescreen visuals; the discreet plumes of stage smoke, allowing pencil-beams of light to strafe the air; the headset mics and welcoming MC; and – of course – the C-level 'fireside chat' patois, in which every sentence begins with "So…" and ends with, "right?" ("So, we're building out our capability, right?")

We have all been to these huge tech-industry events. But this isn't some rock star US vendor welcoming customers to the Moscone in San Francisco or the Javits in New York. It is Chinese multinational Tencent kicking off its annual summit in Shenzhen, the high-tech megacity just north of Hong Kong – the exact point on Earth where the old world ends, and a new one begins.

Tencent has been an entertainment and internet company ...