At Beijing AI-themed bar, DeepSeek tokens come with the pints

BEIJING - AI and alcohol have three main similarities, according to Beijing bar owner Song De: hallucinations, bubbles and distillation. As AI enthusiasm sweeps across China, Song hopes his bar can ride the wave.

He opened AGI Bar, named after the concept of artificial general intelligence where AI systems surpass human intelligence, last year in Zhongguancun, the capital's high-tech neighbourhood in Haidian district. It is now a hub for Beijing's AI developers, investors and students.

"You'll see people sitting around a table coming from different labs, competing companies, and different universities, all chatting about industry trends right here," said Song, an independent AI developer in his thirties who runs the bar in his spare time.

Located on Zhongguancun's Inno Way startup street, the bar is a stone's throw from the elite Tsinghua and Peking universities that produce China's top AI talent, as well as the offices of well-known Chinese and Western tech firms, including DeepSeek and Microsoft. 

It has hosted parties for Chinese AI labs including Z.ai, and regularly holds developer seminars, open-source AI symposiums and university research meetups.

"This is a very unique and advantageous location," Song said. "Haidian (district) has always been the heart of scientific research in China. Internet companies are clustered here, and the tech atmosphere, industry investments, and VC incubators provide massive momentum for the sector."

Inside, the walls are plastered with logos, colourful figurines and merchandise from China's major AI firms, while the giant brass gong struck by Z.ai when it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January stands proudly outside the entrance.

The bar is a symbol of China's drive to use AI to turn its economy into a high-tech powerhouse, which has even led retirees to adopt AI agents and made coding education for primary school children mainstream. 

The initiative has already brought about some job disruption and prompted universities to add AI to their curriculums.

Deepseek tokens for customers

The bar's signature drink, also called AGI, is a 9.9 yuan (S$1.90) glass of foam. Customers can connect to the bar's AI agent through WiFi to access free unlimited DeepSeek tokens for coding, which run on two Nvidia DGX Spark computers on display.

"We say AI is a future public utility like water, electricity, and the internet. AI should be like WiFi," said Song, who believes the discovery of AI is more important than the Industrial Revolution.

The bar's registered Chinese name means "knowledge distillation", a tongue-in-cheek pun on liquor distillation and AI model distillation.

"First off, it's an AI technical term for transferring knowledge from large models to small ones, but between humans in a bar, that's also a form of knowledge distillation," said Song.

Bar to add humanoid robots soon

Although the bar still employs people, Song has automated much of the bar's inventory, reservation, utilities and membership systems using an AI agent.

Due to huge demand, Song hopes to expand the bar's Beijing floor space this year and use humanoid robots, another symbol of China's innovation drive, to serve customers drinks. He opened a Shanghai branch in June.

"We've hooked up all our lighting, software, and hardware in the store to APIs for AI processing. We're trying not to waste human labour on tedious, unnecessary operational tasks," he said.

However, like many Chinese open-weight models that users can access for a much lower cost than US proprietary AI models, Song is yet to make money.

"The bar is completely losing money," he said. "The amount of drinks given away is definitely 10 times more than what's sold."