A sticker representing OpenClaw is pictured on Sunday at the AI-themed AGI Bar in Beijing’s high-tech neighborhood of Zhongguancun, China.
Tingshu Wang, Reuters
DeepSeek tokens for customers
The bar’s signature drink, also called AGI, is a $1.50 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.
Customers chat on Sunday at the AI-themed AGI Bar in Beijing’s high-tech neighborhood of Zhongguancun, China.
Tingshu Wang
Bar to add humanoid robots
Although the bar still employs people, Song has automated many of its systems for inventory, reservations, utilities and membership.
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 labor on tedious, unnecessary operational tasks,” he said.
However, like many Chinese open-weight models that users can access for a much lower cost than U.S. 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.”