China's first AI artist concert sells out Shanghai's Bund Conference
Two days at China's biggest AI gathering produced a pair of firsts that had nothing to do with benchmarks: a machine-built singer filling a riverside venue, and a Guinness-certified coding marathon whose winner is nine years old.
Yuri, an AI virtual idol holding China's first official digital-human identity certificate, played the country's first AI artist live concert on Friday night at the Bund Conference in Shanghai — a sold-out show it shared with a human indie-folk duo. The set ran on a 100-metre-wide, 22-metre-tall screen at 10K resolution, with Yuri performing new songs written by AI while the folk band Landlord's Cat and the Shanghai Huili Kindergarten Choir performed alongside her. Zhao Hanqing, founder of the AI TALK studio that built her, framed the point as format rather than spectacle: AI-native content should not just be faster to produce, he said, it should find forms of its own — and when an AI with no childhood talks about growth and doubt, it hands humans a new mirror for their own feelings.
The concert headlined the Bund Conference's first AI Art Festival, a three-part programme that also included an exhibition co-curated around a 1985 work by Harold Cohen's AARON system — the earliest AI built to make art, and the only known piece it signed itself — and a screening of more than 100 AI films with platforms including MiniMax and Kuaishou's Kling. The conference's own framing is that as standardised skills fall to machines, imagination, taste and judgment get scarcer. Yuri's route is the concrete version of that argument: pilot commercial shows, brand deals, and a public-service role in anti-fraud messaging before this week's headline slot.
A separate Bund Conference event, the AI coding marathon that opened the conference on September 9, has been certified by Guinness World Records as the most applications ever built in an online generative-AI coding contest — 15,577 working apps — and a nine-year-old took first prize. Organisers say more than 10,000 people took part, nearly 70% of them under 18, with the youngest entrant aged six. Luo Ange, nine, turned a ceramics-camp summer into a digital museum by talking to AI in plain language, iterating her project to a seventh version inside two days; another nine-year-old built an interactive geometry tutor. Also notable: the 11 AI coding platforms backing the event — units of Ant Group, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, SenseTime and 360 among them — published a shared technical specification for public AI coding competitions, the first such joint standard in China.
What to watch: whether the ticketed-AI-performer model travels outside festival stages, and how much of the new contest standard the platforms actually enforce.
Would you buy a ticket to watch a performer who was never born? Tell us in the comments.
