BEIJING  –  Instead of simply directing visitors to a store, a shopping mall sign may be able to detect crowds, warn of potential stampedes, recognize pets, and even adjust its lighting as conditions change. Such a vision came from an AI-powered guide sign designed by Qin Zi’ang and Wang Hansen, two eighth-graders from east China’s Jiangsu Province. The pair made it to the finals of a national youth artificial intelligence innovation challenge, held over the weekend in Wuzhen, a water town in neighbouring Zhejiang province. Using off-the-shelf sensors and AI hardware, the students are turning a familiar piece of mall infrastructure into something that can respond to its surroundings and help make commercial spaces both safer and smarter.

“What fascinates me about AI is its ability to make the invisible visible,” Qin said. “When we first learned to code, we were essentially telling computers what to do, step by step. With AI, we are beginning to teach computers how to learn for themselves.”

Wang and Qin were among nearly 8,000 young contestants from across China who took part in the finals, held both online and offline. Roughly 170,000 students signed up for the competition nationwide, according to the organisers.

The figures offer one measure of how quickly AI has made its way into youth competitions in China, as contests proliferate from the national level to local events.

The boom comes amid a broader surge in AI development in China. Developers at companies including DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and Moonshot AI are building increasingly capable and accessible language models, helping bring the technology into a growing range of real-world applications.