Beijing's AGI Bar Hands Out Free DeepSeek Tokens to AI Developers Over Drinks

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

BEIJING, Aug 17 (Reuters) - 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 ($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. 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 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." Reporting by Laurie Chen; Editing by Eduardo Baptista and Kate Mayberry Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Disrupted Laurie Chen Thomson Reuters Laurie Chen is a China Correspondent at Reuters in Beijing, whose coverage focuses on the nexus of frontier technology, strategic emerging industries and geopolitics. She has reported on China for almost a decade, having previously covered China's government, defence, security and foreign policy. She has broken multiple global scoops on U.S.-China relations and the trade war 2.0, elite Chinese politics and diplomacy. She is particularly interested in Chinese frontier AI, tech and industrial policy, semiconductor supply chains, robotics, aerospace and grand strategy.

A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens

In Beijing's Zhongguancun district, the dense grid of universities and start-ups that likes to bill itself as China's Silicon Valley, a small bar has found a neat way to distil the country's artificial-intelligence boom into something you can actually drink. The AGI Bar, opened last summer by an independent developer named Song De, does not bother with the usual offer of free Wi-Fi. It hands patrons free "tokens" instead, the units of AI usage that everyone in the trade now counts as carefully as money. The mechanics are pleasingly literal. Two Nvidia workstations sit behind the bar, self-hosting DeepSeek's V4 Flash model so that customers can prompt, tinker and code over a beer without paying a subscription to anyone. "It's quite common for bars to provide free Wi-Fi with routers," Song told Reuters, "so I'll provide free tokens." That such a thing is even affordable owes everything to the way cheap Chinese models have closed in on their pricier Western rivals. Logos of China's major AI labs line the walls, the menu leans on sector in-jokes, and the house cocktail, the AGI, arrives as a glass almost entirely full of beer foam, a wry nod to the frothy hype that has swollen around the industry. It is the kind of gag that only works in a room full of people who build the thing they are teasing. According to visitors, the extras lean into the same joke. Regulars can buy a "Drinking Plan" that hands over free beer for a year, order a brew called the "AGI bubble", and glance up at a screen cycling through job openings at AI companies while they work. The result is part watering hole, part recruitment board, part group therapy for a sector that cannot quite decide whether it is on the verge of god-like machines or an almighty crash. The joke lands because the economics beneath it are entirely real. DeepSeek became a global name in early 2025, when its cheap, capable models set off what many described as a "Sputnik moment" for American AI, and the lab has spent the time since dragging the price of frontier-grade intelligence steadily downwards. Running V4 Flash on a pair of workstations, cheaply enough to give the output away with a lager, is only thinkable because DeepSeek and its domestic rivals have driven the cost of inference through the floor and kept cutting from there. That is precisely the shift rattling Silicon Valley. DeepSeek's knack for matching far more expensive Western systems at a fraction of the cost has forced OpenAI and Anthropic to defend not only their benchmarks but their prices, and Beijing has come to treat the lab as a matter of national pride and strategic leverage. A bar handing out DeepSeek tokens as freely as bar snacks is, in its own small way, a monument to that confidence, a sign that in China the technology has already crossed from the lab into the culture. There is a nervier reading, too. The foam-topped AGI cocktail is, after all, a joke about a bubble, and plenty of people inside the industry quietly share the worry that valuations, DeepSeek's included, have sprinted well ahead of revenue. The lab has lately begun charging more at peak hours and softening its rock-bottom pitch, a reminder that even the great disruptor eventually has to make the sums add up. Cheap intelligence is thrilling until someone has to pay for the workstations. For now, the AGI Bar is happy to serve the boom and the anxiety in the same round. Song's clientele of engineers and founders can prompt a Chinese model for nothing, raise a glass to the coming of artificial general intelligence, and, should the whole thing deflate like the head on their beer, at least count on being first to hear about the next job going.