About Leiphone

Leiphone

Leiphone, published at leiphone.com and known in Chinese as Leifengwang, is a Shenzhen technology news site founded in 2011. It began by covering consumer electronics and later became a leading Chinese artificial-intelligence and robotics news outlet through its dedicated AI channels and the annual GAIR summit. That evolution — from gadgets to artificial intelligence — mirrors the transformation of its home city and of Chinese technology itself, and it gives Leiphone a distinctive archive: a publication that first explained smartphones and smart hardware to early adopters, and then reoriented itself around the researchers, companies and conferences of China's AI industry.

Founded in Shenzhen in 2011

Leiphone was founded in 2011 in Shenzhen, in Guangdong province. The timing and place both matter. In 2011 Shenzhen was already the centre of China's consumer-electronics manufacturing, the city where phones, components and accessories moved from design to production faster than anywhere else in the country, but the software and AI industries that would later define it were still forming. A technology news site based in Shenzhen therefore started close to hardware: close to factories, component suppliers, device makers and the engineers who turned prototypes into products sold around the world.

The outlet's Chinese name, Leifengwang, is rendered in its own summit materials in forms such as Lei Feng.com, while English-language directories and the batch record use Leiphone. Readers searching for the outlet in either language are looking for the same publication: a Shenzhen technology news organisation whose site is leiphone.com and whose best-known institutional creation is the Global Artificial Intelligence and Robotics summit, GAIR.

From Consumer Electronics to Artificial Intelligence

The defining editorial story of Leiphone is a pivot that the record states plainly: originally covering consumer electronics, it later became a leading Chinese AI and robotics news outlet through its AI channels. Consumer-electronics coverage meant news and analysis of phones, wearables, smart devices and the companies behind them — the natural beat for a Shenzhen newsroom in the early 2010s, when Chinese brands were moving from contract manufacturing towards designing and selling their own products worldwide.

As artificial intelligence moved from research laboratories into products — voice assistants, computer vision, autonomous systems, smart hardware — the same newsroom skills applied to a new subject. Covering AI well requires a different network from covering handsets: university researchers, laboratory directors, algorithm companies and robotics startups matter as much as device brands. Leiphone built that network deliberately, creating dedicated AI channels and, crucially, a summit that brought the academic and industrial sides of Chinese AI into the same programme. By the end of the decade, industry coverage of Chinese AI media routinely treated Leiphone as one of the outlets that defined the field rather than merely reported on it.

The CCF-GAIR Summit

The Global Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Summit, known as CCF-GAIR, is Leiphone's signature institution. The 2020 edition shows how it works. CCF-GAIR 2020 opened on 7 August 2020 in Shenzhen. It was hosted by the China Computer Federation, known as CCF, and co-hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Leiphone, with Pengcheng Laboratory and the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics among the co-organisers. Contemporary summit descriptions called it a large-scale, high-level and cross-border event spanning academia, industry and investment in artificial intelligence and robotics in China.

The summit's own retrospective, published for the 2020 edition, traces its development year by year: the combination of school and industry in 2016, industrial landing — meaning real-world deployment — in 2017, vertical segmentation in 2018, and the fortieth anniversary of artificial intelligence as a theme in 2019. Read as a sequence, those themes chart the maturation of Chinese AI itself, from connecting researchers with companies, to deploying systems, to specialising by sector. A media outlet that co-hosts such a summit is not standing outside its beat; it is helping to set the agenda its journalists then report on, and its newsroom gains direct access to the academics and executives shaping the field.

What the AI Channels Cover

Leiphone's AI coverage, delivered through the AI channels on leiphone.com, spans the subjects its summit brings together. Artificial intelligence research and its leading laboratories; robotics, from industrial systems to service robots; AIoT, the combination of artificial intelligence with connected devices, which received its own special session at CCF-GAIR 2020 under the heading of a mid-year AIoT gathering; and the companies commercialising these technologies, from large platforms to specialist startups. The 2020 summit programme illustrates the breadth: an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Tan Jianrong, delivered an opening report, while a vice president of Baidu Group, Jing Kun, who also led its smart life business group, was among the industry speakers — one programme containing both national-level engineering scholarship and the product leadership of a major internet company.

That breadth is the point of Leiphone's model. AI in China developed simultaneously in universities, in large technology companies and in Shenzhen's hardware supply chain, and no single traditional beat — science correspondent, business reporter or gadget reviewer — covered all three. Leiphone positioned its channels and its conference at the intersection, translating research developments for industry readers and industry deployments for academic ones.

Shenzhen as a Newsroom Advantage

Shenzhen shapes Leiphone in the same way that Beijing shapes a policy or product-community outlet. The city combines electronics manufacturing, a large population of hardware engineers, major technology companies and, increasingly, AI research institutions such as the partners named in the GAIR summit. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Pengcheng Laboratory, both GAIR partners, are part of that local research infrastructure. A newsroom in Shenzhen can visit a factory, a laboratory and a startup headquarters in a single day, and its reporters see prototypes become products at close range.

The city's role in Chinese AI is documented well beyond Leiphone itself: Shenzhen reporting in 2025 described a comprehensive local AI industry chain covering intelligent chips, algorithm frameworks and software and hardware applications, with more than two thousand AI companies in the city including Huawei and Tencent. Leiphone, founded there in 2011 before that chain fully existed, grew up alongside it — which is why its archive reads as a record of the city's second transformation, from the workshop of consumer electronics to a centre of artificial intelligence.

People and Editorial Identity

Leiphone's editorial identity is also connected to the writing of Chinese internet history. Lin Jun is identified in publishing coverage as executive chairman of Leiphone and as co-author, with Hu Zhe, a deputy editor-in-chief of Leiphone, of a ten-year history of the mobile internet, the sequel to an earlier history of the Chinese internet. The preface material for that book describes Lin Jun as a veteran observer of the Chinese internet whose earlier work recorded the industry's first era. Whatever the exact division of editorial roles over the years, the association matters for readers: the outlet's senior figures presented themselves not only as news reporters but as chroniclers of the industry's development, and that historical ambition is consistent with building an institution like GAIR that deliberately marks the field's anniversaries and stages.

For a technology publication, that self-understanding has practical consequences. Coverage is framed as documentation — of companies, technologies and turning points that will matter later — rather than only as daily news. Summit proceedings, award selections and in-depth industry reviews all serve that documentary purpose, creating reference material that other outlets, researchers and companies cite afterwards.

How Leiphone Is Cited and Used

Within China's technology media, Leiphone functions as a trade reference for artificial intelligence and robotics. Its summit is cited by participating institutions — universities, laboratories and companies announce their GAIR participation and awards in their own news releases, as institutions did for CCF-GAIR 2020 — which spreads the outlet's name through academic and corporate channels far beyond its direct readership. Its AI channels provide the day-to-day counterpart: news of research breakthroughs, company moves, product deployments and policy developments affecting AI and robotics, written for readers who work in or invest in those fields.

International readers encounter Leiphone most often through that summit and through English renderings of its AI reporting on Chinese companies and laboratories. In a field where much primary information is published first in Chinese, an outlet that combines a Chinese newsroom with a globally framed conference plays a bridging role, even when its main website remains primarily a Chinese-language service.

Reading Leiphone Today

Today, at leiphone.com, Leiphone remains a Shenzhen technology news outlet whose identity rests on two foundations laid down in its first decade: its 2011 origins in consumer electronics, and its subsequent reinvention as an AI and robotics authority built on dedicated channels and the GAIR summit. A reader coming to the site for the first time should understand it in those terms — not as a general technology portal, but as a specialist publication whose conference, channels and newsroom were constructed to follow one industry, artificial intelligence, from its academic roots in China to its commercial deployment in devices, factories and services.

Place in Chinese Online News

Leiphone's place in Chinese online news is that of a successful specialist pivot. Many consumer-electronics sites of the early 2010s faded as the handset market consolidated; Leiphone instead followed its subject matter upwards, from devices to the intelligence inside them, and built the institutional assets — AI channels, an academic-industry summit, a documentary editorial culture — to hold that position. Founded in Shenzhen in 2011, co-host of CCF-GAIR with the China Computer Federation and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, it stands as one of the clearest examples of a Chinese technology outlet becoming part of the infrastructure of the industry it covers.