From Lab to
Life.

How AI works in China — a mechanism-level account.

Inside China's AI ecosystem, regulation is not a brake applied after innovation. It is market infrastructure: it defines access, shapes product architecture, and determines which firms reach users at scale.

From Lab to Life explains how China built the world's first governed AI ecosystem, moving from invisible search ranking and super-app infrastructure to algorithm filings, generative AI approvals, open-weight models, procurement channels, and exportable governance frameworks. Baidu runs through the book as a connecting thread, not its subject. Its path from search-era machine learning to Ernie Bot makes the larger system visible.