Chinese livestreaming e-commerce influencer Li Jiaqi sells token with Chen Yusen, Vice President of Alibaba Group and CEO of QwenWork on Monday night. Photo: Courtesy of Alibaba

A top Chinese livestreaming e-commerce influencer dubbed as China's "Lipstick King" sold something shoppers couldn't hold in their hands on Monday night: tokens. During the Double 11 shopping festival, Li Jiaqi's show listed the "invisible" product for the first time, marking a first for a top Chinese livestreamer selling AI computing power as merchandise as more platforms race to "put tokens on the shelf."

Within half an hour, the livestream hosted by Li and Chen Yusen, Vice President of Alibaba Group and CEO of QwenWork, sold 100,000 monthly personal membership cards for Qwen Office, equivalent to about 2 trillion tokens, the Global Times learned.

A token is the unit used to measure how much information a large artificial intelligent (AI) model processes and generates, so what users buy is essentially a quota for model calls.
The livestream chat exploded with "3-2-1, drop the tokens!" as Chinese netizens chased the comments. A 0.01-yuan monthly personal membership for Qwen Office became a hot-seller. According to the introduction, the card offers unlimited use in standard mode for office tasks such as document writing, data processing and making PowerPoint presentations.

Li and Chen also demonstrated live how AI agents can cover office work, daily life, education, entertainment and other scenarios. Li also shared how his livestream business has adopted AI, for example using AI and big data to generate shopping rankings in real time.

Li once set a record by selling 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes in livestreaming selling. The listing of token in top Chinese livestream sellers like Li comes as China braces for a sweeping AI revolution, and competition among AI model developers grows white-hot. 

To date, major e-commerce platforms like Tmall and JD.com have rolled out sales entries for tokens, with Zhipu, MiniMax, Alibaba Cloud Bailian, Qwen Office, Moonshot and StepFun among the vendors that have successively settling on the platform - a move that industry insiders that will make "topping up computing power as simple as topping up a phone plan."

According to data Alibaba sent to the Global Times, on October 20, the first day of Double 11 early sales, Taobao's token category gross merchandise volume (GMV) jumped 450 percent from a month earlier. Also, after Zhipu opened an official flagship store on Tmall, brand searches rose 50 times within 48 hours, and sales of AI token subscription products climbed more than 160 percent month on month.