‍In my five years of covering TechCrunch Disrupt, this one was by far the biggest.

Once a fledgling tech news website, TechCrunch has grown into one of the most influential tech entities in the world.

Its tech news website reaches millions of readers. It does its own video news productions. And it holds events around the world, with the biggest being TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

This year it nearly tripled the amount of space by moving to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, a site that regularly holds the city’s biggest conferences.

Roughly 10,000 people attended Disrupt with around 1,200 startups showing off their latest technology. 

This year, I also noticed a far greater Chinese involvement in the event too.

That included Byton, which was listed as the event’s only highest level Platinum sponsor.

Byton is a Nanjing-based auto company that showed attendees an impressive prototype. The M-Byte is its intelligent all-electric smart SUV.

It has the largest screen I’ve ever seen in any car – 1.2 meters! 

The company’s Vice President of Digital technology, Abe Chen, told me that high-end models of the M-Byte will have three modems and use artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand how it can help drivers in their daily lives.

The M-Byte is expected to be launched in late 2019 and go for a base price of around 48,000 US dollars.

TechCrunch also featured a number of keynote speaker from Chinese companies. 

Derek Haoyang Li, the founder of Shanghai’s Yixue Education, told the audience about Squirrel AI, which already has more than one million students using its adaptive learning software.

Its AI program is able to detect gaps in students’ learning, and help them learn faster.

It operates off the principle that no two students should be in the same classroom, because each has different levels of knowledge.

Li says Squirrel AI’s virtual teachers have regularly competed against actual human teachers to see who could teach students better.

“We have conducted more than five competitions from last year and in each case, our AI teachers did much better, like seven or even nine points better than human teachers. The super teachers are a title given to the best teachers who are one out of 1,000 teachers in China." And Derek said the AI teachers did better than them.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, I also got the opportunity to talk extensively with keynote speaker Kai-Fu Lee, who once served as president of Google China, and now the Founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a Beijing-based Venture Capital firm.

He told me that Google will likely have difficulty getting back into China, but at the same time, it’s not easy for Chinese companies like Alibaba and Tencent to compete in the US either.

Lee is launching a new book called AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order.

He’s incredibly enthusiastic about the potential for AI to transform medicine, science and business. But he does have some fears about how it will impact jobs if societies fail to properly train workforces for the future.

I also wanted to find out whether the Telsa founder Elon Musk and the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had legitimate arguments about doomsday scenarios with AI.

Here’s what he had to say.

(Top image: Attendees stand in line to collect their badges during the TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 summit in San Francisco, California, US. /VCG Photo)