The Choice of Infinite originated in 2015 as a quiet experiment—when Angelina Saiyi Li, then working in brand communications while actively modeling across fashion capitals, began noticing how perception traveled faster than product. Trained in both visual aesthetics and narrative velocity, she launched one of China’s earliest award systems centered around luxury hospitality and fine dining—not to celebrate trend but to articulate taste as infrastructure.

By 2016, this initiative evolved into a multilayered collaboration with CITIC Bank, Microsoft, and Visa, introducing algorithmic cultural mapping, symbolic scoring models, and data-calibrated experiential frameworks—well before "AI" became fashionable in marketing decks.

In 2017, The Choice of Infinite published what would become a global anomaly: the world’s first AI- and data-driven restaurant rating system—printed as a formally published dining guide.
Unlike other international restaurants guides , The Choice of Infinite was officially a state publishing number in China (ISBN) and adopted to university and national universities since 2017. Simultaneously, it marked a historic first for China: the country’s first officially published and commercially distributed restaurant guide, created not by anonymous food critics but through structured data partnerships with Microsoft Bing and Visa.

Rather than rely on anecdotal reviews or editorial intuition, the guide synthesized real-time consumer search behavior, location intelligence, and behavioral sentiment data—years before “algorithmic curation” entered the mainstream hospitality lexicon. What began as a tool of taste became a landmark in symbolic infrastructure.

The Korean Restaurant Guide was a government-backed national project, jointly verified by the Korean Embassy in China and the Korea Tourism Organization, and officially launched with Microsoft through a data-driven culinary trend press event at the Korean Cultural Center in Beijing.

The project didn’t just list where to eat. It redefined what it means for a restaurant to be seen by systems. In 2020, The Choice of Infinite quietly entered New York. What began as concept dinners and curated guest tables turned into a soft network: a salon system without a website, where capital, cognition, and cultural power sat down—face-to-face—over food, silence, and semiotics. The goal was never scale. It was resonance. Today, The Choice of Infinite is less an award and more an interface. It does not spotlight. It selects. It does not reward performance. It recognizes patterns. And it always arrives before the narrative does.