The Ledger, every show

“Now there's smart distillation, which is kind of operating in the gray area. It is again, not IP theft. It's not breaking the law. However, it could be breaking what is considered, you know You know, your own term services.”

“And then we see like the leading researchers really, really a lot of them, if not, you know, maybe 40, 50% of them are of Chinese descent or heritage.”

“It's essentially in the beginning, it was like a branding strategy for a lot of these labs. And when I spoke to them, because they said, look, if we want more developers on our ecosystem or on our using our APIs, they need to know what's out there, especially …”

“I think, you know, if you look at, I think Moon Minimax AI I think AI's run rate AR is already something like one billion now, and then Minimax projected to be one billion or to 1.2 billion by the end of the year.”

“And in fact, some, most of them actually don't want to take government money because there's some hindrance as well, right? Like, and when they go public and et cetera on their structure.”

“People love to hype about it. They're saying, look, human robots are going to be deployed in the next three to five years in the mass market. He gave me a rough number of 10 years again, and I believe him, because I've seen a lot of these robots. They frankly …”

“If we've reached a point where everything is kind of just good enough, then I think commercialization is also going to be in product layer.”

“Given certain restrictions, US private equity firms and VC firms still cannot invest in Chinese AI companies directly. The best way to get exposure to this innovation is through public investment into these Chinese big tech right now.”

“10 years ago, if you ask where is China's startup hub, it would have been Shenzhen, which I mentioned was like the hub of the headquarter of Tencent, DJI, SenseTime. Now it's actually up there in Hangzhou.”

“It's definitely also hindering Chinese, like, you know, AI development. For sure, that's probably Biggest bottleneck because we talked about it. It has innovation. It has data. It has energy. It doesn't have chips. So unless domestically, you know, we see like…”

“What you've seen is a lot of these tiny labs faced with compute constraint and in some ways capital constraint, they're forcing them to specialize rather than compete across every dimension. So, you know, for the sake of, you know, deep seek, it's really, real…”

“The fact that they don't actually have that much pressure to commercialize because they have enough money, he says, like, look, we have enough capital, we are not capital constraint compared to maybe other, other labs, and we are really, really focused on just…”

“I think people are a bit undervaluing this case, especially when we're seeing a lot of other labs maybe having a bit of infighting or, you know, internal mission or value misalignment.”

“Essentially if you self host these models or you use them through these inference service providers like fireworks, these models become yours or American, if you want to put it right. So the whole fear mongering around does the data or whatever go to China doe…”

“On the China side, deep seeks people have talked about how they are not revenue driven. So whatever money they, sorry, they're not profit driven. So whatever revenue they make, they want to put that money into R&D, given that they have the quant fund kind of l…”

“Huawei is working very closely with deep seek on how to optimize hardware and software and try to figure out this.”

“China's energy infrastructure side is not a problem, so if you have enough electricity and power to be powering these chips, even if you need to use double amount of energy, that's not a Kind of a bottleneck for the AI compute side.”

“The fact is, I think, 30 years ago, for any average Chinese immigrant to go to North America, it is a no brainer, because the quality of life in almost any major city is going to be higher than a major city in China. But that kind of, I'm not talking about pol…”

“Chinese entrepreneurs now no longer are just driven by money and making money. They're driven by recognition, influence, and power. And a lot of them are like visionary start off with and not businessmen to start off with.”

“Once Tencent integrated Deepseek into their WeChat product, it was like game over for them.”

“Unitree Robotics currently account for about 70% of global sales of humanoid robots, 40% of market share of quadruped robots, and that's just like a solid leader in the industry, and I think their cheapest model goes for something like 16,000 dollars, so it's …”

“I don't think it's a deep seek moment for China. Because I think it did not fundamentally change how we Believe AI is being developed, right? Like in the sense that Deepsea completely challenged the scaling law and what we believed in more capital is better tr…”

“I think both, you know, DeepSeek and Kimi, if not seen as kind of the top two labs right now coming out of China, both founders have openly talked a lot about management of people you know, removing distractions, really focused on the pursuit of AGI, not kind …”

“When I speak to the mate who CFO, which is a leading like creative AI company he was saying, look, we don't really need the most like the biggest model. We don't need the best model in that sense, but we need the best model fine tune for our use case. So we ca…”

“And even despite, you know, Kimi K three being said is a token hungry model. It's not as cheap as other Chinese models. The task per, I think the task per token usage is still quite high. It's still cheaper. It's still cheaper than the most frontier models and…”

“Personal reason I think is the main driver for most people, honestly, like I I've spoken to researchers where hate to overgeneralize, but their wives or spouse or whoever are maybe teachers, lawyers you know, healthcare professionals in China. And those are no…”

“It's said that, you know, a lot of these robots, whether they're humanoid or industrial robots, the raw kind of hardware itself can be like at least 50% cheaper than produced elsewhere.”

“And then the real, real, real bottleneck for these, all these companies, whether you're talking about autonomous driving or industrial robotics or human robotics with, in terms of AI integration is that they don't have enough physical data.”

“Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of DeepSeek and his whole team, they're actually educated in China.”

“China's still not a very heavily depend is not heavily dependent on knowledge workers, Compared to the U S where it's like, 60% of GDP is driven by knowledge workers.”

“Even the companies that have enterprise softwares like Alibaba or ByteDance, those products are their minor businesses. So it's the whole internet economy is so dependent and reliant on consumer facing applications.”

“So I think really the monetization strategy is all an application and they're hoping that one day, whether it's your plugging ads or whatever, you know, charging at friction points, that's where it's going to make the money.”

“What's interesting is I do want to point out is Tencent actually has not really been leading in their LLM development at all. In fact, they're the only and first one that have actually integrated Deep Seek into their products into their WeChat, which obviously…”

“In terms of frontier models, the U S companies, like you mentioned, the open eyes and the tropics of the world have definitely led China's LLM development by far for a long time until deep sea made a breakthrough.”

“There's been a lot of like municipal level or provincial level policies throughout the country. That's really been boosting AI per se, and like I said, physical AI, especially in areas like Zhejiang province or Guangdong province, where they're strong on manuf…”