Grace Shao pushes back against industry hype predicting mass humanoid robot adoption within three to five years, citing conversations with Pony.ai's CEO.
Opinion
Shao: Smart Model Distillation Breaks Terms of Service, Not the Law
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Shao: 40% to 50% of Leading AI Researchers Are of Chinese Descent
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shao: Chinese AI Labs Open-Sourced Models to Disarm Global Skepticism
“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 …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2026
Shao: MiniMax AI Projected to Reach $1.2 Billion ARR by Year-End
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shao: Most Chinese AI labs avoid government funding to protect IPO plans
“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.”
Insight
Shao: Once LLMs become good enough, AI competition shifts to products
“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.”