YouSaid · the spoken record

Grace Shao

lines on the record: 44
first: 2026-06-22
most recent: 2026-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In the beginning, I think local government like Usi tried to even encourage local businesses to embrace open claw, but the Beijing government immediately said, guys, actually be very, very careful of your data privacy, your security. Banks shouldn't do this. SOEs shouldn't do this. Be mindful of what you're doing with this technology. And then the big tech kind of rolled back a bit of their marketing. And you can see actually the hilariously there were advertisements for helping these aunties and uncles how to uninstall these open cloth on their gadgets. So anyway, that's a bit of a kind of background on that.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line, whatever that is. So technology is very much kind of accepted and respected and actually like big tech is like love. Like if you work for one of big tech, you are like. Then is like going back to the super apps. So I think the open claw frenzy was interesting because some people say it was the first agent that, you know, Chinese people could get their hands on, like a Western agent that their can get their hands on because, you know, anthropic and open id doesn't actually operate in China. You can't access that. So when Tencent and Alibaba try to embed open claw products into their own like series of products or business products, whatever offerings, it got people really excited. And because of these super app models that they have, it was a very natural way for people to access them. There's a functional adjacency to, you know, the search bar and then opening up an open claw and then trying to like run your mini programs within 10 cent, WeChat, and then trying to order something. So all of that kind of took off. But that said, actually, the Chinese government, again, regulators acted very swiftly.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After COVID, I went back to, I think, Shanghai for the first time and I was sitting at a restaurant just like waiting for someone to help me order food. No one came because they were just like, why are you so like, why are you a caveman? Don't you know how to scan the QR code on your table? Okay, so that tangent side, I think overall optimism around technology is very different from the West because in the last 20, 30 years, a lot of rural areas in China literally could not access resources, information, goods, whatever that, you know, like big cities could, not until these super apps came about. So a lot of people don't have TVs in their homes and they live in a village and they're maybe annual household income is like a thousand dollars, but they will have a smartphone and that smartphone will be able to actually enable them to get micro loans, to purchase goods, you know, to help their kids access information on.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, but I will say there were grandmas lining up to get it done. Okay. I will answer this twofold. On the kind of surface is, I think Chinese aunties, uncles, whatnot, they are just much more open to technology because, you know, you go around, whether it's by force or by nature, you know, you can't really navigate modern Chinese life without being on Alipay.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that's something where we continue to see. And these companies are generating a lot of revenue. And going back to the fact that like a lot of them don't even have enough capability to support the demand that's coming through.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for a traditional OEM, like wait for at least three to five years, right? So there's the hardware side. I think another very underappreciated fact on the Chinese open source model is that people don't realize. So a year ago when I spoke to startups in Silicon Valley, they were the most cost conscious, frankly less compliance conscious and gives very little care about geopolitics. They were building on top of Quinn. Now it's actually a lot of AI Native American enterprises building on Chinese open source because we're seeing headlines on the ROI is not like showing it's extremely expensive for these token maxing projects, whatnot. So Harvey, cursor, they've talked about using a hybrid model where they will build majority on GLM or Kimmy, but kind of like what we talked about earlier where they use like Opus to act as a judge or guidance.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you could produce that anywhere else in the world. They are also extremely innovative. I've talked to people at EV companies just, for example, to ship out a new model from ideation to production to hitting the floors. That takes maybe less than 15 months.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so don't chase me down if I'm wrong in three years. But I think, you know, there's two parts. One is I think I agree with you. Hardware side, China's definitely going to have, I think, more breakthroughs and have a lot of edge. Not only is the supply chain all domestically there, I think something overlooked by people is the fact that a lot of the know-how is also there. And that's not easy to transfer overnight. You know, Patrick McGee's book recently and his Apple book saying how Apple tried to move this whole supply chain to India, the biggest bottleneck is actually these like highly skilled laborist jobs that actually are so technical that cannot be even trained in one generation. It took decades to really train up the local community labor force, whatnot. So that's still there. Now, because of that ecosystem, a lot of these robots, home appliances, whatnot, these tech gadgets are produced at less than 50% of the cost of”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think China having been the manufacturing hub of literally everything under the sun over the last like three decades has definitely an advantage have owning all the supply chain, right? And it's like not only just owning the supply chain, but you know, there are literally regions where that whole supply from raw material to like the end result, end product from OEM is all within like say 50 kilometers of each other. So what we're seeing is a lot of American investors and entrepreneurs coming into China to kind of get a sense of.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with regulators and the private sector. So if say Bydon's a new product, they might go to them first and say, Can you try this out? And then they will report and debug and see what's happening and then tell the whoever local government that's funding them with providing the infrastructure say, hey, this product might come out. Do you want to be part of it? Do you want to give it money? Do you want to provide it with whatever resource you want to? So there is kind of this like cohesive ecosystem where they kind of all dance together. How much these companies actually want to take state money? I think that's debatable. However, as AI and robotics become more and more sensitive and being recognized as not only economic driver, but potentially a military use or geopolitical, I guess, talking point at this point, it is becoming more and more nationalized, not only in China, but globally in the US and so on.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to work in manufacturing roles, they want to be automated actually, and they want to work in urban areas. So they have that now. And then each of the provincial governments will take that as kind of like a KPI. They're like, all right, let's go act like VCs essentially and go find, you know, future deep seeks and fund them, however, how much these companies want to take government money is a different discussion. A lot of them will then even support them by providing infrastructure like buildings, offices. Even like some of them heard like dormitory for these young entrepreneurs and then give them money and capital to try things out. There's also these AI pilot zones being rolled out across the country. I think now about 11 or 12 of them where, you know, people can try out new AI products. I met with the largest AI developer community founder in China a couple weeks ago and she was saying there's more than a couple hundred thousand developers in this ecosystem.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese government probably sees this in a much more pragmatic way. Just like how there was internet plus policy 15 years ago, there's now an AI plus policy. When deep-seek moment took off, you know, there was a frenzy of private companies even in home appliances trying to embed deep sea to integrate deep sea. I'm just like, what is a AI vacuum going to do for you or AI like electric toothbrush going to do for you? It was wild, right? But the government picked that up. And I think what the Chinese government, going back to what we talked about earlier, is that they have the advantage of having the ability to push things down from top down. And at the very high level, they're seeing AI as an economic driver to propel maybe efficiency, to address some of the labor shortage that's coming as the population continues to age and decline. It also addresses a lot of issues where a lot of the young people”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One really knows what the real impact of AI will be on economy, but definitely that fear mongering narrative is not mainstream in China.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have to say, I'm not a policy expert, so I don't work with a lot of the safety people as much, but there are organizations in China that are definitely working, like the regulators, as well as the private sector working together. And for some context in China, there are various moving parts in the government. There's MIIT, the CAC, et cetera. These agencies basically some are to propel economic development. So in this case, AI diffusion, the whole idea of AI plus AI plus every single sector you can think of, some act more like a guardrail as a protector. So they are working hand in hand. And on top of that, every single AI, Gen AI application, as well as LLM company, have to go through the National Registry in China. So they actually disclose what is being trained, what is the potential risk. That said, I think right now, no.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“home to Alibaba and a lot of these AL labs. Basically a company tried to like lay off a person saying you are being replaced by AI and the court literally ruled say that is not allowed and you no company can use AI as an excuse to lay off or replace or even cut short their contract.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y think to start with, the AI community themselves, I would say people are a lot more pragmatic. And I think recently I was talking to Nathan Lambert, who was open source researcher, who just came to China, visited all the labs. He said, look, I was shocked to see majority of labs are so young. As in like a lot of the researchers are still students, a lot of them are interns. And the core research teams are maybe led by a handful of people. And then these people are academics by training. So maybe they're a bit less commercial. Maybe you can say they're less like sophisticated to manipulate the market, whatever you want to call them. So I definitely feel like there's less of that kind of psychosis or high level narrative going around. However, I would say that there is obviously anxiety from the public in some degree, not as much of a pushback. But recently there was a very interesting court case in Hangzhou, which is”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you definitely get less of that sports star vibe or mentality here. They're still getting paid like hefty amounts, how much they don't usually disclose, but at least even in the internet era, like a bite dance product manager can make just as much as a meta product manager. Similarly, if you're like an average AI researcher, you're probably making a similar amount. Although the star star players, like the ones that are signing 100 million bonuses, I don't know if you had anything like that big like in China. But look, they made their money with the IPOs. They made the money recently with all this AI boom. It just said on maybe slightly smaller scale doesn't mean that they're not making much more than the frankly average person.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better any city in North America compared to any city in China. Now that's kind of a personal debate, right? Because it depends on what you really value. If you want to be close to city center, you want that fast-paced techno, Eevee, futuristic lifestyle, China actually gives that to you. And then on top of that, if you want to be close to your family, it's a very personal reason. I've met a lot of researchers who actually decided to come back to China or this part of the world simply because they wanted to do it for personal family reasons.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think even during the internet era, we saw a lot of Chinese nationals or Chinese ethnic people returning to China, right? I think this, it's easy to blanket statement as geopolitical headwinds. People are scared. But realistically, I think most people are just trying to take care of their families and live a good life, right? I hate to sound so crass about it, but sometimes it's what your package looked like. And to overgeneralize, I've heard from many researchers say, look, if my wife is a lawyer in China, my wife is a nurse in China, my wife is a teacher in China, that kind of employment opportunity is very, very hard to actually transfer to a new market. If I can get a similar package and a growth opportunity in one of the big labs in China, I will pick that over living in the US. And on top of that, I think that's something that's lost in the nuance is my parents immigrated to North America 30 plus years ago. It was a very clean cut-like quality of life. It's just like objective.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Aachi split that into two parts on the data itself people often think China is so data intensive and you just have a mass amount of data to use for AI training. However, actually people forget again China's enterprise buildout or whatever the knowledge work economy is very new and not as sophisticated frankly as American ecosystem or the Western ecosystem if you have to put it that way. So data is often unstructured and data thus a lot of the specific needs for you know the kind of training we're seeing today is not as vibrant or the data ecosystem is not as sophisticated as what American data providers kind of can provide such as Mercourt like we just mentioned now on the big tech side it's a bit interesting so I'm glad you brought up Tencent because Tencent actually just announced last week that”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help you with the judgment for the evaluation and even the data labeling itself. So you're using it as almost a teacher for your own model. It guides it a little bit versus really copy-pasting the answer for that makes sense. And that part of it is frankly not that unethical or like, you know, that frowned upon right now because that is what enterprises do when they're fine-tuning. So it's all kind of a bit of a murcy area, to be honest.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the compute constraint and the capital constraint is real, and frankly, like no one's hiding that or pretending that that's not an issue for them right now. Like Deep Sea has openly said they even were struggling, right? Like they needed more compute. I think on the distillation allegations or accusation, it is quite interesting. Like recently, I've been thinking about this a lot and thinking about what it means for distillation and what it means for the models to catch up, right? So there was this one quote from Yao Xuyu, who is a Google deep mind researcher. He said, there is smart distillation and dumb distillation. Dumb distillation is something I think most of us were, frankly, non-technical think about. It's like, okay, you take like a thousand queries, you take the answers of whatever Claude gives you, right? And then you kind of force copy that into your said model and then you forcefully make them basically like get the exact same answer. Smart distillation is like you using the frontier model almost as a partner to help.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese labs kind of weigh that out so they can pay like maybe a million dollars versus like $10 million for the same data”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying Mercosur specifically, but supposedly there are these data providers that do the so and they have exclusivity windows.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out beyond that, you know, China has an advantage in the fact that they can actually drive top-down mandates and provincial governments will follow suit. This is something quite unique to China because it's not decided by each state. So when they pushed out the east state or west compute where it's basically a top-down initiative where they built a ton of renewable energy for cheap in rural mountainous areas in Guizhou province, like even Xinjiang, inner Mongolia, Sichuan, you know, those were like very easily executed, frankly. And then 90% of the population actually sit on the eastern coastal lines. Like when you think about Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shinjin, that's all on east. So that's where the data comes from. So that kind of optimization has also really helped them, you know, with the low that is the demand right now.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, energy is probably not the biggest bottleneck right now in China, and I think people like to say, well, some people like to say, oh, somehow the Chinese government had foresight on the AI boom driving, like the energy consumption, but definitely not. I think people forget that China's economic growth over the last three, four decades also meant a rise of urbanization. And a lot of the cities that we are visiting these days, like at least Westerners are visiting, like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, with all these robots and EVs or whatnot, these were all really urbanized within the last two, three decades. And because of that, the grid is very new. And because of that, the government already foresaw that there was going to be a increase in energy demand. And, you know, so a lot of the energy plants, you know, the solar plants, hydro plants, whatnot were actually built out in anticipation for that. Now, obviously, this has coincided with now the AI boom and it's really helped.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To six months time, let's say, and then pay a fraction, if not like a tenth of that price, the same data set. And that kind of plays into that like six to nine month leg that we hear about as well.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, some of these big tech are actually even buying out the contracts that data centers have with some of these labs. And, you know, they were taking over the compute. So these labs essentially are now optimizing for the highest quality of inference demand, if that makes sense. They don't actually have enough even supply. They don't have enough compute power to even like meet the demand that's coming through. So that's on how they're serving. So, with post training, they will optimize a lot of times the data they collect. For example, if a data provider like Mercor provides a very, very niche set of data set for like an open AI or whatnot, maybe they would charge them $10, $20 million. The Chinese lab will weighed out that exclusivity contract.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, they are making money. And how? Well, just because they're open source doesn't mean they don't make money. I think people forget, you know, we had open source softwares before as well. People are paying for managed services. And when you're paying for an API through that AI or Minimax, whatnot, you basically don't have to self-host. You don't have to get your own GPU. You don't have to get, you figure out your own compute. You don't have to figure out your own guardrails, your deployment, your security, your monitoring, whatnot, right?”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so China's VC space in general has not been that vibrant, frankly, since internet crackdown on a lot of USD funds did exit, you know, three to five years ago with Sequoia being maybe the most high profile, right? Like we all remember that. Now, people forget even in 2022, a lot of these labs that we just talked about, they were struggling to even raise money, you know, raise capital. And a lot of them spun out of academic institutions. You know, you mentioned they're valued anywhere roughly between 20 to 30 billion right now, but they went public between like six to eight billion. That's like kind of tiny compared to American valuations right now. However, they are actually making money. You know, the public disclosed information, I think, from Mini Max and Drupal indicates that they were making just as much like in their last month, they made the same amount of money last month as they did last year, essentially. And their end of year AAR projection is anywhere between one to 1%.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just focus on pushing the frontier and kind of trying to play catch up and push the Chinese ecosystem as fast as possible.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you really have to look at the ecosystem, we can kind of put aside the big tech for now, but looking at the maybe the foremost relevant startup labs, deep seek moonshot, who has Kimi, Zia who has GLM, and then Minimax, they are still probably the most committed to frontier research. However, because the constraint we mentioned that they face, whether it's compute, whether it is capital, or even frankly, talent, they have decided out of necessity to basically each focus on a different vertical in capturing a different kind of business share. So ZAI is very focused on coding capabilities. So if anything, their GLM plan is much more similar to maybe what you think of Claude Co or Claude Code, et cetera, a codex, that kind of product. And then you look at Mini Max, they're really focused on the multimodality capabilities, moonshot, they're really focused on agents. And Deep Seek, again, really.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they were like, look, guys, like you can actually do this. And they became a shared foundation layer for China's model ecosystem. So because, again, everything is open source and open weight. Other labs were able to study what they did to actually start inferencing on Huawei stack. And I think that was the first step, whether it's signaling or actually a very pragmatic reason to start shifting some reliance on, you know, the China AI stack.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Share, but Deep Sea plays an interesting role. I want to bring it back to Deep Sea V4. So V4, you know, on the surface, you know, people said, okay, it wasn't as maybe impressive on evals, on performance. They didn't catch up with the most frontier labs in the US, whatnot, right? But it was a very interesting move because what I heard from researchers on the ground in Beijing was that the lab actually delayed their release for about three to four months because they wanted to re-engineer a lot of the inference onto Huawei. So I'm not saying this completely replaces NVIDIA or CUDA, not at all, because if you ask any developers, they still want to use CUDA if they can. However, it was the first effort to really, and I kind of like did one for the team. They kind of like put the resources.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the sharing is an unintentional result rather than an intentional effort in the beginning to even start with. They are for sure extremely competitive. And we all know the word evolution. So like China AI is duetting as well. That means like there's evolution in this ecosystem as well. However, I think bringing up deep seek plays a very interesting role in the whole ecosystem. Like you mentioned, V3 propel the whole industry forward. Everyone kind of starts taking China AI more seriously. You know, it brought a lot of interest from investors globally back into the internet companies that Tracy mentioned, you know, prior to that, there was a bit of a slump for three to five years. However, Jipu CAI is now publicly listed in Hong Kong. Mini Max is publicly listed in Hong Kong. Moonshot is in preparation to go public next year. They are competing with each other to capture market share, to capture developer mind.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say they're not competing though. However, because of the compute constraint they're faced with, talent constraint and the capital constraint you mentioned, they are a lot more conscious with where they want to put their money, where they want to put their time in R&D. And all of that forms the basis of a strong open source ecosystem. Is the culture as pro-sharing and pro open source as it was even two years ago? Now the deep seek moment was right around Trump's inauguration in early 2025, so about a year and a half ago. Since then has the culture stayed the same or has that sort of competition bug, that intense competition bug that we know among Americans?”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frontier models of the US. Why did it develop that way? Yeah, I think people like to think of these mystical reasons, but really it was a very pragmatic business reason to start with. To start with a lot of the labs have cited that, you know, for Western companies or Western developers to trust them, they needed to open source their models to build that trust and credibility. So in many ways, it's a branding decision. Then on top of that, I think you can see it as a philosophical drive. You know, the founder of Deep Sea Minfeng has openly said he wants open source his most frontier research to really help propel the whole industry as a whole. And that kind of R&D sharing has now formed a layer for the whole ecosystem where each of the labs kind of integrate each other's kind of breakthroughs. You know, you see them congratulate each other even on X when they have new models announced. So you can say it's a bit more collective.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, good. That was the episode. Let's start at a basic level. So the big impression, the one that everyone knows is Chinese models are open source versus the closed.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very different. I get the impression that it's like much harder to raise enormous sums of capital. And so I'm very curious how that limited capital actually influences the development of these models and the tech. I think it's safe to say that both of us have a lot of impressions. Yes. Right. Vague impressions. How many times in this intro I was like, I get the impression, but I actually have no idea. So that is a good reason to actually bring in our guest, someone who has more than, quote, impressions, unquote, about the AI tech scene, are going to be speaking to someone whose newsletter I'm a big fan of and everyone should read are going to be speaking to the perfect guest, Grace Xiao. She's an independent AI researcher and she has a great substat called AI Prome. And she joins us here in our Hong Kong office. So, Grace, thank you so much for coming on Odlot. Thank you so much for having me, Joe and Tracy. How did we do on our impressions, unquote? Those are pretty accurate impressions, I think.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Chinese companies, because over in the US, we all know that people are flinging money at anything with the word AI in it. But in China,”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using AI for their existing business models rather than this existential thing, which it is in the US, where AI is the business. That's just it. Right. Yeah, that's exactly. AI is sort of weird. Like, it sort of sits in the middle of what you would call software and hard tech because we consume it through the browser, right? Sort of the same way, or in many cases through the browser, the same way that we would go to an Amazon or an online gaming or something like that. But it's clearly, you know, it's a scientific endeavor. And so it's sort of as this blend. And then you have to figure China's so far ahead of the US when it comes to things like robotics and EVs and batteries. And one thing I don't know anything about is the degree to which that melding of hardware capabilities with AI capabilities, how that influences the direction of the development of the AI tech. Yeah, I'm also very interested in like the capital stack.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money on it. I also get the impression the heads of American AI labs speak in these like sort of quasi-mystical terms, et cetera. It doesn't feel quite the same here where it feels like a bit more of like yet another technology, but I'm glad you brought up the point about the tech crackdown because at the time the whole story was like, oh, there needs to be less focus on sort of digital tech and more focus on hard tech, which has been done extremely, that's been an extraordinarily successful endeavor. And then my last impression, though, is that since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, that was the moment it's like, no, we really have to also compete on sort of this next era of software and sort of consumer facing tech breakthroughs. Yeah, overall the AI scene in China feels much more utilitarian to me. It's more about like the big companies, the 10 cents, the Alibaba sort of.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was here in Hong Kong in 2020 was China's tech crackdown, right? That's right. That's right. Right. And like there was all this concern about whether or not the crackdown was going to destroy China's entrepreneurial spirit. I'm doing air quotes on a podcast. I don't know why. But fast forward six years, and there's entrepreneurism basically everywhere. And we talk a lot about how China is producing all these new AI models. Okay. Can I like say, like, I know very little. I mean, I know very little about AI, but I know even less about Chinese AI. But here are some of my general impressions, which is, it seems like there's so many open source. Okay, so I know they're largely open source. It seems like every random company you see like some toothpaste company and they'll have produced an LLM. So I'm very curious how they're making.”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weissenthal. Tracy Alloway. Tracy, I love being in Hong Kong. I love hearing so much. I love it here so much. I would like to come here a few times a year if we could. I'm sure you would. I lived here for, I guess, almost four years. So it's kind of weird coming back, but Hong Kong has a lot of pluses, like great food, great weather for most of the year, beaches. I once heard someone describe it as Manhattan meets Maui, which I think is pretty accurate. Maui, it's so nice. The weather is actually not great. It's not great right now. Certainly this week we've come during, I guess it's a monsoon season. Right? Yeah, it's the rainy season. But oh well, I like thunderstorms, so I'm enjoying it. Yeah, I'm enjoying it too. Anyway, one thing that has changed since the last time you were in Hong Kong, you left in 2022. Yeah. We weren't doing as many AI episodes. No, we definitely weren't. In fact, so I remember one of the big...”
2026-06-22 · Odd Lots · Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source