YouSaid · the spoken record

Kai-Fu Lee

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-07-15
most recent: 2019-07-15
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

“Yes, so these techniques are the result of several key things, some of which may be learnable, some of which may be very hard. One is this trial and error and watching what everyone else is doing. I think it's important to be humble and not feel like you know all the answers. The guiding funds idea came from Singapore, which came from Israel. And China made a few tweaks and turned it into, because the Chinese cities and government officials kind of compete with each other because they all want to make their city more successful so they can get the next level in their political career. And it's somewhat competitive. So the central government made it a bit of a competition. Everybody has a budget. They can put it on AI or they can put it on bio or they can put it on.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the roads are the city is smart. And the Chinese government at local levels would have these guiding funds acting as LPs, passive LPs to funds, and when the fund makes money, part of the money made is given back to the GPs and potentially other LPs to increase everybody's return at the expense of the government's return. So that's interesting incentive that entrusts the task of choosing entrepreneurs to VCs who are better at it than the government by letting some of the profit move that way.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it reflects the valuation of the companies and our us going multistage and things like that. It also has government support, but not in the way most Americans would think of it. The government actually leaves the entrepreneurial space as a private enterprise sort of self-regulating, and the government would build infrastructures that would around it to make it work better. For example, the mass entrepreneur Mass Innovation Plan built 8,000 incubators, so the pipeline is very strong to the VCs for autonomous vehicles, the Chinese government is building smart highways with sensors, smart cities that separate pedestrians from cars that may allow initially an inferior autonomous vehicle company to launch a car without lower casualty.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which may not work in the US, but may work very well in Southeast Asia, Africa, and other developing worlds that are a few years behind China. And a few of these products may be our universal and are getting traction even in the United States, such as TikTok. So this whole ecosystem is supported by VCs as a virtuous cycle because a large market with innovative entrepreneurs will draw a lot of money and then invest in these companies as the market gets larger and larger, US China market is easily three, four times larger than the US, they will create greater value and greater returns for the VCs, thereby raising even more money. So at Sanovation Ventures, our first fund was 15 million. Our last fund was $500 million.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't exist elsewhere. So products like and financial under which includes alipay, which is mobile payment, and also the financial products for loans built on that, and also in education, VIP kid. And in video social network. TikTok and in social e-commerce. And then in ride sharing mobile, these are all Chinese innovative products that now are being copied elsewhere. And an additional interesting observation.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Copying was merely a way to learn from the American masters just like we if you learn to play piano or painting, you start by copying. You don't start by innovating when you don't have the basic skill sets. So very amazingly, the Chinese entrepreneurs about six years ago started to branch off with these lean startups built on American ideas to build better products than American products. But they did start from the American idea. And today WeChat is better than WhatsApp, Weibo is better than Twitter. And so on. So that, I think, is Chinese entrepreneurs going to step two. And in step three is once these entrepreneurs have done one or two of these companies, they now look at the Chinese market and the opportunities and come up with ideas that”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I liked the way you describe it it's a non heroic acceptable way to start the company and maybe more expedient so that's I think a baggage for Silicon Valley that if it doesn't let go then it may limit the ultimate ceiling of the company take snapchat as an example I think you know Evan's brilliant he built a great product but he's very proud that he wants to build his own features not copy others while Facebook was more willing to copy his features and you see what happens in the competition so I think putting that handcuff on a company would limit its ability to reach the maximum potential so back to the Chinese environment”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is intended to try many, many things and then converge one that works. And it's meant to be iterate and changed. So finding a decent starting point without legal violations, there should be nothing morally dishonorable about that.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Secondly, the internet was emerging Link startup was the way to do things, building a first minimally viable product and then expanding was the right way to go. And the American successes have given the shortcut that if you took you built your minimally viable product based on an American product, it's guaranteed to be a decent starting point. Then you tweak it afterwards. As long as there are no IP infringement, which as far as I know there hasn't been in the mobile and AI spaces, that's a much better shortcut. And I think Silicon Valley would view that as still not very honorable because that's not your own idea to start with. But you can't really at the same time believe every idea must be your own and believe in the Link Startup methodology because Link Startup”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of the listeners probably still would brand Chinese entrepreneur as copycats, and no doubt ten years ago that would not be an inaccurate description. Back ten years ago, an entrepreneur probably could not get funding if he or she could not describe what product he or she is copying from the US. The first question is who has proven this business model, which is a nice way of asking who are you copying? And that reason is understandable because China had a much lower internet penetration and didn't have enough indigenous experience to build innovative products.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think China is an environment maybe more interesting for the emergence because if you look at companies between, let's say, 50 to 300 billion dollars China has emerged more of such companies than the US in the last three to four years because of the larger marketplace, because of the more fearless nature of the entrepreneurs and the Chinese giants are just as powerful as American ones. Tensen, Alibaba are very strong, but Bite dance has emerged worth seventy five billion and financial, while it's Alibaba affiliated. It's nevertheless independent and worth $150 billion. And so I do think if we start to extend to traditional businesses, we will see very valuable companies. Probably not the case that in five or ten years we'll still see the whole world with these five companies having such dominance.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I have a good solution. Probably the best solution is let the entrepreneurial VC ecosystem work well and find all the places that can create the next Google, the next Facebook, so there will always be increasing number of challengers. In some sense that has happened a little bit. You see Uber, Airbnb having emerged despite the strength of the big three.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm hardly the most vocal complainer of this. There are a lot louder complainers out there. I do observe that having a lot of data does perpetuate their strength and limit competition in many spaces. But I also believe AI is much broader than the internet space. So the entrepreneurial opportunities still exists in using AI to empower financial, retail, manufacturing, education, applications. So I don't think it's quite a case of full monopolistic dominance that makes that totally stifles innovation. But I do believe in their areas of strength, it's hard to dislodge them.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“while most people would view Facebook as the primary target of their recent unhappiness about Silicon Valley companies, many would put Google in that category, and some have named Google's business practices as predatory also. So it's kind of difficult to have the two parts of a body, the brain wants to do what it's supposed to do for shareholder, maximize profit, and then the heart and soul wants to do good things that may Run against what that brain wants to do.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard, and I think Google has struggled with that, first that don't do evil mantra is very dangerous because every employee's definition of evil is different, and that has led to some difficult employee situations for them. So I don't necessarily think that's a good value statement, but just watching the kinds of things Google or its parent company alphabet does in new areas like healthcare, like eradicating mosquitoes, things that are really not in the business of a internet tech company. I think that shows that there is a heart and soul and desire to do good and willingness to put in the resources to do something when they see it's good, they will pursue it. That doesn't necessarily mean it has all the trusts of the users, I realize.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are companies that will tenaciously go after adjacent markets, build up strong product offering and find ways. To extract greater value from a sphere that's ever increasing and they understand the value of the platforms. So that's the similarity. And then with Google, I think it's a genuinely value-oriented company that does have a heart and soul and that wants to do great things for the world by connecting information and that has also very strong technology genes and Wants to use technology and has found out of the box ways to use technology to deliver incredible value to the end user.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are elements that are the same. I think the three American companies that had or have Chinese characteristics and obviously as well as American characteristics are Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think Apple represents while the user please the user and the Essence of design and brand and it's the one company and perhaps the only tech company that draws people with a strong serious desire for the product and the need and the willingness to pay a premium because of the halo effect of the brand which came from the attention to detail and great respect for user needs. Microsoft represents a platform approach that builds giant products that become very strong modes that others can't do because it's well architected at the bottom level and the work is efficiently. Delegated to individuals and then the whole product is billed by adding small parts that sum together. So it's probably the most effective high-tech assembly line that builds a very difficult product that could be”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the competitors built, essentially a copycat that can be done without infringing laws. If what it takes is to satisfy a foreign country's need by forking the code base and building something that looks really ugly and different, they'll do it. So it's contrasted very sharply with the Silicon Valley approach. And I think the flexibility and the speed and execution has helped the Chinese approach. And I think the Silicon Valley approach is potentially challenged if every Chinese entrepreneur is learning from the whole world, US and China and the American entrepreneurs. Only look internally and write off China as copycat. And the second part of your question about the three companies,”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the Chinese approach is do whatever it takes to win. And it's a winner take-all market. And in fact, in the internet space, the market leader will get predominantly all the value extracted out of the system. And the system isn't just defined as one narrow category, but gets broader and broader. So it's amazing ambition for success and domination of increasingly larger product categories leading to And that develops a practical Result oriented Ultra ambitious, winner take all, gladiatorial mentality. And if what it takes is to”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it also comes with a lot of success. These products became global platforms and there were basically no competitors anywhere. And that has also led to a belief that these are the only things that one should do, that companies should not tread on other companies' territory so that Groupon and the Yelp and an open table and the grubhub with each field okay I'm not going to do the other company's business because that would not be the pride of innovating whatever each of these four companies have innovated”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He doesn't do focus groups. He looks in the mirror and asks the first in the mirror, what do you want? And that really is an inspirational comment that says the great company shouldn't just ask users what they want, but develop something that users will know they want when they see it, but they could never come up with themselves. I think that is probably the most exhilarating description of what the essence of Silicon Valley is. That this brilliant idea could cause you to build something that couldn't come out of focus groups or A-B tests. And iPhone would be an example of that. No one in the age of BlackBerry would write down the one an iPhone or Multitouch, a browser might be another example. No one would say they want that in the days of FTP. But once they see it, they want it. So I think that is what Silicon Valley is. Best”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in aggregate, Silicon Valley companies, and we could probably include Microsoft in that even though they're not in the valley, is really Dream Big and have visionary goals and believe that technology will conquer all and also the self-confidence and the self-entitlement that whatever they produce, the whole world should use and must use. are historically important, I think Jobs' famous quote that”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roughly right, I would say that based on purely machine learning approaches it's hard to imagine it could lead to a full conversational experience across arbitrary domains, which is akin to L5. I'm a little hesitant to use the word Turing test because the original definition was probably too easy. We probably do that.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that they think it's foolish to use LiDARs, but that's clearly a one less valuable and reliable source of input that they're foregoing, which may also have consequences. I think the advantage, of course, is capturing data no one has ever seen before. And in some cases, such as computer vision and speech recognition, I have seen Chinese companies accumulate data that's not seen anywhere in the Western world, and they have delivered superior results. But then speech recognition and object recognition are relatively suitable problems for deep learning and don't have the potentially need for the human intelligence analytical planning elements.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be very hard. One could characterize Tesslaw's approach as kind of a Chinese strength approach. Gather all the data that you can and hope that will overcome the problems. But in autonomous driving, clearly a lot of the decisions aren't merely solved by aggregating data and having feedback loop. There are things that are more akin to human thinking. And how would those be integrated and built? There has not yet been a lot of success in human intelligence or call it expert systems, if you will, even though that's a taboo word with the machine learning. And the integration of the two types of thinking hasn't yet been demonstrated. And the question is, how much can you push a purely machine learning approach? And of course, Tesla also has an additional constraint that they don't have all the sensors.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so breaking that down further in autonomous vehicle, I think huge amounts of data probably will solve trucks driving on highways, which will deliver significant value, and China will probably lead in that. And full L5 autonomous is likely to require new technologies we don't yet know, and that might require academia and great industrial research, both innovating and working together. And in that case, US has an advantage.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're really in the company and you have to deliver results using known techniques and enhancing data seems like the more expedient approach that's very low risk and likely to generate better and better results. And that's why the Chinese approach has done quite well. Now, there are a lot of more challenging startups and problems such as autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis that existing algorithms may probably won't solve. And that would put the Chinese approach more challenged and give the more breakthrough innovation approach more.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineer would rely on and ask for more and more and more data and find ways to cleanse them and make them work in the system and probably less time thinking about new algorithms that can overcome data or other issues.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of American Engineering AI engineering process is to try new things, to do things people haven't done before, and to use technology to solve most, if not all problems, so to make the algorithm work despite not so great data, find error tolerant ways to deal with the data. The Chinese way would be to basically enumerate to the fullest extent all the possible ways by a lot of machines try lots of different ways to get it to work and spend a lot of resources and money and time cleaning up data. That means the AI engineer may be writing data cleansing algorithms, working with thousands of people who label or correct or do things with the data that is the incredible hard work that might lead to better results.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot that's similar because AI is about mastering sciences, about using known technologies and trying new things, but it's also about picking from many parts of possible networks to use and different types of parameters to tune. And that part is somewhat wrote. And it is also, as anyone who's built AI products can tell you a lot about cleansing the data. Because AI runs better with more data and data is generally unstructured, errorful and unclean, and the effort to clean the data is immense. So I think the”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It holds back the breakthrough innovative spirits that we see in the United States, but it does not hold back the valuable execution oriented, result oriented value creating engines, which we see China being very successful.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, well, the Chinese tradition is about excellence, dedication, and results, and the Chinese exams and study subjects in schools have traditionally started from memorizing ten thousand characters, not an easy task to start with, and further by memorizing his historic philosopher's literature, poetry. So it really is the probably the strongest rote learning mechanism created to make sure people had good memory and remembered things extremely well. That's, I think, at the same time suppresses the breakthrough innovation and also enhances the speed execution, get results. And that, I think, characterizes the historic basis of China.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the Chinese soul of people today, right? We're talking about people who have had centuries of burden because of the poverty that the country has gone through. And suddenly shined with hope of prosperity in the past forty years as China opened up and embraced market economy. And undoubtedly, there are two sets of pressures on the people, that of the tradition, that of facing difficult situations, and that of hope of wanting to be the first to become successful and wealthy. So that's a very strong hunger and a strong desire and strong work ethic that drives China forward.”
2019-07-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Kai-Fu Lee: AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source