Recent Chinese Innovation

Lerner, Josh and Narain, Namrata and Papanikolaou, Dimitris and Seru, Amit and Xu, Zunda Winston, Chinese Sputnik Moments? (July 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7114818

Abstract: China's technological progress in recent decades has been viewed with admiration, alarm, and (in some cases) doubt. To better understand the Chinese innovation ecosystem, we compile a dataset of almost 14 million domestic Chinese patent publications. We focus on the subset of critical technologies identified by the U.S. Department of Defense. Several surprising patterns emerge from the data: Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Chinese critical technology patents involves an inventor with U.S. experience or training. Finally, using four text-based measures of patent quality, we show that the rise of Chinese patenting in critical technologies has not been associated with a decline in quality relative to the U.S. awards.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

America and China in the World, a quick note

Is that where we’re headed, to a bipolar world dominated by America and China? I just asked Google Search: “Is China the largest economy in the world?” Its reply:

China is the world's largest economy when measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), but the United States is the largest in terms of nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

• By Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): China is the world's largest economy, with an estimated output exceeding $44 trillion. This metric adjusts for the cost of living and the price of local goods, reflecting a higher real volume of economic activity.
  
• By Nominal GDP: The United States holds the top spot. In current market exchange rates, the U.S. economy is valued at approximately $32 trillion, while China's nominal GDP is roughly $20 trillion.

So that’s one thing. The other is AI. America and China are in a race for dominance in AI. America has a technical lead, but with respect to Frontier LLMs, that lead is measured in months, not years. And China is making its models open weight while the most advanced American models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and not open. It’s not at all clear how that will shake out.

With the Trump administration authoritarianism is on the rise in America. While the Democrats may well win the next presidential election, it’s not at all clear what that means for America’s already precarious democracy. The problem is that a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of political and business elites, so much that America’s democracy looks like a chess game played by oligarchs where ordinary Americans are the pawns.

Is that what the world will become in 2040, a competition between American and Chinese oligarchs in which everyone else is a pawn, with Homo economicus triumphant over all?

The sun rises in the East [China & AI]

Steve Lohr, China’s Leader Pitches ‘Openness’ in Push to Shape A.I.’s Future, NYTimes, July 17, 2026.

China’s leader on Friday laid out his nation’s bid to shape the path of artificial intelligence, casting China as a champion of an open approach to the technology and a trusted ally of developing nations in advancing A.I.

The remarks by Xi Jinping highlighted the importance that China’s top political and governmental leadership place on artificial intelligence. Mr. Xi’s speech did not mention the United States by name, but the message was clear: China plans to compete as the world’s other A.I. superpower.

Speaking at an A.I. conference in Shanghai, Mr. Xi said that “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of global collaboration.”

He described open-source A.I. technology, in which much of the software can be freely shared and modified, as a “rare and historical opportunity” to spread the benefits of A.I. globally. The technology, he said, must be shared by developing nations or raise the threat of “new historical injustices.”

Moonshot open-source:

On Friday, a Chinese company, Moonshot, introduced a new model that it claimed performed as well as American models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The announcement of the model, Kimi K3, helped roil financial markets.

The U.S. companies, which have spent many billions of dollars creating their frontier models, do not share their technology freely. They have also accused the Chinese of pilfering their technology. And China remains well behind in the most advanced A.I. chips, a market dominated by Nvidia. [...]

In his address, Mr. Xi also said China planned to offer its A.I. technology and training to developing countries that were friendly to China. “We must uphold openness and win-win cooperation,” he said.

But how open?

But A.I., depending on how far and fast it progresses, poses a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party. How should it manage the rise of a technology that could one day be so disruptive that it could threaten its interests — and its grip on power?

There's more at the link.

Feelings for Sale in China

There's a video at the link (NYTimes). Here's a transcript of the voice over:

Visitors to a theme park in central China are lining up for selfies with this cosplayer. While this hiker is paid to guide and carry visitors up one of the country’s most popular mountains. It’s all part of a growing trend among young people here who are increasingly anxious about the future because of declining wages and high youth unemployment.

So many are buying feel-good experiences and products that provide “qíng xù jià zhí” — which means emotional value in Chinese. The phrase is everywhere. Companies use it in ads to sell everything from A.I. pets that provide companionship to blind boxes that bring surprise. Even some local governments are using the term in their annual economic reports.

The trend has fueled a nearly $400 billion market that’s estimated to grow 70 percent by 2029. We found two young Chinese workers who are cashing in on the craze. Their social media posts and videos they shared with us give a glimpse inside the emotional value phenomenon.

College student, Lu Zhaoyu, is part of a group that helps people hike Mount Tai in eastern China. The 20-year-old markets his services with photos of himself, promising “maximum emotional value” all the way up to the summit. He said his clients are usually women in their 20s and 30s who prefer to spend money on their feelings rather than practical things.

A Lang bounced between different jobs before becoming a cosplayer at an amusement park. The park advertises that its good-looking actors and actresses provide a “full emotional experience” for $15 per visitor. The 30-year-old usually spends an hour transforming himself into a warrior from a video game. He said some visitors in the crowd are fans who have seen his videos on social media. A Lang said his goal is to create a moment of joy for each person.

What sets Lu apart from a typical hiking guide are the services he offers his clients such as fresh fruit at a rest stop or champagne to celebrate the hike. Clients pay about $100 for a six-hour trek. Many get exhausted along the way and ask to be carried. Sometimes Lu said he feels like a therapist. Both Lu and A Lang said the job can be emotionally and physically draining. But emotional value can also be a two-way street. “Getting exhausted during the hike is inevitable. But providing emotional value or carrying their bags is the basics of the job.” “When I am tired, I will turn on the livestream and sing to release my emotions.”

Joel Mokyr on China, India, and Europe; clans vs. corporations; the idea of progress.

A Conversation with Tyler: Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth (Ep. 282)

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human history, cleverness didn’t compound. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren’t related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.

Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China’s, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, and much more.

Clans vs. Corporations

COWEN: Start by telling us, in the book, your thesis about European corporations versus Chinese clans and the importance of that difference. How would you explain it?

MOKYR: Well, the difference is, basically, the kind of organizations that produce what we call local public goods, so things like food relief and education, religious services, things like that, I would think that if you look at the world, say, around 800, at the time of Charlemagne, the difference between Europe and China isn’t very large. At some point, during the Middle Ages, you can see this divergence getting started. What’s happening is that, in Europe, there is more and more of a decline in the extended family or the extended kinship group, we call it clan, and instead, people get together and cooperate with other people to whom they are not related and with whom they do not share an ancestor.

Whereas in China, it moves exactly in the other direction. In China, you get more and more people getting organized by their extended family. The reasons for that are fairly complex. In Europe, it’s particularly the Catholic Church that played a major role here. This was argued quite a while ago by a guy, an anthropologist called Jack Goody, but your own colleague Jonathan Schulz wrote, what I think is one of the best papers on the subject, who pointed this out in great length and actually provided a fair amount of systematic evidence for this.

In China, there is no Catholic Church. The imperial bureaucracy is more and more in cahoots with local clans to whom they actually outsource a fair amount of the things that they were supposed to do. As you move on out of this period of the Song dynasty into later dynasties, you see this thing growing. The problem in Europe is that the nuclear family, which became the fundamental building block of society, is too small to provide local public goods. You need to cooperate with others. What emerges in Europe, and quite spontaneously, is a bunch of things that provide these local public goods that you just don’t see in China.

For instance, we have something called universities. We have monasteries. We have autonomous cities. All of those things are what we call corporations. What it is, is people who are not related, but what they share is not an ancestor but an objective. Guilds have one kind of objective, universities have another one, and so on and so forth. That divergence in social organization turns out, in our view, to be one of the key components of the divergence between Europe and China.

COWEN: Do you take that change in policy from the Catholic Church as exogenous or that it is rooted in earlier features of Western society such as the ideology of Christianity itself or maybe earlier Roman times? What is causing what? What’s the most fundamental driver here in the West?

MOKYR: Well, there’s some debate about that. They don’t, of course, tell you. There are, I think, two components about this, and I would not know how to weight them. There are two things happening here. The first is that the Catholic Church really becomes quite obsessive about certain sins that they consider to be particularly egregious. One of those sins is incest. Every society in the world prohibits marriage between siblings, but other more remote relatives is more ambiguous. The Church becomes quite obsessive about this. At the end, there are places where they actually prohibit the marriage of fifth-degree cousins. Now, how anybody in the Middle Ages would know who is fifth-degree cousin is, is unclear. I don’t know who my fifth-degree cousins are. Maybe you do.

The other thing, which is also sort of Goody’s argument, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, is that the Church wants to weaken any kind of organizations that compete with it for power and control in the local communities. They also have figured out that if you organize society by nuclear families, then a certain proportion of people die without heirs. If they die interstate without heirs, that in many cases, the property that these people own reverted to the Church. Pure naked greed by the Church, which was not unknown in the Middle Ages, I think, was a driver here. Goody convinced me that that actually is a substantial factor.

There are other arguments that have been made in this context, but I think these are the two that are most striking. The other question is, why is it that the clan in China is so convenient for the imperial bureaucracy to rely on? Both of those things happen in parallel. I would think, maybe, if I may allow one observation, in both cases, this is history as historical outcomes, as the unintended and unanticipated consequence of very different actions. There’s no question that the Church never, I think, foresaw the emergence of corporations in Europe, nor do I think that the Chinese imperial service ever seriously considered the possibility how this would change life in China. That’s what happens. You try to follow one objective and then something very different emerges over time. That’s what history is all about.

European Growth

COWEN: Why does it take so long for the wealthiest parts of Western Europe to surpass Chinese living standards? Say that’s happened by 1700 or 1720, that’s many centuries after this medieval divergence. If it takes so many centuries, is the medieval divergence really the relevant factor? Why is it such a slow process?

MOKYR: Yes, I think it is. I think it’s a main factor. I think the idea of looking at standard of living, one thing, I’m very skeptical about how standards of living are actually measured. I know that this is what Pomeranz and other people have, and Jack Goldstone and other people have argued that the living standards in China were comparable to the West as late as 1750. I’m not 100 percent sure that that is true. Certainly, for my money, what really defines the divergence is that, technologically, the gap between the two countries starts to become visible at the time of the Renaissance, in terms of a whole bunch of things that you see growing in Europe and stagnant in China.

Now, keep in mind, of course, that part of the European growth is due to the fact that they borrowed ideas from China. Then the Industrial Revolution consists, to some extent, of imports institution by Europeans trying to mimic the goods that they were importing from China—not just from China, from India as well. Pottery is a good example. One of the things they really wanted from China was Chinaware. That’s why it’s called Chinaware. It took them a while to be able to match the Chinese capability in the ceramic industry, but they do so eventually. Then they stop importing this stuff from China. The same is true for, say, cotton and other products that we’re getting from the East.

European living standards, I think, should be measured, in part, by the fact that when the Europeans start their voyages across the globe in the late 15th and early 16th century, they are able to bring in a whole bunch of new crops and new techniques from other areas which they merely adopt. You’ll see Europeans very soon growing tobacco and potatoes and corn and other things like that. They are the agents of global change. Not only that they change their own diets, they change the Chinese diets because the Europeans bring from the New World things like peanuts and sweet potatoes and things like that. They change the Chinese diets, but the Chinese themselves are not agents here.

They are accepting the stuff that the Europeans did to some extent, and they’re rejecting others, but it’s the Europeans who are the agents of change here. They are the entrepreneurs. They are the people who bring about the changes, Tyler. My sense is that typifies the difference between Europeans and the Chinese. Europeans are more aggressive. They are more outward-looking. In the end, what you see by the 1830s and 1840s, you see that the technological gap is huge, in some ways much larger than the living standards gap. Even in the 19th century, in terms of food, the Chinese were capable of producing enough food. The number of famines in China is probably not a lot worse than in Europe.

When you see what happens during the First Opium War, one English ship is blowing all of this sort of mighty empire to pieces, and the Chinese have to accept this terribly humiliating peace, you can sort of see how the technological gap has grown between the two. For me, that is much more telling than the living standards. The other thing that I should like to point out is that, when you look at Europe in the 16th and 17th century, you can see that the capability of expanding the set of useful knowledge, including science, is just growing very rapidly. Whether there is a scientific revolution or not is a debate that I want to get into.

Certainly, by 1700, Europe is on the verge of really changing our understanding of how creation works. That’s not just Newton and Galileo. There’s a whole body of work that is emerging. There’s really nothing parallel like that in China. China is a very sophisticated society in many ways. The literacy rates are high. They have a well-funded and well-organized system of education, but they don’t really continue their earlier forays into science and into new technology.

Somebody actually went out and looked at Joseph Needham’s many volumes on Chinese technology and science, or Science and Civilisation [in China], as he called it, and he discovered something—which I guess we all knew, but they put numbers on it—almost nothing that Needham pointed out as an innovation happens after 1400. There’s complete stagnation setting in and some of the things that they knew how to make in earlier times, like the sophisticated clocks that they built in the 11th century, they disappear. For me, that’s more telling than how many calories of carbohydrates were consumed on average, if we could ever calculate that correctly.

Chatbots respond to questions about China depend on whether they were asked in Chinese or English

Your ideas are most likely made of what language is made of. Hence your brain is specialized to predict the next token, even while you're under anesthesia.https://t.co/0TIrS3mw4p

— Starphyre △🏴‍☠️ (@starphyre23) July 8, 2026

Seeing China Clearly | Robert Wright & Tianyu Fang

YouTube page:

Trans-Pacific tech watcher Tianyu Fang joins Robert Wright to take a close look at China—including how the government works (and doesn’t), online censorship, how China sees AI and the chip war, the legacy of the one-child policy, and more. Plus: Silicon Valley’s hawkish turn. [...]

0:00 Teaser
0:45 How Tianyu became a “China explainer”
3:15 American vs Chinese exceptionalism
8:09 What you can and can’t say in China
18:32 Is the government more accountable in the US or China?
27:03 How China sees America
36:32 The one-child policy and its consequences
42:53 Tianyu: The biggest misconception about China is…
46:20 Heading to Overtime

Chinese top 100 books

If anyone else is interested in literary polls - these are the top 100 highest-rated books on Douban Books (basically Chinese Goodreads) w/ number of ratings. I have translated some titles, indicated w ?. All books pretty much sit within a point of each other on a 10-point scale pic.twitter.com/k63LEcqMGo

— Ella Dorn 唐棠 (@elladorn_) May 17, 2026

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

Trump's accidental triumph in Beijing

That’s the title of the latest edition of Robert Wright’s NonZero Newsletter on Substack. Rather than summarizing and paraphrasing I’m going to reproduce most, but not all, of it in full below the asterisks. In particular, I’m omitting the very end, which is a series of charts showing bipartisan anxiety for AI. I share that anxiety. The title of one of recent columns at 3 Quarks Daily gives you my attitude: The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure. The anxiety in Wright’s charts is one reflection of that institutional failure.

* * * * *

On Thursday the White House issued a social media post that said simply, “American strength back on the world stage.” You might expect such a post to be accompanied by military imagery—maybe an impressive-looking array of soldiers. And this one was. But the soldiers weren’t American. Smartly clad People’s Liberation Army troops, part of the pageantry that had greeted Trump in Beijing, were featured in the opening montage of a video that then showed Trump shaking hands with President Xi Jinping and ended with the two leaders walking side by side on a red carpet.

Apparently the unipolar moment is over. Being one of the world’s two main poles is, these days, the highest geopolitical aspiration of America’s president. “It’s the two great countries,” Trump proudly told Sean Hannity in an interview that aired on Fox News after the US-China summit ended. “I call it the G-2. This is the G-2.”

The US foreign policy establishment was less effusive than Trump about G-2 membership. A Washington Post headline said: “China summit yields Xi’s goal—equal footing with U.S.,” and the subhead added that “the image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.” The analyst quoted by the Post, a Biden administration national security staffer, said that Xi, using “the opulent optics of the visit,” had managed to do something “Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades”—he had made it “clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

New York Times reporter David Sanger, the dean of Blob [foreign policy establishment] scribes, also depicted the summit as a kind of comedown for America. Whereas Trump was “conciliatory,” Sanger wrote, Xi was “quietly more confrontational,” projecting a “new level of confidence and authority.” In particular: Xi had, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, privately warned Trump that “the US must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution” if it didn’t want to wind up in a conflict.

Meanwhile, as Xi was drawing red lines, Trump, Sanger noted in a subsequent co-authored piece, was spending his time calling Xi a “great leader” and saying that a garden where the two men strolled contained “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” All of this showed, according to Sanger, “how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration, and the beginning of his own second term.”

Works for me! Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence. Besides, the non-zero-sum problems that the US and China need to solve are increasingly urgent, and a pleasant stroll in the garden can be conducive to cooperation. In fact, this week the two nations agreed to start a dialogue on AI safety. For now they’re focusing mainly on ways to keep non-state actors from putting AI to malign uses. That agenda will likely grow as the magnitude of the AI issue becomes more evident and the inherently international nature of many AI threats does, too. But for now it’s enough that, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, “the two AI superpowers are going to start talking.”

I think I’d go even further than Sanger in stressing the magnitude of this moment. Trump has “shifted the foundations” not just of “American policy toward China” but of American foreign policy globally. And at the moment, at least, this shift looks auspicious.

Before elaborating, I should emphasize that I’m not calling Trump a visionary. The new and improved foreign policy that I hope is unfolding will, if it unfolds, be one that Trump has more or less stumbled into—and will be different from the one he was pursuing when he started stumbling. Contingency plays a big role in history, and reckless leaders like Trump are particularly good at illustrating that.

* * * * *

That’s not the end of Wright’s discussion of the implications of Trump’s accidental triumph. But it’s the main story. I’ll end by quoting Wright’s last two paragraphs.

One thing standing in the way of my dream scenario—a world where the US and China and the world’s other nations cooperate to solve problems they collectively face—is Trump’s aversion to international governance. China under Xi plays a more active role in international institutions than the US under Trump, and Xi talks more about “win-win” outcomes than Trump, who is famously inclined to see life in zero-sum terms.

Still, he emitted fewer zero-sum vibes this week than he often does. Indeed, inherent in the idea of “G-2” is sustained cooperation between the two superpowers. So maybe Trump has more in the way of non-zero-sum impulses than is commonly recognized, and they just need to be nurtured. And maybe it would help if the New York Times and the Washington Post and much of the foreign policy establishment quit giving him negative feedback every time he expresses them.

 * * * * *

BONUS: Check out Wright's recent discussion with Zhengyu Huang, author of the new book Rethinking China.

0:00 Teaser
0:34 Zhengyu’s tech background and new book, Rethinking China
3:00 What kind of threat is China, really?
10:06 How trading with China transformed America
16:51 The stakes of the chip war
22:02 Will tech war lead to real war?
30:33 The US-China escalation spiral and Taiwan
39:13 “Researching while Chinese”: the new Red Scare?
49:46 Heading to Overtime

America and China have different attitudes about and approaches to AI and work

Ross Douthat, Why China Isn’t Worried A.I. Will Replace Its Workers, NYTimes, May 14, 2026.

The United States and China are really the only two countries that matter right now in shaping the A.I. future. As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere, with people talking about an A.I. arms race. But who is winning? Are we even in a race at all? Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it’s hard to call it a race because the U.S. and China have very different A.I. goals.

I presented the conversation to Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Adaptive) and asked it for a summary. 

 * * * * *

I have uploaded conversation to the project area, filename “China AI workers.”

It is between Ross Douthat, who writes for The New York Times, and Kyle Chan, who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. I would like you to summarize the conversation for me. I’m particularly interested in the Chinese attitude toward AI in general and the (proper) relationship between AI and humans.

This is a rich and wide-ranging conversation. Here's a summary, with particular attention to the themes you flagged.

Overall frame

Douthat's central premise is that the U.S. and China are in an AI "arms race," but Chan's main contribution is to complicate and largely deflate that framing. China, he argues, is running a different kind of race, not the same race at a slower pace.

The Chinese approach to AI: practical, not transcendent

The sharpest contrast Chan draws is between the American fixation on AGI — the idea of a "machine god" that surpasses all human capability — and the Chinese orientation toward diffusion and application. China wants AI in food delivery, ride-hailing, health care, government services, and factory floors. They want smaller, cheaper, more deployable models, not necessarily the most powerful frontier model. Chan puts it directly: Beijing is not "AGI-pilled."

He sees this as continuous with how China approached the internet era: not as a transformative metaphysical event, but as infrastructure to be integrated into daily life and governance. The Chinese state is also notably more willing to use open-source models, giving away AI capabilities to gain adoption at scale — both domestically and in the Global South — which is a strategy the commercially driven American labs largely ignore.

The proper relationship between AI and humans: tool, not god

This is where the conversation is most relevant to your homo ludens framework. Chan describes Beijing's view of AI as essentially instrumental — AI serves human economic and social purposes. The Chinese government is actively hostile to AI use that it considers "nonproductive": AI companions, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, even excessive gaming. The fear is that young Chinese will waste time on AI-mediated entertainment and social substitution when they should be building the economy.

There's a revealing parallel Chan draws: the same regulatory instinct that cracked down on video games and private tutoring platforms is now being pointed at AI companionship apps. The state's implicit position is that AI must serve the collective project — not become a substitute for human connection, productivity, or reproduction. This is a deeply anti-mystical, anti-transcendent view of the technology.

So the Chinese "proper relationship" between AI and humans is essentially: AI augments human labor, fills demographic gaps (falling birthrate, shrinking workforce), and extends state capacity. It does not replace human flourishing or social life; it should not become an end in itself.

The demographic driver

Chan adds an important materialist dimension: China's embrace of robotics and AI is partly driven by sheer demographic necessity. Their labor force peaked over a decade ago, youth unemployment is near 17%, and the birthrate is roughly two-thirds the U.S. rate. This produces a different calculus than in America — the question isn't whether a robot waiter displaces a human worker, but whether you have a waiter at all. AI and robotics fill a structural labor hole, which makes China more tolerant of automation than Western economies that still have more human workers to protect.

The public mood: anxiety about falling behind, not about being displaced

Where American anxiety about AI tends toward fears of job loss, surveillance, or existential catastrophe, Chan describes Chinese popular anxiety as nearly the inverse: fear of not using AI enough, of being left behind in a hyper-competitive labor market. Individual workers, companies, and policymakers all share this orientation. Chan calls this a "mirroring" — the individual's fear of losing competitive edge mirrors China's national fear of falling behind the U.S. technologically.

On AGI and existential risk: skeptical distance

Chan thinks it's telling that when Trump relaxed chip export controls, Chinese AI companies wanted the chips but Beijing declined — preferring to build domestic semiconductor capacity rather than become dependent on American supply chains. This, he argues, is not the behavior of a country sprinting toward superintelligence. A true AGI race would involve gobbling up every available chip. China is playing a longer, more measured game.

He also pushes back gently on the "race" metaphor itself: the intermediate risks (cyberwarfare, biosecurity) are, in his view, underrated and real; the AGI-superintelligence scenario is overblown. He ends by urging dialogue between the U.S. and China on shared risks from rogue actors and open-source proliferation, while acknowledging the deep mutual distrust that makes formal arms-control agreements essentially impossible at this stage.

A thought for your book

Chan's portrait of Beijing's AI worldview sits almost perfectly at the opposite pole from Silicon Valley's quasi-religious eschatology — no Omega Point, no machine god, no homo deus. What you might find generative: the Chinese model is also, in its own way, a version of homo economicus applied to AI — purely instrumental, collectively economistic, hostile to play and to what the government calls "wasted time." It's not an alternative to the Silicon Valley eschatology so much as its mirror image — the same foreclosure of genuine play, just in a different ideological register.

China and America as mimetic rivals in A.I.

Yi-Ling Liu, The U.S. and China Are Hurtling Toward a Shared A.I. Future, NYTimes, May 12, 2026.

This is a long article. Are are some highly selected excerpts.

The rivalry:

The growth of artificial intelligence has been presented as a rivalry between two fundamentally different systems. America commands capital and chips while China marshals engineering talent and manufacturing prowess. America holds an edge in building software — enterprise tools and cloud platforms. China leads in hardware — humanoids and autonomous vehicles. America pushes ahead with frontier models, with its artificial intelligence labs making moonshot bets to build a superintelligence. China focuses on scale and diffusion, with its tech firms embedding A.I. as quickly as possible in every sector of society.

We’ve been told that the ultimate prize in A.I. is the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. The country that figures this out, the theory holds, will establish world dominance through turbocharged economic and military power.

Internal division in both countries:

But looking past the headlines and the highlight reels, you can see the sharp divide in both countries brought on by A.I. Those who build and bankroll the technology speak of the future as a promise to be profited from, an opportunity to be exploited. In Silicon Valley, college dropouts talk of A.I. tackling climate change and curing disease. Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to “Supercharge your A.I.” and “Stop Hiring Humans.” [...]

China’s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing’s Zhongguancun, known as China’s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another’s star engineers while freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. [...]

Miming memes:

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as “high agency,” while the rest of us are “bots” condemned to the “permanent underclass.” In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (“corporate cattle”) and jiabangou (“overtime dogs.”) These same workers have long used the viral term “involution” to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the “NPC” or “non-player character.” They feel like the background role in someone else’s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.

Frictionless companionship:

Outside the office, both Chinese and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale. Over 70 percent of American teenagers report using chatbots as companions, nearly one in eight for mental health support.

Similarly, in China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. In a country where living alone is quickly becoming the norm — with single-person households expected to possibly reach 200 million by 2030 — A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic.

Religion and spirituality:

The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. The 20-somethings of America check astrology apps like Co-Star, part of a $3 billion dollar industry. Some in Gen Z are rediscovering Christianity, and religious conservatism has re-entered public life. In China, fortunetelling bars have popped up in cities, astrology apps like Cece are going viral and young people are consulting DeepSeek to predict their futures.

Nostalgia and authoratarianism:

When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable. Many Chinese idolize rural vloggers such as the celebrity YouTuber Li Ziqi, who rose to viral fame during the pandemic by sharing videos of her self-sufficient, pastoral life in the Sichuan countryside. You can see the same dynamics in the popularity of the tradwife Instagrammer known as Ballerina Farm, who documents her Utah homestead, milking cows and making doughnuts from scratch for her eight children. Both of those women live off the grid and embody an imagined idyll where chatbots and corporations do not exist.

Nostalgia also has a dark side, encouraging the rise of once fringe, illiberal ideas into the mainstream. This has been underway in China for years, with its influencers and ideologues rejecting liberal ideas and drifting toward a conservative centralized authority. In the United States, we see the growing influence of pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who argues that liberal democracy should be dismantled in favor of a C.E.O.-led monarchy and whose ideas have found an audience among both America’s tech and political elite, from Peter Thiel to JD Vance.

Final paragraph:

Once you step back, it’s easy to see the warping effect of the U.S. vs. China race. It’s a story used to justify sprinting ahead without guardrails in the name of beating the other. By focusing on our rivalry, we have become blind to our vulnerability. Instead of fixating on who crosses the finish line first, we must work together to lift up the people that both countries have left behind.

There's more at the link.

The Chinese conceptualize A.I. differently than Americans and are deploying it differently

Jacob Dreyer, America’s A.I. Is Futuristic. China Is Just Making It Work. NYTimes, May 9, 2026.

The reality is that China and the United States are racing in different directions, because the two countries conceptualize A.I. very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known. In the quest for superintelligence, the U.S. government is encouraging private firms to move full speed ahead, regulation be damned. Under the very tightest regulation, by contrast, the Chinese want to make A.I. more practical and embedded in society, more carefully selecting how it is deployed and used by the population. If the Chinese achieve their A.I. goals, they may take a lead in the larger geopolitical contest between the two nations.

Most Chinese policymakers don’t believe A.I. superintelligence is arriving any time soon. Instead, the Chinese strategy is about advancing a government-directed strategy referred to as “A.I.+” that treats A.I. as if it were infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable A.I. tools into every public service. Chinese people encounter A.I. as a natural part of their day-to-day lives. Sometimes it’s visible and palpable, like the “smile to pay” terminals used in many shops. Sometimes it’s invisible, like Hangzhou’s City Brain, which uses A.I. to analyze massive amounts of data for urban management needs like regulating traffic and environmental protection.

Unlike in the United States, where most people remain wary, A.I. seems to have had less of a backlash in China. The Chinese A.I.+ strategy is practical and comprehensible to the local population in a way that the U.S. strategy simply is not, which may explain why the Chinese appear so much more optimistic about A.I. than Americans.

Chinese leaders are trying to maximize the country’s resources. The country’s chief resource is not oil, soybeans or pork bellies, but Chinese people. [...]

But China’s A.I.-as-infrastructure strategy is about more than just improving the country’s domestic quality of life. It’s also about exporting Chinese influence. Chinese A.I. is already integrated into the supply chains that dominate world trade.

And increasingly, rather than selling individual goods or services, China is selling a whole suite — energy, infrastructure, telecoms, transportation, surveillance — with A.I. systems to manage it all.

Interesting. It seems that the Chinese are interested in improving people's lives and making them more effective. In contrast, one could almost say that Silicon Valley AI is about replacing people. After all, isn't that the Doomsday scenario at the heart of so much Silicon Valley AI mythology? 

There's more at the link.

Presiding over a declining America, Trump hastens the descent

Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.

China Rising

Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.

This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.

Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.

After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:

Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.

There's more at the link.

An Empire in Decline

Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:

Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.

Suckered again.

Iran was able to resist a bully's attack, so can Taiwan.

Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones, Iran Resisted a Powerful Attacker. Taiwan Can Too. NYTimes, Apr. 19, 2026.

As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran grinds to an uncertain conclusion, observers have been quick to label it a win for China. The war has damaged American prestige around the world and angered countries and their populations whose economies face inflation and disrupted supply chains. But a closer look at Iran’s methods in resisting the United States reveals uncomfortable lessons for China as it weighs whether to follow through on its threats to take Taiwan.

Iran prevented the far more powerful United States from winning a war that, on paper, it should have walked away with. Iran weathered decapitation strikes and continued to counterattack, despite heavy bombing and inferior weapons. Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is particularly instructive. Its navy had only dilapidated surface ships, a small number of diesel-powered submarines, and numerous small, fast-attack speedboats. Iran’s air force had no advanced attack aircraft and no true bombers.

What Iran did have, however, was a large stockpile of drones and missiles — including anti-ship cruise missiles — capable of striking vessels in the strait and hitting military and commercial targets across the Middle East. Iran also decentralized its command and control network and dispersed and concealed its weapons in multiple locations to make it difficult for the United States and Israel to find and destroy all of them.

Later:

Survival requires more than hardware. Iran weathered massive strikes against its political and military leaders by quickly replacing them and by decentralizing military command and control. It maximized deception and concealment, stored weapons in underground bunkers to increase survivability and relied on mobile systems that could be quickly rolled out, launched and rolled back into bunkers.

Taiwan needs to prepare similar moves to survive the potential disruption of its command networks and to be ready to fight in the face of decapitation strikes, space and counterspace attacks and offensive cyberoperations. Doing this will require plans for succession, decentralized command and control, deception and survivability.

There's more at the link.

The Chinese are optimistic about AI, no Doomers

Vivian Wang, Where are China’s A.I. Doomers? NYTimes, Mar. 4, 2026.

People in China are among the most excited in the world about A.I., according to a KPMG survey of 47 countries last year. While 69 percent of people in China said the technology’s benefits outweighed its risks, only 35 percent of Americans agreed. Other polls have shown similar disparities.

The question is, why?

The answer may be related to how the technology has been deployed in each country, as well as how the government and industry leaders have talked about it.

I don’t find this at all surprising. AI Doom is a projective fantasy, as I argued a couple of years ago in 3 Quarks Daily. Continuing on:

... Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

As a result, Chinese consumers are feeling the benefits of A.I., said Bai Guo, a professor who studies the digital economy at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

“A lot of things can already be helped by A.I., and people find that interesting, that’s useful, and so there are quite a lot of positive and active feelings toward it,” Professor Bai said. Potential dangers, such as unemployment or increased inequality, still feel remote.

The Chinese government has emphasized practical use: “Officials say that A.I. could help solve China’s thorniest problems, such as inequalities in health care, or an aging work force.” And so:

In August, the government laid out a plan, called A.I.+, for A.I. to penetrate more than 70 percent of Chinese society by 2027, and 90 percent by 2030. The plan said A.I. will “promote a revolutionary leap in productive ability” and “create higher-quality, beautiful lives.”

Because Chinese officials are promoting A.I. as an economic engine, they may also be silencing those who are more pessimistic about it. Crashes involving autonomous driving have attracted widespread attention online, only for posts to be censored. State media outlets have compared concerns about job loss for taxi drivers to the Luddite movement.

However:

Users have also raised concerns about how easily the government’s restrictions can be bypassed. A Chinese feminist group recently highlighted tutorials for making sexually explicit deepfakes that circulate openly on Chinese social media. Attempts to report the images were unsuccessful, the group said.

The Chinese government has also begun more directly addressing the technology’s potential for disrupting jobs, mental health or the Communist Party’s grip on power. [...]

For all of its potential, China must not let A.I. “spiral out of control,” Mr. Xi warned during a recent meeting of the leaders of the Communist Party.

There’s more at the link.

Chinese dancing robots

🤯Absolutely insane. Unitree's humanoid robot team's performance at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala

The significance of the humanoid robot's performance lies in letting 1.4 billion Chinese people know where the future lies. pic.twitter.com/6vXIX2MfWM

— CyberRobo (@CyberRobooo) February 16, 2026

Among universities, the Chinese are moving up, USA is moving down

Just think, a century ago most Americans thought of Charlie Chan, a movie detective, when they they thought on the Chinese. And Chinatown, of course. In the 1960s a character named "Hop Sing" appeared as comic relieve in the hit TV program Bonanza. He was the house boy for the wealthy Cartwright family – note the word "boy." And then came the war in Vietnam along with Chairman Mao and his Red Book. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s I took a course on radical approaches to literature, taught be Art Efron. We read a collection of essays on aesthetics written by Mao.

Mark Arsenault, Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip, NYTimes, Jan 15, 2026. The article opens:

Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.

That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.

Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.

The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.

“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.

In the middle of this long article:  

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.

China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.

“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.

Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.

There's much more in the article.

NYTimes on AI: Robot games in china, Stop obsessing over super-intelligence

Yan Zhuang, The Athletes at China’s Robot Games Fell Down a Lot, Aug. 18, 2025.

There’s a very real concern that robots could eventually make some of our jobs obsolete. But at a robot-only sports competition in China over the weekend, the immediate concern was that they would fall over or crash into each other.

The Humanoid Robot Games, a three-day event in Beijing that ended on Sunday, featured more than 280 teams from universities and private companies in 16 countries. Some robots landed back flips and successfully navigated obstacle courses and rough terrain.

In other cases, the robots’ athletic ability left, well, something to be desired.

During soccer matches, child-size ones tripped over each other, falling down like dominoes. One goalkeeper robot stood placidly as its opponent kicked a ball at its legs several times before finally managing to score.

One robot by China’s Unitree Robotics plowed into a human staff member while sprinting during a track event, knocking him down. [...]

“Despite the pratfalls, significant progress in robot locomotion and balance is being achieved including back flips, side flips, and other acrobatic and martial arts moves,” said Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. [...]

But Professor Fern said the type of robots used in the games are generally not equipped for higher-level functions like planning or reasoning and usually need a human operator to help guide them.

So, how do we link them to such capabilities residing in the cloud?

Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu, Silicon Valley Needs to Stop Obsessing Over Superhuman A.I. Aug. 19, 2025.

It is uncertain how soon artificial general intelligence can be achieved. We worry that Silicon Valley has grown so enamored with accomplishing this goal that it’s alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, our nation risks falling behind China, which is far less concerned with creating A.I. powerful enough to surpass humans and much more focused on using the technology we have now. [...]

The current modus operandi is build at all cost. Every tech giant is in the race to reach A.G.I. first, erecting data centers that can cost more than $100 billion and with some like Meta offering signing bonuses to A.I. researchers that top $100 million. The costs of training foundation models, which serve as a general-purpose base for many different tasks, have continued to rise. Elon Musk’s start-up xAI is reportedly burning through $1 billion a month. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, expects training costs of leading models to go up to $10 billion or even $100 billion in the next two years.

To be sure, A.I. is already better than the average human at many cognitive tasks, from answering some of the world’s hardest solvable math problems to writing code at the level of a junior developer. Enthusiasts point to such progress as evidence that A.G.I. is just around the corner. Still, while A.I. capabilities have made extraordinary leaps since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, science has yet to find a clear path to building intelligence that surpasses humans.

In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, an academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of the 475 respondents said our current approaches were unlikely to lead to a breakthrough. While A.I. has continued to improve as the models get larger and ingest more data, there’s concern that the exponential growth curve might falter. Experts have argued that we need new computing architectures beyond what underpins large language models to reach the goal.

Right. And this crazy over-commitment to machine learning (sunk costs fallacy) starves the pipeline by skewing research, education, and training. We need research on other approaches and broad training, not a narrow focus on machine learning.

While some Silicon Valley technologists issue doomsday warnings about the grave threat of A.I., Chinese companies are busy integrating it into everything from the superapp WeChat to hospitals, electric cars and even home appliances. In rural villages, competitions among Chinese farmers have been held to improve A.I. tools for harvest; Alibaba’s Quark app recently became China’s most downloaded A.I. assistant in part because of its medical diagnostic capabilities. Last year China started the A.I.+ initiative, which aims to embed A.I. across sectors to raise productivity.

It’s no surprise that the Chinese population is more optimistic about A.I. as a result. At the World A.I. Conference, we saw families with grandparents and young children milling about the exhibits, gasping at powerful displays of A.I. applications and enthusiastically interacting with humanoid robots. [...]

Many of the purported benefits of A.G.I. — in science, education, health care and the like — can already be achieved with the careful refinement and use of powerful existing models. [...]

Instead of only asking “Are we there yet?” it’s time we recognize that A.I. is already a powerful agent of change. Applying and adapting the machine intelligence that’s currently available will start a flywheel of more public enthusiasm for A.I. And as the frontier advances, so should our uses of the technology.

Amen.

US gets 15% of chip sales to China

Trump gets 15% of China chip sales, The AI Report, August 10, 2025.

Our Report

An unnamed US official has revealed that US chipmakers, NVIDIA and AMD, have agreed to give the US government 15% of the revenue they make from selling their AI chips to China in return for export licences to China.

Key Points

• The revenue share applies to NVIDIA’s H20 chips (which NVIDIA modified specifically for the Chinese market, under Bidens’ previous export rules) and AMD’s advanced MI308 chips.
• This comes after the US previously banned the export of AI chips to China after security experts warned it could be "a potent accelerator" of China's AI capabilities, but last month, President Trump reversed this ban.
• This is the first time a US company has agreed to share revenue to secure export licences, but President Trump has previously encouraged US firms to “buy down” the tariff rates he imposes.

Relevance

Although securing export licences for China is good news for NVIDIA and AMD (NVIDIA generated $17B from China sales last year, representing 13% of total sales, and AMD made $6.2B, accounting for 24% of total revenue), China appears to be growing increasingly concerned about the security of NVIDIA chips, forcing NVIDIA to confirm that their chips had no “backdoor” security risks (which would allow remote access) and demanding it produce “convincing security proofs” to eliminate Chinese users’ worries and regain market trust.

BygteDance (China) drops automated theorem prover

China just dropped an absolute bombshell AI for Math paper: not just Gold in IMO 2025, but >50% of all Putnam and 78% of all past IMO problems.

It BEATS Google's AlphaGeometry2, achieves 100% on OpenAI's miniF2F. Uses Lean for proofs and novel approaches for geometry.

And it's… pic.twitter.com/XzO2Vsmoe5

— Deedy (@deedydas) August 3, 2025