Investor visits Beijing and Shanghai AI labs: China's labs are far less coordinated than US framing suggests
Dan_Jeffries1 · x · 2026-09-23
Investor David Cheng spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai meeting most major Chinese model labs, researchers, VCs and founders, and highlights an essay's core finding: the phrase "China's AI strategy" is a myth. Every lab, investor, and media contact independently described domestic competition as more brutal than competing with US labs, and laughed at the US framing of Chinese AI as a state-directed bloc. The labs are far less coordinated than US labs — echoing the previous cycle's "War of a Hundred Groupons" (actually 5,000 group-buying firms). Includes a full write-up of his observations from the trip.
More from AGI Musings
- Only high-profile 'misaligned' agent cases come from big labs, dev observes — tobowers · 2026-09-23
- The coupon metaphor: clipping was the point, and AI agents just broke that filter — arampell · 2026-09-23
- nptacek: AI will only accelerate the decay of freely shared internet culture — nptacek · 2026-09-23
- Emerging research consensus: architecture tweaks are efficiency fixes, RL compute drives capability — burny_tech · 2026-09-23
- burny_tech muses: could a universal theory of learning equalize nearly all architectures? — burny_tech · 2026-09-23
- Engineer's reflection: software engineering is going away, and the job is now 'director, not builder' — rachittshah · 2026-09-23