Nat Lambert hails best piece yet on China's LLM data economy vs the US
natolambert · x · 2026-10-13
Nathan Lambert recommends Grace Shao's AI Proem article as the best read yet on China's LLM data economy. Key points: the US has big independent data firms (Surge AI, Scale AI, Mercor, Handshake) while China doesn't; Chinese big tech guards its data in walled gardens and favors in-house model building (Meituan, RedNote, Xiaomi) over API/open-weight reliance; top Chinese data spenders are Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance; Chinese labs lagged 6–12 months on data spending but are catching up fast; new Chinese vendors are going global, focused on healthcare data.
Related event: Deep dive compares US and China LLM data economies as Chinese labs catch up(2 posts)→
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