China Tech Talk

I had the pleasure recently to go on Carl’s live stream to talk about the recent LM-10B launch and recovery. Why this was significant and why China picked its design of recovering in offshore pad. We also talked a little bit about the strategic implication of having low cost launches and what else China needs to do to continue to make advancement in space missions like building up LEO constellations and also do Moon landing and building lunar colony. We also had some fun talking about SpaceX/Elon part of this.

Finally, I did Q&A from the audience. A lot of AI related questions, especially with AGI stuff.

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I’ve been wanting to do an episode on GLM-5.2 & Zhipu for a while, but didn’t get a chance to do so. Last week, I did a live stream on Carl Zha’s channel and here is my piece on it.

I’ve had very good experience with GLM-5.2 so far and will probably move up a level in coding plan if their next release makes a similar level of jump. I’ve also had good experience with Kimi 2.6 & 2.7. Although in terms of Software engineering, GLM-5.2 is clearly better from my personal experience.

I would just recommend everyone to get off Opus and Claude Code. Try the cheaper GLM through ZCode or Kimi through Kimi Code. Or you can get both. Sometimes, one model would be better and other times, the other one will be better.

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This week, I welcome Andy from Multipolarity podcast onto my show. I’ve been listening to his show for a while and always enjoyed him and Phillip Pilkington’s discussion on geopolitics, European politics and the increasing multiploar world that we live in.

We talked about everything for quite a while. I was really interesting in how someone with multipolar view from Europe would look at the Russian/Ukraine conflict as well as the Iran conflict. I think you will find that we had a lot of common view point. It seems like European leaders are waiting for Trump to fall apart and lose elections so that the democrats can get back in power and fix everything. I’m not sure that’s a good approach, but there is definitely the European pitch of “If you continue to support us with Ukraine, we will help you squeeze China”.

As two people that think this world has profoundly changed to multipolar, we both think this is not an approach that works well with the current power dynamics globally. In fact, a dramatically weakened US from Iran conflict would not only hurt Trump, but hurt the position of the collective West.

And we also finished up agreeing on something I’ve personally been thinking about. What happens to UK as it goes on this decline? Do we have Scottish independence or a unification of Ireland. These are actually real problems that few people seem to be talking about publicly.

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When I started really getting into Chinese EVs in 2022/2023, there really wasn’t that much material in English about what was going on in China's EV industry. When I did search on YouTube, I would often find content by Wheelsboy, Elliott Richards and my guys today China Driven/Will Sundin.

I remember watching some of the earlier content by Will and just seeing his driving experience on various NIO and Li Auto models. This was before Li Auto was really known by anyone outside of China. You could see back then just how good the L1 and L9 were and why people in China were buying them instead of BMW.

So, I managed to get hold of Will this week and bring him on the show to talk about how he moved to China, got into doing videos of Chinese EVs, his experience with NIO, Li Auto and experiences with China’s EV sector as a whole. We ended the show talking about his experiences from the recent Beijing Auto Show and also what vehicles Will would buy. It was a really great chat with Will and I would love to have him back on the show in the future. Please follow him on his Youtube channel and X/Twitter.

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I had the pleasure this week to welcome Marcel on my show. I would recommend everyone to follow Marcel on X as well as on his website and YouTube channel. A really good guy and we had a great discussion. I first followed and noticed Marcel because of his commentaries on China’s EV industry and especially NIO. However, he actually talks about more than that on both X and our episode. I think he is very well tuned into China’s tech industry as well as life in Shenzhen. He even mentioned to me that his work involves helping German companies navigate challenges in the China market as well as understanding Chinese companies entering European market + opportunities from all of this.

I was pleasantly surprised that he mentioned Tuya as the under the radar company that he thought very highly of. I actually only found out about them a few months ago as I was getting really into embodied AI supply chain in China.

So, I recommend everyone to check it out and let me know what you think. And I recommend everyone to visit Shenzhen.

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I had the pleasure to join Grace on this episode of AI Proem. We covered a lot of topics here. A lot of stuff on AI, semiconductors and robotics, but obviously also all the other techs that I talk about.

I didn’t break ground on anything new, but I did voice my opinion regarding China’s housing market slowdown at the end and how I think people are completely misreading the story.

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I had the pleasure of joining RWN on his podcast to talk about China and PLA and WestPac conflict. I thank Mark and John for welcoming me on their show and giving me the opportunities to just explain how we got here and why we saw a lot of the alarms from the DC crowd and US security establishment. I talked about game changing political events like the South China Sea Island expansions and the Pelosi visit. A lot of the moves by DC actually didn’t work out well like the THAAD deployment in South Korea. Why you cannot compare attacking Iran to attacking Taiwan. Blockading Taiwan is an entirely different paradigm vs blockading a country with as large surface area as Iran. I also talked about things like the first strike and why that is important, but also dangerous in terms of escalation of conflict. I also talked about the importance of satellites in modern warfare.

Also since was right before Trump’s visit, we actually did talk about Thucydides Trap but not in those war exactly. How do you resolve issues between reigning hegemon and upcoming power? I think these are all hard questions that need to be resolved.

Please feel free to ask any questions you may have regarding to this interview. I’m glad to answer them.

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Today, I had the pleasure of speaking to Paul Triolo on a host of things. We actually have been talking to each other for a while offline, but I finally got a chance to speak to him in a person today and it was great. And as you will hear in this podcast, we are nowhere close to being finished. I will definitely have Paul back on the show to talk about semiconductor industry in the future.

I think it was great to hear from him on just how this China/USA tech competition started and his experience through all of this as someone who first spent time in China in the late 80s! Ever since, he has always taken a very fair and thoughtful role in being vocal about the importance of China/US ties in the media.

But I guess the focus of our talk today was on how the October surprise sanctions came about and the rationales behind these decisions. And I think it’s important for people to remember that while Biden started all these sanctions, the brunt of Chinese retaliations did not hit until 2025 after Trump started his tariff war. The reason is that export control regimes take time to develop. While America is the master of this art, China hasn’t been that involved in tech export controls (especially on supply chain side & extra-territorial) until the wake-up call from Biden sanctions.

The vast majority of the DC crowd simply did not ever think there would be consequences to their actions, so there was apparently very little cost-benefit analysis when these decisions were made in the first place.

We didn’t really get into the semi industry part of this which will be fun to talk about next time. We did talk a lot about critical minerals and Paul has actually worked with American customers of Chinese Rare Earth magnet customers as well as Indium. We talked about why Coherent visited China with Trump this time.

We also talked about why the Chinese Rare Earth retaliations only came around when the trade war started. Simply put, China just had not developed the same type of export control back in 2022. It only ramped up building these export control policies after it suffered from them. So, I think Trump was just unlucky that he was the one that got hit hard by them. Those controls were actually in retaliations for 3 years of US export controls prior to Trump admin.

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This week, I had the chance to interview Lou from Z.ai. It was really a great conversation to talk to her about the work that they are doing there and how they look at developing newer models and her view toward AGI.

I get the feeling of just incredible hard work that Zhipu is going through as part of their effort to produce the best models and products out there. You can see that with GLM-5.1, which I can attest to as being very good for programming. It can do a lot of thinking of solve problems. I get the sense that GLM models are now able to do some form of RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) where the models help improve or create new more powerful models.

One thing that stand out to me about GLM models is their size. They are in the 750B param range which can still fit as Quantized models and run locally on boxes with really large VRAM. However, they are also large enough that they are competitive with larger models. I think there are probably some sacrifices that you have to make in a 750B param model vs 1.6T or 3T param models.

It will be very interesting to see where Z.ai goes from here since they have now received a lot of funding since IPO which gives them a larger war chest to do the work that they need to do.

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This week, I had the pleasure of doing a crossover episode with Kyle Chan who X profile can be found here. We discussed a wide range of topic related to all aspect of AI. We really had a fun time discussing the full scope of China’s supply chain vs other countries. If we look at things holistically, China is definitely building the same supply chain advantage in AI as it has in other industries.

I would recommend everyone to read and listen to Kyle’s substack. I’m sure I will be doing more stuff with Kyle in the future. There are a lot of interesting topics and trend that we are both seeing. AI is just the start and we can probably discuss EVs, renewables, batteries and other industries and supply chains in the future. You can see Kyle’s podcast of this episode here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com