China Tech Talk

This week, I welcomed back Qian Yu on the show to talk about China’s AI (especially embodied AI) ecosystem.

If you would like to know how Chinese entrepreneurs can start new AI robotics/embodied AI product, this would be a good episode to listen to. We also talked about World Model vs VLA, educational institutions involved in AI industry and some of the projects that we have seen recently like the Honor and Xiaomi humanoid robots.

I talked about the difference between reinforcement learning in world model vs LLMs. How can you have recursive self improvement in real world models?

And finally, we also talked about the recent Sugon rack innovation. How Chinese players leveraged domestic supply chain to create a high voltage rack that allows superior cooling to existing solutions.

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

This week, I welcomed back Dan Collins to talk about something that has come to the forefront since the start of the Iran conflict. We are really in a historically unprecedented disruption when it comes to supply chain and energy. What does it mean when this many “molecule” or “atom” get taken off the global market. What will that do to global prices of everything and shortages of things like food? That will cause huge disruptions everywhere. Near the end, Dan and I spent sometime just talking about where the Iran conflict is going at the moment. Always great to discuss something in traditional engineering and hard sciences with someone that have experience in this area like Dan.

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

This week, I welcomed back my friend Snek onto the show to talk about what we are seeing so far in the Iran conflict.

We tried to look at it from the view of how the conflict started, how it’s progressing and where it is going. We covered what Iran is likely getting from Russia & China in the form of intelligence and supply chain. We looked at the possible land invasion plans that’s been rumored.

Since Snek is very familiar with both this conflict and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, we also talked about the parallels and similarities we saw in the two conflict. Finally, we went into the geopolitics a little bit based on what we think will play out in the region.

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

I have joined a project called the China Research Collective to look into providing English language translations of how China thinks about different topics of modern economy. This week, I invited Qian Yu on the show to discuss it and to talk about the first topic we are looking at together: Embodied AI.

It is very good to have him on the show, because he is in Tsinghua University right now and have access to many of the people involved in China’s LLM and embodied AI industry. Of course, I have my own experience with China’s embodied AI industry which I’ve talked about before. So, I think this is a good thing to explore as I discussed Galbot investment, Xiaomi’s usage of robots in its factories, the entire supply chain, D-Robotics AI chips and services like Tuya (which help customers find suitable model, hardware module & ODM). It is amazing to have access to this supply chain, which allows prototyping in just 4-6 weeks. That’s something not possible if you are working on these projects in America.

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

This week, I invited my discord friend “Sagar” on the show to talk about his experience in moving back to China from his finance sector job in America. It is always interesting to broach this topic, because many of us who grew up in the West now see living standard higher in major cities in China than where we live.

I thought it was important for someone who made the move to give everyone an idea of the experience of moving to a tier 1 city like Shanghai and settling down with your friend + looking for a job afterward.

Since we both work in finance, we had a discussion also about Shanghai’s finance sector and what it needs to do to create more service sector jobs to accommodate all the young college grads coming into the work force.

I apologize for audio this week. Due to the fact that Sagar had issue connecting to my usual recording site (vpn problems), the quality of recording was worse than usual.

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

This is an emergency episode of my podcast and I invited Bora back to the show to talk about Type 09V submarine.

In my mind, this is possibly the most consequential PLA program of the next decade. Well, this program and the Type 09VI submarine that will likely come along also. This submarine by itself will change the balance of naval warfare globally once it enters service in large quantity in the early 2030s.

Think of a modern Chinese version of Seawolf. That’s what Type 09V is.

And Type 09VI will also be quite the strategic and geopolitical gamechanger because it will be the first non Western SSBN that can get close to CONUS without being tailed. That was never the case for Russian/Soviet SSBNs.

There will be more analysis of Type 09V by myself and others in the future, but I hope this is a good first technical overview online.

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

I welcomed back Glenn to talk about something that he knows far better than me. How has China prioritized investment in different industries over the reform period since opening up.

China started off by getting investment and investing its own money in export factories to get wealthy through exporting to global market. After the great financial crisis hit, China shifted toward growing its economy and invest in economy through more emphasis on the real estate and infrastructure. This had actually started after liberalization of housing ownership in the late 90s but was really accelerated with many shovel ready projects in second half of 2000s. Eventually, this was shifted to new productive high tech industries as Chinese businesses continue to get more competitive in the global market. Every phase of development made a lot of sense given where China was in terms of development, economic size and demographics.

As we head toward the 15th Five Year Plan, we should see continued focus on investment in areas like grid toward more clean energy (State Grid is investing 4B RMB over this period) as it seeks more energy and technological independence.

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

This week, I welcomed back my friend Bora to talk about where things are at currently. The hot topic of this week is Trump’s capture of Maduro and his operation in Venezuela. We discussed about Greenland also and MAGA’s desire to take it. We also talked about Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

There is a lot of stuff going on geopolitically. But since this is a China based podcast, we also talked about interesting platforms we saw for the PLA in 2025 and what we are looking forward to in 2026.

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

This week, I’m really excited to welcome Tiezhen/Tom Wang from Huggingface on my show. You can find him here on X.

We talked about his background working at Google before he joined HF. Although, we did not get a chance to go really deep into running AI on robotics, but we did discuss the constraints facing AI on edge devices. Basically, 7B parameter model is close to the largest models we can reasonable run on a phone and small board type of device due to memory constraint. Although, Tom has been raving about OpenGLM’s open sourced 9B parameter AI agent that can reach your phone GUI and handle tasks.

We then talked about what you can do to fine tune models. For those out there that are interested, I would definitely recommend trying it with one of the 3B to 8B parameter Qwen models and use your own data. You can also try quantizing it (which may require data set depending on which NPU you are running off).

Open sourcing is very exciting and collaborative for many AI researchers. That’s why they are working so hard on it. I get that. And you can see with the number of projects and check ins on AI projects, many of them are just done by Chinese researchers. Chinese devs are not only rolling out open source models, but also involved in help building all the tools used in AI work.

Toward the end, we spoke more about the economics involved in AI right now. Why certain AI labs are racing to IPO.

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

As we hit the Christmas season of 2025, I have a special episode out to first talk about the 6 future industries that China said it will be focusing on over the 15th Five Year Plan period.

The industries are Quantum Computing, Bio-Manufacturing, Hydrogen & Nuclear Fusion, Brain Computer Interconnect (BCI), Embodied AI and 6G Telecom. Embodied AI is something I really care about and talked about quite a bit on this episode. Especially as it relates to EV and smart phones. Hydrogen and Embodied AI will have huge 2026 in China. Keep an eye on the number of consumer embodied AI products like toys, little gadgets and companions that will come online next year.

I also talked a little bit about H200 and the EUV news. I’m not too worked up by either news. I think H200 purchase will have a positive effect for the small AI labs like DeepSeek, Zhipu, Moonshot and Minimax. But the biggest players in China’s AI world are still ByteDance and Alibaba. ByteDance made a very strong move recently with Doubao Phone. They are only going to push further ahead here next year with more OEM partners. Xiaomi and Huawei are likely going to use their own LLMs. Xiaomi’s recently released model was really good. I’m generally not too surprised by EUV news. I think it shows that there are so many people know about the projects that even Reuters found out about it. Getting this into risk production and HVM will require them to fine tune the entire process and get all the little details right. We will see how long that will take. I would think 2028 would be on the later side.

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