Pablo

How I hacked my timeline, and the Chinese AI Culture: Yesterday, a post from @dontbesilent appeared in my feed. He was wondering why foreigners who can't read chinese were suddenly answering to his tweets (that was me), and if we were using auto-translate. I replied with the reality: long before X had the auto-translate feature enabled, I realized the chinese content was way better than the english feed. So, I started manually copying and translating their articles. I intentionally trained my algorithm to feed me their posts because the insights were just better (imo). That one reply sparked a massive back and forth yesterday with the chinese community in the comments. The cultural exchange was incredible, and it perfectly mirrored what i saw on my visit to China this last christmas. The Implementation Reality I spent over two weeks moving through the country: Shenzhen, passing by Xingping, Phoenix, Tianmen, Zhangjiajie (prob the most beautiful place on earth), Xi'An, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and back home. Everyone in the west talks about ai, fintech and implementation, but China is years ahead. To give you an idea of the scale: We were driving through a random, remote village somewhere between phoenix and zhangjiajie. Literally the middle of nowhere. We stopped at a crosswalk by a dirt roundabout, and there was a guy selling fruit in a cartwheel. Even this remote dirt-road fruit vendor had an alipay & wechat qr code. We paid with our phones (and generously tipped him bc we couldn't believe he could be in that remote place selling fruit). The entire country runs on a seamless digital infrastructure that makes the rest of the world look like its stuck in the past. There is no place on earth where there is such a general technology adoption. The Friction & The Physical Comedy My worst and only problem of the entire trip was the language barrier. What I love the most every time I travel, is mixing with locals. Understanding their mental models, exchanging ideas, knowing their culture and ways of thinking. From the smallest detail in their day to day life, to the way of working of the entire society of the country I am in. For the first time in my life, I couldn't do that. The friction was just too high (the younger generations are doing great though. Kids would constantly approach me just to practice a few english words). Also, being redhead in rural china is a really interesting experience: People would take sneaky photos every day, parents pointing me out to their kids, Chinese locals asking me to take photos with them, even a mother literally handed me her baby just to take a smiling photo with me. The people are incredibly welcoming, but the communication gap is (very sadly), too big right now. Thoughts after my trip I loved it so much, I seriously looked into moving there for a few months right before I moved to Portugal. Unfortunately, the visa requirements allowed me just to stay for 30 days as a tourist. Otherwise I would have to create a company, or get hired by one (none of them were options in my plan for now). But here is the absolute reality: at their current pace and work ethic, they are going to completely dominate the tech and ai meta. I have no doubts about this. I will definitely return at some point to live there for a few months and being able to dive really deep into AI, local models, hardware, and above all, the culture and people. But next time I am bringing a real time ai auto translate device with me, so I can actually talk to everyone over there ;) (and massive thanks to everyone on the chinese timeline who spent their day exchanging thoughts with me yesterday. the bridge is being built.)

How I hacked my timeline, and the Chinese AI Culture: Yesterday, a post from @dontbesilent appeared in my feed. He was wondering why foreigners who can't read chinese were suddenly answering to his tweets (that was me), and if we were using auto-translate. I replied with the reality: long before X had the auto-translate feature enabled, I realized the chinese content was way better than the english feed. So, I started manually copying and translating their articles. I intentionally trained my algorithm to feed me their posts because the insights were just better (imo). That one reply sparked a massive back and forth yesterday with the chinese community in the comments. The cultural exchange was incredible, and it perfectly mirrored what i saw on my visit to China this last christmas. The Implementation Reality I spent over two weeks moving through the country: Shenzhen, passing by Xingping, Phoenix, Tianmen, Zhangjiajie (prob the most beautiful place on earth), Xi'An, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and back home. Everyone in the west talks about ai, fintech and implementation, but China is years ahead. To give you an idea of the scale: We were driving through a random, remote village somewhere between phoenix and zhangjiajie. Literally the middle of nowhere. We stopped at a crosswalk by a dirt roundabout, and there was a guy selling fruit in a cartwheel. Even this remote dirt-road fruit vendor had an alipay & wechat qr code. We paid with our phones (and generously tipped him bc we couldn't believe he could be in that remote place selling fruit). The entire country runs on a seamless digital infrastructure that makes the rest of the world look like its stuck in the past. There is no place on earth where there is such a general technology adoption. The Friction & The Physical Comedy My worst and only problem of the entire trip was the language barrier. What I love the most every time I travel, is mixing with locals. Understanding their mental models, exchanging ideas, knowing their culture and ways of thinking. From the smallest detail in their day to day life, to the way of working of the entire society of the country I am in. For the first time in my life, I couldn't do that. The friction was just too high (the younger generations are doing great though. Kids would constantly approach me just to practice a few english words). Also, being redhead in rural china is a really interesting experience: People would take sneaky photos every day, parents pointing me out to their kids, Chinese locals asking me to take photos with them, even a mother literally handed me her baby just to take a smiling photo with me. The people are incredibly welcoming, but the communication gap is (very sadly), too big right now. Thoughts after my trip I loved it so much, I seriously looked into moving there for a few months right before I moved to Portugal. Unfortunately, the visa requirements allowed me just to stay for 30 days as a tourist. Otherwise I would have to create a company, or get hired by one (none of them were options in my plan for now). But here is the absolute reality: at their current pace and work ethic, they are going to completely dominate the tech and ai meta. I have no doubts about this. I will definitely return at some point to live there for a few months and being able to dive really deep into AI, local models, hardware, and above all, the culture and people. But next time I am bringing a real time ai auto translate device with me, so I can actually talk to everyone over there ;) (and massive thanks to everyone on the chinese timeline who spent their day exchanging thoughts with me yesterday. the bridge is being built.)