Rui Ma

Our first one-week Youth Tech China Trek for ages 10-18 sold out 🤯 So we opened a second session: July 19-26 in Beijing Got a STEM kid at home? They’ll visit and get hands-on exposure to robotaxis, robovans, humanoid robots, AI labs, smart factories. They’ll also meet peers from top local schools. For ages 10-18, with a chaperone. Early bird ends April 25 techchinatrek.com

@_joe_harris_ There is no Green Harmonics, that was a mistranslation by a16z I think. The company is just called Leaderdrive, which is a phonetic transliteration of their Chinese name Luu De (“of Green”)

if you're new to actuators, study these companies: strain-wave reducers (rotary transmission): - Harmonic Drive Systems, Japan - Leaderdrive, China - Green Harmonic, China planetary roller screws (linear transmission): - Rollvis, Switzerland - Schaeffler / Ewellix, Germany - SKF, Sweden frameless BLDC motors: - Kollmorgen, US - maxon, Switzerland - TQ-RoboDrive, Germany - CubeMars, China bearings: - THK, Japan - IKO, Japan torque sensors: - ATI Industrial, US - FUTEK, US complete actuator modules: - Hyundai Mobis, Korea - Apptronik, US - Unitree, China - AgiBot, China encoders: - RLS / Renishaw, UK - Celera Motion, US Japan, China, Switzerland, Germany dominate let me know who im missing

All of the triggered AAs not realizing she’s just pulling a cluely move (see her bio) designed to be controversial, divisive and get an emotional response from you My follows mostly not gonna get it (and that’s for the best lol) Yeah yeah sorry for feeding the algorithm, it was fun watching it unfold live though

@siyuanhuang95 @chris_j_paxton @RoboPapers We have visited before and would love to visit again and feature BIGAI in a new project! Will reach out!

@chris_j_paxton @RoboPapers Thank you Chris!

Siyuan has produced some of the coolest research papers of the last couple years while at BIGAI (we covered many of them on @RoboPapers) so this is worth a look

Just read a Chinese article examining two cases where AI hallucinations were involved in real-world legal disputes. 1/ In one case, a student’s brother used AI to look up university admissions information. The AI provided incorrect information and even “promised” compensation if the answer was wrong. He sued the AI developer. The court dismissed the claim, finding that the AI’s “promise” was not an actual legal commitment by the platform. The court also noted that the developer had taken reasonable technical measures to reduce errors and had warned users about the risks. 2/ In another case, a digital media creator published an AI-generated article that falsely described an unrelated company as a major subsidiary of a well-known enterprise. The court ruled against him because he published the article for commercial benefit, knew it came from AI and could be inaccurate, but failed to review it or clearly label it. He was ordered to publish a statement to eliminate the impact and pay RMB 30,000 (~$4500) in damages. The article concludes thusly: (AI paraphrase, hah) "The distinction is important: AI developers are not automatically liable every time a model says something false, especially if they have taken reasonable precautions. But users who republish AI-generated content, particularly for commercial purposes, may not be able to hide behind “the AI wrote it.” The governance answer is not simply to “make AI perfect.” That is probably unrealistic. The more practical answer is better data, stronger verification systems, clearer labeling duties, and more human judgment. The key to using AI is not making AI omnipotent. It is making humans more discerning."

@nbunkerauthor @kimmonismus What was the critique of Power Broker (which I only got though first 150 pages of)?

@ruima @kimmonismus One thing I did like about Wang’s “Breakneck” was his critique of Caro’s “Power Broker”! My problem with “Breakneck” is what I see as Wang’s clichéd caricature of the USA as a “lawyerly society,” a phrase more apt to describe the UK. It just doesn’t fit with my experience of…1/

I think many people still don't grasp what this means. Chris Miller analyzed in his book "Chip War" that China is about 10 years behind in lithography machine production. Meanwhile, Huawei chips are achieving roughly 80% of the performance of the NVIDIA H100. China is probably more like 2 years behind the US, and the gap is narrowing. I will be writing a detailed analysis on this soon because it's far more significant than the models themselves.

@kyleichan It’s basic common sense tho, somehow the professional class took over and scientific research became an undesirable field in America

I confess it took me a while to understand why China has been so obsessed with “new materials” 新材料. But now we all get it: rare earth magnets, synthetic diamonds, carbon fiber, SiC and GaN chips, lithium batteries, optics, solar, special alloys, etc. highcapacity.org/p/chinas-tech-…

@yishan @lvjin1993 Her parents live there

@lvjin1993 Did I catch that right? Right off the bathroom from the living room, there’s a tiny room that someone else is living in?

当亲戚以为女子住20年楼龄老小区，觉得她日子过得拮据……于是，她直接来了个全屋一镜到底。

@bytheophana It’s really weird reading about this as an older mom (who was always a nerd) who’s having to raise Asian American kids in this environment Makes me sad

@liqian_ren I don’t think “parents” can be counted on to do this lol

Propaganda works, but ultimately for social issues, you need parents to teach children to minimize “brain wash” effect so they grow up to be able to see through a lot of propaganda.

Paraphrasing @mahbubani_k: “Geopolitics is an ugly game. It’s not a race to see who runs faster. It’s about kneecapping your opponent.” Learned so much from the professorial diplomat at the @AmChamHK event on Tuesday! Here’s to making the world more win-win in business and less subject to the ugly games of geopolitics.

SCOOP: A pro-AI dark money group backed by a powerful super PAC funded by execs tied to Palantir and OpenAI, has been secretly paying influencers to push pro-AI, anti-China propaganda on TikTok and IG.

@WanrongHe Interesting, I hope it improves. That's what I would have expected for US but would have thought it would be higher for China

@ruima there were 10 out of 90😂

I left China for Stanford CS, then dropped out after one year to build Komiko full-time. No network. No safety net. Fundraising in a country I'm new to. Navigating O-1 visa while trying to run the company. 1M+ users later — I'd do it all again. Silicon Valley is the only place where a "schoolkid" with a "weird anime AI app" idea gets taken seriously on day one. The density of people who move fast and bet early is unmatched. @speedrun didn't just back Komiko — they helped me find home in a new country 🇺🇸 If you're an international founder on the fence: take the shot!

@ndrewlee @WanrongHe There are very famous programs in China that only the super top students get invited into and the Yao class is one of them specific to AI: iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/Yao_Class/A…

@WanrongHe @ruima as an uneducated American, can someone explain this to me?

@nbunkerauthor @kimmonismus I think Dan's Breakneck is meant to be more of a personal viewpoint unlike Miller's is sold as a definitive history. I only listened to 3 chapters but remember already encountering some factual errors. The public is just clueless about semiconductors.

@ruima @kimmonismus Ha! I thought I was a lonely skeptic about Miller’s “Chip Wars”. Much of the book, I felt, was ancient history. The latter parts of the narrative were thin & told me little I hadn’t heard on CNBC over the years. But then I’m also a skeptic about Wang’s “Breakneck”..,

Distillation is largely an industry standard and not just something done by Chinese labs targeting OpenAI/Anthropic. Many American companies also distill Chinese (open) models.

My money is on @engineairobot! They even have a fighting tournament you can enter as an owner, it’s called Ultimate Robot Knockout Legend (URKL) and the prize money is $1.4m USD (it costs 20-40K for the robot model)

What people call "distillation" is a super common practice (you use other models to benchmark your model, to evaluate your inputs or to add a little bit to your datasets) that in my opinion should be covered by fair use (just like using public data is), especially when the resulting models are open-source as it benefits all and helps break out monopolies that are strongly forming in AI!

@chontang You’re kidding me you only thought of this today! Also talk to international folks esp non Western and you’ll see they have no objection to a Chinese stack. Especially if it is the only one they can afford, even more no brainer.

Oh wow - only now do I see how the flywheel works. Only NOW do I really see what Jensen meant. The other model providers (Kimi, GLM, Xiaomi) haven't yet committed to Ascend, and are still optimized for inference on CUDA/Nvidia. Why wouldn't they be? Nvidia is the dominant ecosystem, and Huawei is a competitor in many ways. But if the compute infrastructure at the hyperscalers become dominated by Ascend GPUs - then the other model providers will have a massive incentive to switch over. Otherwise, they become compute-deprived (there aren't more Nvidia GPUs coming), and unable to service the massive local, mainland market. Once the tipping point is crossed.. it's not just Deepseek + Huawei, it will be all of the Chinese open source models + Huawei.

@GeorgStieler @pstAsiatech @TechBuzzChina Nope, sorry that looks to be the wrong link: techbuzzchina.substack.com/p/on-the-groun…

@pstAsiatech @ruima @TechBuzzChina Substack says the page is private. On purpose?

Thanks again to @TechBuzzChina and @ruima and great staff for arranging such an in-depth and engaging trip. Great group of investors along added a lot of great perspectives on investment in China in high tech space. Thanks all!!