Lovely post - glad you had a productive visit. I think the Chinese labs view the US ecosystem with deep respect / awe, so I'm sure they appreciated your respectful visit.
I think a lot of the cultural differences you described comes from the massive amounts of VC capital that has flooded into the industry. It has really perverted the growth curve.
On the plus side, it's precisely this massive flood of (risk-tolerant) capital which has attracted massive amounts of talent and capex, to enable the awesome build outs across the entire stack.
On the negative side, VC ethos has focused on building monopolies, moats, and really "owning" super intelligence. For VCs and the startups they support, it really is seen as a zero sum game - their closed source model HAS to achieve absolute dominance in order to justify the capital / valuations we are seeing.
The cadence gap is bigger than the benchmark gap. DeepSeek, Qwen, and MiniMax have shipped frontier-class models on tight iteration cycles while several US labs spent 2025 absorbing talent shuffles and political reorgs. Org friction compounds. Architecture catches up faster than culture does.
Lovely post - glad you had a productive visit. I think the Chinese labs view the US ecosystem with deep respect / awe, so I'm sure they appreciated your respectful visit.
I think a lot of the cultural differences you described comes from the massive amounts of VC capital that has flooded into the industry. It has really perverted the growth curve.
On the plus side, it's precisely this massive flood of (risk-tolerant) capital which has attracted massive amounts of talent and capex, to enable the awesome build outs across the entire stack.
On the negative side, VC ethos has focused on building monopolies, moats, and really "owning" super intelligence. For VCs and the startups they support, it really is seen as a zero sum game - their closed source model HAS to achieve absolute dominance in order to justify the capital / valuations we are seeing.
Great trip and such an insightful and unique report you're not going to find anywhere else on the internet
Great post! Do you know why Chinese researchers are obsessed with Claude in particular? Curious about that.
It's what they view as the best model.
Interesting. I agree
The cadence gap is bigger than the benchmark gap. DeepSeek, Qwen, and MiniMax have shipped frontier-class models on tight iteration cycles while several US labs spent 2025 absorbing talent shuffles and political reorgs. Org friction compounds. Architecture catches up faster than culture does.