US-China Tech in 2023: Top 5 Stories of the Year

12/08/23 • 54 min

2 Listeners

Kevin Xu of https://interconnect.substack.com/ and I run down our top five stories of the year in US-China tech. We get into:

The eternal chip war
The battle for AI model supremacy
EV competition
Venture investing in China
PDD and Temu's rise
TikTok's impressive resilience

Here's ChinaTalk's attempt to benchmark Chinese models https://www.chinatalk.media/p/putting-chinas-top-llms-to-the-test

Outtro music: two songs from my spotify wrapped which are kind of ancillary to crappy US-China relations?

2gether, Mura Masa and Gretel Ganlyn: https://open.spotify.com/track/1Wqd0R1X1tuVK9FySVyLpt?si=48a61ddf3f094b57

No Talk, Lowell: https://open.spotify.com/track/0ToOqwERQswtN1O7AveCU9?si=9424183956b74960

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Xu of https://interconnect.substack.com/ and I run down our top five stories of the year in US-China tech. We get into:

The eternal chip war
The battle for AI model supremacy
EV competition
Venture investing in China
PDD and Temu's rise
TikTok's impressive resilience

Here's ChinaTalk's attempt to benchmark Chinese models https://www.chinatalk.media/p/putting-chinas-top-llms-to-the-test

Outtro music: two songs from my spotify wrapped which are kind of ancillary to crappy US-China relations?

2gether, Mura Masa and Gretel Ganlyn: https://open.spotify.com/track/1Wqd0R1X1tuVK9FySVyLpt?si=48a61ddf3f094b57

No Talk, Lowell: https://open.spotify.com/track/0ToOqwERQswtN1O7AveCU9?si=9424183956b74960

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

Taiwan Election Showdown! A Blue Prof and Green Pol Explain

The Taiwanese populace will head to the polls to choose their next president on January 13, 2024 — and the three-party slate is set!

To discuss, we brought on Lu Yeh-chung 盧業中 — a professor of diplomacy at National Chengchi University 國立政治大學 — and Lin Fei-fan 林飛帆, previously the Deputy-Secretary of the DPP and well-known for leading the Sunflower Student Movement in 2014.

Our conversation gets into:

What a three-party race means in a first-past-the-post electoral system, and how the pan-blue and pan-green camps are feeling;
Why the KMT-TPP alliance broke down, and what the pan-blue side needs to do to mobilize its electorate;
The KMT’s and DPP’s views on whether Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are part of the same family 兩岸一家人;
What the 1992 Consensus means to the KMT and DPP, and the tensions and synergies between idealism and functionalism in Taiwanese politics;
How the CCP views the upcoming election, and to what extent it really fears pro-independence activists in Taiwan;
What demarcates the KMT and DPP outside of cross-Strait politics, and which domestic issues are most compelling for the average Taiwanese voter;
And how the KMT and DPP balance government spending on hard military assets versus subsidizing critical technologies like semiconductors.

DPP ticket: