Interconnected

🔋Is Ford’s Pause on CATL Plant Really About China?

Ford’s pause of its $3.5 billion battery plant last week has been portrayed in many circles as a victory against Chinese technology. Many members of Congress, from Marco Rubio to Mike Gallagher, who have staked their political career on being permanently anti-China,

Topics: Cloud Industry• Regulation• AI•

🏦AI Is Turning Clouds Into Banks

Louise Matsakis of Semafor reported an important scoop this week: the White House’s upcoming executive order on AI may require cloud computing platforms to share customer information with regulators. If this scoop turns out to be true, this EO will basically implement a

Topics: Industrial Policy•

🇺🇲Are Labor Unions Raining on America's Parade?

Every Labor Day weekend brings about some fond memories for me. Early in my career, as a political campaign staffer, first with Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, then on a few issues and local campaigns, I marched in many Labor Day parades, oftentimes

Topics: China• Macro•

5️⃣ China's Future Through the Wubi Lens

Recently, I did a weekend long road trip, and then promptly fell sick for a week (thus the delayed publishing of this post, sorry folks!). During my weeklong nasal-congestion-induced stupor, I kept thinking about the stretch of drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains where

Topics: AI• China•

🔊Capital Allocators China - Generative AI Panel

Last week, I was invited to do a panel discussion with members of Capital Allocators China on notable trends in generative AI between the US and China. This is the China chapter of Ted Seides’s Capital Allocators community, so the audience is mostly

Topics: AI• Public Market•

🟡 Generative AI Heading For (Short Term) Disappointment

The generative AI wave may have taken off with ChatGPT last November, but the first ripple started in June 2020 with the release of GPT-3. Back then, the model’s performance already made quite a stir, especially within the programming and engineering community. Tweets

Topics: Meta• Alibaba• Baidu•

☁️Llama 2 is China Cloud's Best Friend

When Meta’s large language model, Llama 2, was released a couple of weeks ago, it chose Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, as its preferred partner. Since the model is open source (though people dispute how open source it really is given its licensing

Topics: Investing•

🤑H1/Q2 2023 Performance Update (and A Poll)

With the first half (H1) of 2023 behind us, it is time again for my quarterly performance update on my investment portfolio. Here is the H1/Q2 2023 performance and benchmarks comparison (as of June 30): * Interconnected Portfolio H1: +220.12% (Q2: +53.66%

Topics: AI• Regulation•

🤖EU, China, US: Three Different Attitudes Toward AI Regulation

One interesting aspect of the fast-evolving landscape of generative AI is the global consensus on the need to regulate it. This was not the case at the dawn of the Internet or the early days of mobile social media. Perhaps precisely because regulators regretted

Topics: Resources• VC•

Good Chinese Language Tech Podcasts

A big part of my learning process is listening to audio products – audiobooks, podcasts, earnings calls, investors presentations. I can glean a lot of nuances from listening that are missing from reading transcripts, though listening does take more time. One overlooked genre I listen

Topics: Semiconductor• Geopolitics• South Korea•

🏴‍☠️Traitors or Treasures: the Semiconductor Talent Conundrum

Last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called the global semiconductor competition “a national all-out war.” As the home country of the world’s two largest chips manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix, South Korea is a global semiconductor leader in all respects. Its

Topics: Cloud Industry• Geopolitics•

US vs China: A Cloud Proxy War

The US-China tech “cold war” appears to have a new front: the cloud. According to the New York Times, both the Departments of State and Commerce are looking into new ways to restrict Chinese cloud hyperscalers, e.g. AliCloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.

Topics: Open Source• Facebook• AI•

Meta Wants to Make AI “Moatless"

When Meta first released its open source foundation AI model, LLaMA, I thought it was a shrewd move to gain public trust for a social media giant with a huge trust deficit. However, the more I think about Meta’s open source AI posture

Topics: AI•

China's Underestimated AI Convening Power

Ever since Large Language Models (LLMs) became synonymous with AI, thanks to ChatGPT, the consensus is that LLMs created in China lag those from the US, and the gap will persist. For a variety of reasons – from tighter government regulations, to lack of quality

Topics: Announcement•

Re-Introduction

Last week, I spent a few days in New York City catching up with old friends and making new friends with readers of my newsletter. It was exhilarating! (Thank you to everyone who made time to hang out with me IRL. To those who

Topics: AI• Nvidia• Jensen Huang•

Jensen Huang NTU Commencement Speech 2023

Jensen Huang, two days after Nvidia's historic quarterly earnings, delivered the commencement speech at National Taiwan University – one of the elite universities in Taiwan. He shared three near-death Nvidia stories – making the wrong architecture choice when building for its first customer Sega, betting the

Topics: Alibaba• Cloud Industry•

Is the Next Alibaba...AliCloud?

During Alibaba’s Q4 2023 earnings call, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group’s CEO, expressed a rather romantic optimism that “we would love…to see one of these little Alibaba's spinning off from Alibaba becoming another big Alibaba.” Among the six “little Alibaba’s” that

Topics: Developer• AI• Open Source•

AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

Last week, I started using a new brokerage service for my investments. It is one of those brokerages that can help produce an audited track record, access to more international exchanges, and other bells and whistles designed for the “pros”. Yet, the UI and

Topics: VC• China• Geopolitics•

“Hardtech” Corporate VCs Rising in China

Huawei runs a little-known corporate VC division called Habo Investment. I first wrote about Habo back in early 2021, when it was barely two years old. Yet, at that time, it had already made 22 investments, five of which have gone public on the

Topics: Investing•

Q1 2023: Performance Update

Back in January, I published our first Interconnected Annual Letter to share the Interconnected public market portfolio performance in 2022 and my learning along the way. Even though I don’t manage anyone else’s money but my own, writing the letter was a

Topics: TikTok• ByteDance• China•

RESTRICT First, Ban Later

Since my first post on the RESTRICT Act two weeks ago, the bill has gotten a lot more attention and scrutiny than when it was first announced on March 7. And deservedly so. Its definition of what types of technologies may constitute national security

Topics: Alibaba•

Alibaba Reorg

If you work in tech long enough, you will experience many company reorgs. They are almost as routine as sales kickoffs or quarterly earnings calls. But every once in a while, a consequential company does a reorg so major and out of the box

Topics: Regulation• China•

RESTRICT China

From time to time, I like to read the full text of a legislative bill, if only to put my past work experience at the White House and my law degree to some good use. What caught my attention recently was the RESTRICT Act,

Topics: Cloud Industry• JD• National Champion•

Is JD Cloud the New “National Champion”?

JD Cloud is quietly, but effectively, positioning itself as the new “national champion” in China’s cloud computing market. This move became apparent when, during the weeklong “Two Meetings” deliberation that anointed China’s leaders of the next five years, JD Cloud’s top

Topics: Meta• Open Source• AI•

Is Meta Becoming a Trustworthy AI Company?

Among all the Big Tech companies who are planting flags in the red hot generative AI arms race, I think the most trustworthy one may actually be Meta. Yep, Zuck’s Meta. I say this because its recently released large language model (LLM), LLaMA