The China Desk: what Chinese AI builders and researchers are thinking
Long interviews with the people shaping AI—in China and across the Chinese diaspora in Silicon Valley, New York and beyond—retold in English, with what each argument means for founders, investors and builders.
This month’s thread: world models. Two of the most influential researchers in the field disagree about whether language is a foundation or a crutch.
“Silicon Valley is LLM-pilled”: Saining Xie on why world models need the world
The co-creator of Diffusion Transformers left the LLM race to co-found AMI Labs with Yann LeCun—$1.03 billion raised before any product, and no office in Silicon Valley.
Read the 60-second brief and our analysis →“You don’t need to beat every rival”: NVIDIA’s Ming-Yu Liu on Cosmos and making markets
The first NVIDIA researcher promoted to vice president leads Cosmos, its world foundation model. Jensen Huang’s instruction: keep going “to Cosmos 97.”
Read the 60-second brief and our analysis →Original interviews are by Zhang Xiaojun (张小珺) for Business Interviews (张小珺商业访谈录). We write English summaries and our own analysis, quote briefly, and link to the full article and episode. We do not publish full translations.
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