ChinaTalk

You can read a translation into English of this interview here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-make-fun-of-chinese-ai Xianyu (咸鱼), the writer behind 葬AI — “Funeral AI” — produces some of the best satire out there about China’s AI industry. ChinaTalk Substack readers may remember his essay “Open Models Are the United Front of AI”.In this conversation, Irene and Xianyu talk (in Chinese) abo...

The blockade is squeezing Iran. So why does it keep being easier to press the war button? WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark. Why the strikes continue when the blockade is doing the real work, and what running the war off two carriers costs the Navy. Combatant commanders pitching the president their own wars, and whether Cuba is next. The myth that a mo...

In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead. Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data at Accenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University...

ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world. But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent? To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire. Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business...

Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it? Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark. We discuss: How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO. Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons an...

Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of t...

He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things. We discuss: Why the Departme...

Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a d...

Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export contro...

I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things. Check out their show The Argument, it's good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October. We discuss… Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google had e...

Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making A...

It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael. Is either the right way to transform the force? Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute for...

In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too. So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues. Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice com...

After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century. Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back. Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTa...

WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding b...

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit? We discuss: Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has...

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services. We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does...

In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career. Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence...

ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy. Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can...

In the week of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Secretary of the Army walked into the White House, told the president the force is breaking, and quit. Days earlier his boss had fired the Chief of Staff, disbanded the Army's only drone battalion, and cashiered Chris Donahue — the last man out of Kabul. Bryan Clark, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan for a hosts-only edition marking a quar...

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why. Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Co...

OpenAI models mid-training broke out of their sandbox, hacked internal infrastructure, and eventually compromised Hugging Face — the first headline-grade AI breakout, and one that safety researchers saw coming. Is the cyber apocalypse finally on the calendar, or does the industry just need to do its homework? Joshua Saxe spent his formative years as a DARPA and NSA contractor before four years at...

The USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home after a deployment that stretched past 240 days, and the bill is about to come due: mechanical failures, rations down to the emergency stores, 20,000 unfilled billets at sea, and a maintenance backlog funneling into the one carrier repair yard on each coast. Meanwhile, the White House wants to tear the electromagnetic catapults out of the Ford class and put s...

The political economy of AI — things are getting weird, it seems. We have models on the loose, open weights being dropped from the heavenly temple, and data center protests fanning out across the land. There’s a lot of salience in a way that feels really different than it did even six months ago. To discuss, we have the wonderful Anton Leicht, a fellow at Carnegie and author of the excellent Subst...