China Tech Talk

TP Huang

A podcast where I talk about various Chinese tech development in new energy, AI, semiconductor, robotics and military fields. Follow me on substack https://tphuang.substack.com or X https://x.com/tphuang

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Wednesday · 40 min
Quick Take 3: My early thoughts on time in China
I did a very early morning quick take on my trip to China. I’m sure there will be more on this since so much stuff happened while I was there. But I really wanted to just the message that China is becoming a really livable place and people are moving there for the quality of life. I met several people in Beijing this time who moved there from America from different reasons. It was interesting to hear about why they did it. I spoke about my own thoughts on what I enjoyed about living in Beijing and why I would consider moving there more permanently. I think there are still many reasons to not move to China. For example, the intensity of life and work is much higher there than here. The competition for everything is so much higher and this drives people toward addictions that are all about the short term consumerism satisfaction like looking at micro drama on their phones and snacking/drinking milk tea all the time. If I had to talk about what I think is problematic in Chinese society, the phone addiction and increased short termism seem to be the most obvious ones. And those are also problems that likely will get worse with more competition and AI. But in many ways, the quality of live in Beijing is also just so much better than here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
September 8 · 1 hr 13 min
My Episode with Lei on Tau Scaling and Reusable rocket
I had a chance to go over Tau Scaling and reusable rocket with Lei. As Lei is the person who shares my point of view the closest on Tau Scaling and Huawei’s efforts on this front, we really spent a lot of time explaining why what Huawei did in their design and production is quite special. Even if transistor cell itself can continue to scale smaller, that does not apply to memory cell sizes or analog components like copper connections and such. This episode was recorded before I went to China. Now that I’m back and Kirin 9050 has been unveiled, it’s a good time to publish my discussions on it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
August 13 · 1 hr 20 min
China Tech Talk @ Tsinghua AI school
I am currently in Beijing and have the pleasure of getting together with some friends in Tsinghua University in the AI school. I was welcomed by Alex and Qian Yu. We sat down talked a lot about the academia, AI research in China, getting talent to come to China and future of AI both in LLM and embodied AI. It’s quite the interesting experience to come here and see Zai in one corner, Unigroup building in another corner, the school for automation (using unreal new technology), Galbot robot booth, Infinigence, Vidu AI, Robotera and many other AI and semi startups. Pay attention to the tips they have about the transitioning toward Ascend from Nvidia chips by researchers. Also, check the part about researchers in China finally finding Kimi K3 to be good enough for vibe coding compared to GPT and Claude. There are still some concerns about inference sped for Kimi. I think they need to get more compute. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
August 4 · 55 min
My appearance on Taipology to talk about China's AI progress
I was fortunate to be invited by Angelica Oung last week to talk about China’s AI progress in light of Kimi K3, DUVi lithography new, CXMT IPO and the KOSPI market crash. Things have changed a little bit since the podcast, but CXMT remains very important, K3 remains the top Chinese model and lithography is still a big story. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
August 1 · 10 min
Quick take 2: Deepseek V4 Flash
My quick thoughts on DSV4-Flash: Huge improvement over the original. It took 3 to 4 months, but we essentially got something close to GLM-5.2 in software engineering tasks. I did some testing today on VS Code using cline plugin. DSv4-Flash is essentially free, so I’m going to keep it as a backup to GLM & Kimi’s latest models, since those coding plans are going to get used up quickly. Going forward, I see 2 paths for open src/weight models: * Smaller models that can run locally with some souped up hardware. * Larger models that can need SuperNode to run and can compete with closed source flagship models. All the developers are going to want to run these smaller LLMs locally. You don’t have to worry about AI company getting your data and can fine tune them anyway you want. This is going to drive an acceleration in “souped up” local hardware. Very bullish in my opinion for memory chips. For the larger models, I think there really isn’t a lot of room for middle ground. You need to make them larger to compete fully with the Anthropic and OpenAI models. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 23 · 21 min
My Quick Take on Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2
I’m staring a new series of what I call quick takes. These will be shorter (15-20 minutes) than scheduled podcast. They will be recorded whenever something interesting comes up in the tech world and I don’t want to wait to talk to someone about it. So the first thing I did here is Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2 and what this tells us about China’s AI development. I think the overall story I want to put out there is the self improvement part of it and also models likely expanding over time and improved training data and flywheel with the Chinese labs. By this point next year, we could very well (imo) see 5T+ parameter models coming out of China. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 22 · 52 min
Talking about Kimi K3/WAIC on Carl Zha podcast
This week, I had a chance to go on Carl Zha’s livestream to talk about the launch of Kimi K3 and what we saw at WAIC. Unfortunately, I had to leave early due to family obligations, but I think most of the issues I wanted to cover was already talked about. I’m actually a little surprised of the audio quality in there. I think next time, I have to go with something other than iPhone when I do this. I just want again to point out something that I think is very under reported out there. Chinese models are getting larger and they will keep getting larger. Biren Tech reported this week that Chinese models will get to 5T+ range next year and it looks like we will reach 10T the year after as larger super node becomes available that can pool together all the high bandwidth memory and do efficient inference of these large MoE models. All of the major Chinese AI players like Moonshot, Zai, DeepSeek, Qwen and Minimax are going into new and larger sized models this year. Larger models require more compute to train, more data and more longer term optimization for inference. All of this has been made easier by the increased automation these firms can use to improve and speed up their own model development and training time. We are now seeing these very fast iterative improvement from Kimi and GLM in recent times. These are the new standards. The public is no longer happy with a new big improvement every 3 to 4 months. This needs to be every 1 to 2 months and eventually every month by the end of this year. Teams will need to have both flagship LLM and smaller and cheaper distilled models. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 21 · 1 hr 1 min
Episode with Electric Felix
This week, I invited Electric Felix on my show to talk more about EVs. I first encountered him on X/Twitter and then followed his journey on EVs in Europe as well as his trips in China and what he experienced there in Yunnan and charging stations. It was great talking to him and getting a sense of where Europe’s EV infrastructure and demand look like at the moment. I was in Spain and Italy earlier this year and the latter is still very hydrocarbon centric. We ended the talk with how the current trade dispute with Chinese EV industry in Europe gaining market share might get worked out. I think we will probably end up just seeing more localized production over time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 21 · 1 hr 34 min
My talk with Carl Zha on Long March 10B launch and recovery
I had the pleasure recently to go on Carl’s live stream to talk about the recent LM-10B launch and recovery. Why this was significant and why China picked its design of recovering in offshore pad. We also talked a little bit about the strategic implication of having low cost launches and what else China needs to do to continue to make advancement in space missions like building up LEO constellations and also do Moon landing and building lunar colony. We also had some fun talking about SpaceX/Elon part of this. Finally, I did Q&A from the audience. A lot of AI related questions, especially with AGI stuff. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 7 · 1 hr 45 min
My discussion with Carl Zha on China's AI progress and GLM/Zai
I’ve been wanting to do an episode on GLM-5.2 & Zhipu for a while, but didn’t get a chance to do so. Last week, I did a live stream on Carl Zha’s channel and here is my piece on it. I’ve had very good experience with GLM-5.2 so far and will probably move up a level in coding plan if their next release makes a similar level of jump. I’ve also had good experience with Kimi 2.6 & 2.7. Although in terms of Software engineering, GLM-5.2 is clearly better from my personal experience. I would just recommend everyone to get off Opus and Claude Code. Try the cheaper GLM through ZCode or Kimi through Kimi Code. Or you can get both. Sometimes, one model would be better and other times, the other one will be better. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
July 4 · 1 hr 16 min
Episode 30 with Andy Collingwood
This week, I welcome Andy from Multipolarity podcast onto my show. I’ve been listening to his show for a while and always enjoyed him and Phillip Pilkington’s discussion on geopolitics, European politics and the increasing multiploar world that we live in. We talked about everything for quite a while. I was really interesting in how someone with multipolar view from Europe would look at the Russian/Ukraine conflict as well as the Iran conflict. I think you will find that we had a lot of common view point. It seems like European leaders are waiting for Trump to fall apart and lose elections so that the democrats can get back in power and fix everything. I’m not sure that’s a good approach, but there is definitely the European pitch of “If you continue to support us with Ukraine, we will help you squeeze China”. As two people that think this world has profoundly changed to multipolar, we both think this is not an approach that works well with the current power dynamics globally. In fact, a dramatically weakened US from Iran conflict would not only hurt Trump, but hurt the position of the collective West. And we also finished up agreeing on something I’ve personally been thinking about. What happens to UK as it goes on this decline? Do we have Scottish independence or a unification of Ireland. These are actually real problems that few people seem to be talking about publicly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
June 27 · 54 min
Episode with China Driven/Will Sundin
When I started really getting into Chinese EVs in 2022/2023, there really wasn’t that much material in English about what was going on in China's EV industry. When I did search on YouTube, I would often find content by Wheelsboy, Elliott Richards and my guys today China Driven/Will Sundin. I remember watching some of the earlier content by Will and just seeing his driving experience on various NIO and Li Auto models. This was before Li Auto was really known by anyone outside of China. You could see back then just how good the L1 and L9 were and why people in China were buying them instead of BMW. So, I managed to get hold of Will this week and bring him on the show to talk about how he moved to China, got into doing videos of Chinese EVs, his experience with NIO, Li Auto and experiences with China’s EV sector as a whole. We ended the show talking about his experiences from the recent Beijing Auto Show and also what vehicles Will would buy. It was a really great chat with Will and I would love to have him back on the show in the future. Please follow him on his Youtube channel and X/Twitter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
June 16 · 1 hr 9 min
Episode 28: Marcel Münch
I had the pleasure this week to welcome Marcel on my show. I would recommend everyone to follow Marcel on X as well as on his website and YouTube channel. A really good guy and we had a great discussion. I first followed and noticed Marcel because of his commentaries on China’s EV industry and especially NIO. However, he actually talks about more than that on both X and our episode. I think he is very well tuned into China’s tech industry as well as life in Shenzhen. He even mentioned to me that his work involves helping German companies navigate challenges in the China market as well as understanding Chinese companies entering European market + opportunities from all of this. I was pleasantly surprised that he mentioned Tuya as the under the radar company that he thought very highly of. I actually only found out about them a few months ago as I was getting really into embodied AI supply chain in China. So, I recommend everyone to check it out and let me know what you think. And I recommend everyone to visit Shenzhen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
June 9 · 50 min
My episode on AI Proem with Grace Shao
I had the pleasure to join Grace on this episode of AI Proem. We covered a lot of topics here. A lot of stuff on AI, semiconductors and robotics, but obviously also all the other techs that I talk about. I didn’t break ground on anything new, but I did voice my opinion regarding China’s housing market slowdown at the end and how I think people are completely misreading the story. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
June 2 · 1 hr 25 min
My Radio War Nerd Episode
I had the pleasure of joining RWN on his podcast to talk about China and PLA and WestPac conflict. I thank Mark and John for welcoming me on their show and giving me the opportunities to just explain how we got here and why we saw a lot of the alarms from the DC crowd and US security establishment. I talked about game changing political events like the South China Sea Island expansions and the Pelosi visit. A lot of the moves by DC actually didn’t work out well like the THAAD deployment in South Korea. Why you cannot compare attacking Iran to attacking Taiwan. Blockading Taiwan is an entirely different paradigm vs blockading a country with as large surface area as Iran. I also talked about things like the first strike and why that is important, but also dangerous in terms of escalation of conflict. I also talked about the importance of satellites in modern warfare. Also since was right before Trump’s visit, we actually did talk about Thucydides Trap but not in those war exactly. How do you resolve issues between reigning hegemon and upcoming power? I think these are all hard questions that need to be resolved. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have regarding to this interview. I’m glad to answer them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
May 24 · 1 hr 24 min
Episode 27: Talk with Paul Triolo
Today, I had the pleasure of speaking to Paul Triolo on a host of things. We actually have been talking to each other for a while offline, but I finally got a chance to speak to him in a person today and it was great. And as you will hear in this podcast, we are nowhere close to being finished. I will definitely have Paul back on the show to talk about semiconductor industry in the future. I think it was great to hear from him on just how this China/USA tech competition started and his experience through all of this as someone who first spent time in China in the late 80s! Ever since, he has always taken a very fair and thoughtful role in being vocal about the importance of China/US ties in the media. But I guess the focus of our talk today was on how the October surprise sanctions came about and the rationales behind these decisions. And I think it’s important for people to remember that while Biden started all these sanctions, the brunt of Chinese retaliations did not hit until 2025 after Trump started his tariff war. The reason is that export control regimes take time to develop. While America is the master of this art, China hasn’t been that involved in tech export controls (especially on supply chain side & extra-territorial) until the wake-up call from Biden sanctions. The vast majority of the DC crowd simply did not ever think there would be consequences to their actions, so there was apparently very little cost-benefit analysis when these decisions were made in the first place. We didn’t really get into the semi industry part of this which will be fun to talk about next time. We did talk a lot about critical minerals and Paul has actually worked with American customers of Chinese Rare Earth magnet customers as well as Indium. We talked about why Coherent visited China with Trump this time. We also talked about why the Chinese Rare Earth retaliations only came around when the trade war started. Simply put, China just had not developed the same type of export control back in 2022. It only ramped up building these export control policies after it suffered from them. So, I think Trump was just unlucky that he was the one that got hit hard by them. Those controls were actually in retaliations for 3 years of US export controls prior to Trump admin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
May 12 · 1 hr
Episode 26: Z.ai interview
This week, I had the chance to interview Lou from Z.ai. It was really a great conversation to talk to her about the work that they are doing there and how they look at developing newer models and her view toward AGI. I get the feeling of just incredible hard work that Zhipu is going through as part of their effort to produce the best models and products out there. You can see that with GLM-5.1, which I can attest to as being very good for programming. It can do a lot of thinking of solve problems. I get the sense that GLM models are now able to do some form of RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) where the models help improve or create new more powerful models. One thing that stand out to me about GLM models is their size. They are in the 750B param range which can still fit as Quantized models and run locally on boxes with really large VRAM. However, they are also large enough that they are competitive with larger models. I think there are probably some sacrifices that you have to make in a 750B param model vs 1.6T or 3T param models. It will be very interesting to see where Z.ai goes from here since they have now received a lot of funding since IPO which gives them a larger war chest to do the work that they need to do. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
April 28 · 1 hr 11 min
CrossOver Episode with Kyle Chan
This week, I had the pleasure of doing a crossover episode with Kyle Chan who X profile can be found here. We discussed a wide range of topic related to all aspect of AI. We really had a fun time discussing the full scope of China’s supply chain vs other countries. If we look at things holistically, China is definitely building the same supply chain advantage in AI as it has in other industries. I would recommend everyone to read and listen to Kyle’s substack. I’m sure I will be doing more stuff with Kyle in the future. There are a lot of interesting topics and trend that we are both seeing. AI is just the start and we can probably discuss EVs, renewables, batteries and other industries and supply chains in the future. You can see Kyle’s podcast of this episode here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
April 22 · 56 min
Episode 25: Embodied AI ecosystem
This week, I welcomed back Qian Yu on the show to talk about China’s AI (especially embodied AI) ecosystem. If you would like to know how Chinese entrepreneurs can start new AI robotics/embodied AI product, this would be a good episode to listen to. We also talked about World Model vs VLA, educational institutions involved in AI industry and some of the projects that we have seen recently like the Honor and Xiaomi humanoid robots. I talked about the difference between reinforcement learning in world model vs LLMs. How can you have recursive self improvement in real world models? And finally, we also talked about the recent Sugon rack innovation. How Chinese players leveraged domestic supply chain to create a high voltage rack that allows superior cooling to existing solutions. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com
April 10 · 53 min
Episode 24: Iran conflict's affect on global supply chain
This week, I welcomed back Dan Collins to talk about something that has come to the forefront since the start of the Iran conflict. We are really in a historically unprecedented disruption when it comes to supply chain and energy. What does it mean when this many “molecule” or “atom” get taken off the global market. What will that do to global prices of everything and shortages of things like food? That will cause huge disruptions everywhere. Near the end, Dan and I spent sometime just talking about where the Iran conflict is going at the moment. Always great to discuss something in traditional engineering and hard sciences with someone that have experience in this area like Dan. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com

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