To make my @interconnect_ed newsletter more "AI native" (and since reading long form post is hard), how about an AI generated theme song per post? Here's one by @udiomusic for "Is Tesla China's 'Catfish'" post (🔗interconnect.substack.com/p/…) Whaddyathink? udio.com/songs/qhuzJTRmNnRsY…

All eyes will be on Nvidia GTC One term we will hear about a lot is "sovereign AI" Is it a thing? Do we need it? New post shares my latest thinking on this topic tl;dr: initially skeptical, but coming around to its necessity, esp when human biology and generative AI combine

My first post on the Interconnected @interconnect_ed newsletter was Feb 23, 2020 Can't believe I've been writing this bilingual newsletter for 4 years 40 more years to go!

Does China even want GenAI? My attempt at answering this question👇

Here’s my top 5 US-China tech stories of 2023! From (relative) least to most important: #5: SplinterVC #4: Pinduoduo beats Alibaba #3: AI competition (yep, not #1 for me) #2: EVs competition #1: Chip war! To see why, please join Interconnected Premium to get access to this (and other) premium posts! 👇👇

Should I be proud or troubled by the fact that when you google "alicloud quarterly revenue", my @interconnect_ed post is the featured snippet? 😉 $BABA

Interesting insights from @procureFYI 's Q2 2023 federal gov't SaaS spending data, some intuitive, some surprising💡: 🇺🇸 Both Salesforce and ServiceNow are huge software vendors of US gov't agencies (intuitive, given their sheer size) 🤑 Salesforce alone made $319 million in Q2 from Uncle Sam 🪖 Dept of Veterans Affairs was the largest buyer, responsible for $178m of the $319m (surprising that VA is such a large software buyer of CRM tools. Though it is one of the few agencies that interact with the American public, mostly veterans obvi. If you broaden the definition of "customer" to "constituents", then this all makes sense) 🧑‍🌾👩‍🌾 Dept of Agriculture was 2nd largest buyer of Salesforce. Ag has many state and local-level programs, supporting & interacting with farmers. Again, a broad definition of "customer" -> "constituents" makes a CRM tool useful for this agency 🌐 Dept of State was the biggest buyer of ServiceNow, awarding a 5-year $173 million contract. Looks like our diplomats are spending more to modernize and roll up their own apps (surprising given how not tech forward State tends to be) $CRM $NOW procurefyi.substack.com/p/pr…

Tomorrow, an important trial of industrial espionage that will impact the global fight for semiconductor talent, will begin in South Korea Choi Jin-seok, who was once dubbed the “Master of Semiconductor Yield”, will go on trial for leaking chip making secrets to China Here’s a brief timeline of Choi’s career and later activities that led to his arrest: - 1984: Choi began his career at Samsung - 2001: After 17 years at Samsung, he joined Hynix (not yet SK Hynix) to lead its memory chip production division - 2006: Choi earned the nickname “master of semiconductor yield” for being a genius in improving production processes for Hynix, helping the company catch up to Samsung despite having less resources - 2007: Choi became CTO of Hynix - 2010: Choi was passed over for the CEO job and soon resigned - 2015: He set up a consulting shop, Jin Semiconductor, in Singapore and began working in China - 2018 - 2019: Choi worked to build a memory chip plant for Foxconn in Xi’an, near Samsung’s memory chip plant there. When the promised $6.2 billion investment from Foxconn did not come through, the project folded. (This is the project that would lead to Choi’s arrest.) - 2020: Choi formed another company, CHJS High Technologies, a joint venture with the Chengdu government, to build memory chip manufacturing there. (Funny enough, this project is not part of the industrial espionage allegation, even though he was working directly with a Chinese local gov’t, unlike the project in Xi’an which was with Foxconn.) - 2021 - 2022: CHJS was not doing well, partially due to US sanctions taking effect and prohibiting it from getting lithography equipment from KLA, Lam, ASML - May 2023: Choi was arrested Choi rejects his government’s allegation and denies all wrongdoing. Both FT and Reuters have done good coverage of his indictment Is Choi a traitor that ought to be locked up or a national treasure that was pushed out in an up-or-out CEO battle, saw no opportunity to make use of his talent in his home country, and looked for green pastures abroad? South Korea will answer this question for itself soon enough. But it is a question (and a conundrum) for every country struggling with lack of semiconductor talent. I have my own views (shared here: interconnect.substack.com/p/…) tl;dr: there is a gross mismatch between the demand and supply of highly-coveted semiconductor talent caught up in a geopolitical frenzy As @DannyCrichton of @Lux_Capital argued, in the US context: “if chip engineers made $1 million salaries, half of Stanford, MIT and the Ivy League would be studying electrical engineering tomorrow instead of computer science today.” But if even the “Master of Semiconductor Yield” is treated suspiciously as a spy and traitor, what hope is there for a talented EE grad from KAIST or MIT or Tsinghua?

"Demand for software engineers, developers and programmers has long outpaced supply." per WSJ (wsj.com/articles/ai-powered-…) This demand-supply imbalance will persist for years As I wrote on @interconnect_ed: AI will create more developers, not less interconnected.blog/ai-will-…

One way ChatGPT has become a routine part of my work flow is translating a first draft of my English posts into Chinese I still rewrite/edit/transcreate. But somehow, it *feels* easier working with ChatGPT's draft, than Google/Baidu/DeepL, even though it still has inaccuracies Probably because it is trained on web data, so its inference output is closer to "Internet writing", which, stylistically, is what any newsletter/blog is -- Internet writing As y'all know, every post on @interconnect_ed is bilingual because "information accountability" is an important pillar of my newsletter It is no doubt a niche use case of ChatGPT, but for bridge-builders like me, it's an invaluable one

Just finished listening to Daniel Zhang's analyst conf call on the Alibaba reorg Will be publishing a post on this topic in the next hour or so Please subscribe to @interconnect_ed so you get it in your inbox! interconnect.substack.com/

Fleshed out my thoughts on RESTRICT Act in a new @interconnect_ed post 👇 Beyond spelling "game over" for Chinese tech companies of *all* sizes in the US, if passed, it could also be the largest expansion of executive power since Patriot Act interconnect.substack.com/p/…

Probably should've written about SVB or GPT4 on @interconnect_ed to maximize attention and subs But opted to write about my bread & butter instead -- the boring, picks-and-shovels world of cloud👇

5/ But I'm neutral towards $BIDU and hold no shares, b/c I'm learning from past mistakes As I shared in my 2022 annual letter👇, the *unearned* confidence I sometimes gain from writing can be costly Writing/analyzing and investing are two different jobs interconnect.substack.com/p/…

4/ Ernie, if it works, will boost Cloud and Self-Driving business, well beyond Search, which benefits from protectionism no matter what. interconnect.substack.com/p/…

3/ On my newsletter @interconnect_ed , @restofworld & @washingtonpost, I shared that: Baidu's deep learning framework (PaddlePaddle) is a decade old, Apollo (self-driving stack) is solid, and its AI Cloud is legit (though not a big player yet) restofworld.org/2023/chatbot…

2/ Because being a writer & analyst is totally different from being an investor A writer/analyst needs to be PASSIONATE about the subject to do a good job An investor must be IMPASSIONATE and rational to generate good returns