A lot more people are organizing China tech trips these days, which I actually think is great. More people should come see what’s happening here firsthand. But here’s what I think makes @techbuzzchina different: deep domain expertise. Our trips didn’t start as tours. They grew out of our work with fundamental investors who needed to meet companies face-to-face, ask detailed questions, pressure-test what they were hearing, and understand the environments in which these companies actually operate. Today we work with a much broader group: VCs, founders, executives, and others across tech and investing. So the trips have expanded too. We might visit a factory, an R&D facility, or a robotics lab alongside closed-door company meetings. Every trip is built around what the group actually needs to learn. But the underlying model hasn’t changed. We’re not general business, marketing, or China consultants who moved into tech because AI, robotics, semiconductors, and other deep-tech sectors happen to be where the action is now. I’ve worked in tech, finance, and investing for more than 20 years. I know the companies, the technologies, the investors, and the ecosystem. And because I live and work in Silicon Valley as well, I understand what people coming from overseas already know, what they think they know, and where the real knowledge gaps are. That means we’re not just arranging access. We know who is worth meeting, what is worth seeing, what questions to ask, and how to put what you hear into context. That’s the product. More info below:

As a friend and several commenters pointed out, it was only eight years ago, in 2018, that the hit Chinese film Dying to Survive came out. Based on a real case from the early 2000s, it told the story of a man helping leukemia patients obtain generic cancer drugs from India at a fraction of the price of the treatments available in China, which many patients simply couldn’t afford. At the time, cancer survival rates in China were also substantially lower than in developed countries, partly because patients lacked access to advanced treatments, but also because of late diagnoses and uneven quality of care. The film sparked widespread public outrage over the cost of lifesaving medicines. China certainly hasn’t solved all these problems, but access to innovative drugs has improved dramatically since then. It’s remarkable how much has changed in less than a decade.

I still like to write a physical to-do list, especially now that I have so many AI initiatives that I'm working on. It's really easy for me to lose track of what I'm doing when I'm switching contexts ha. I usually have somewhere around 15+ things I'm trying to accomplish with AI at any given time, and it's just so satisfying when you can cross them off one by one with a pen.

Saw the head of McKinsey China post this on LinkedIn today, quoting a former Google executive. I think it depends on the sector, but in most areas of tech, it feels like it's less than 10% “Westerners have about 10 percent of the knowledge of China that Chinese people have about the West.”

I guess we should take comfort in the fact that the robots aren't gazing at the stars yet? That's still something uniquely human? lol

Lol, just read this in Chinese: “The world has moved so fast these past two years. We all assumed AI and robots would be washing our dishes, mopping our floors, and scrubbing our toilets, so we'd be free to write poetry, paint, and gaze at the stars. Instead, it's the other way around — AI is busy writing the poetry and making the art, and I'm still doing the dishes and mopping the floors myself.”

I alreadt greatly prefer watching YouTube videos to trying to read inscrutable user manuals, and now it will become even easier! Chinese manufacturers need to do this immediately. So many of the negative comments on Amazon are about poor manuals, and now here is a super elegant and fast solution.

I'm extremely embarrassed to say that about 10 days ago (and I'm not even quite sure how it happened), something wiped my Hermes agent setup, which I didn't have proper backup for. I've been spending the last two weeks fixing things intermittently. I now have proper backup, yay! But man, I also realized just how much work I've moved to AI, and how excruciating it is when stuff is broken.

I feel like AI people have way more AI FOMO in the Bay just because missed opportunities are so visible. Non-tech folks are barely aware of what's happening.

Muse is really good: it's proactive without being creepy, thoughtful without overthinking, and it hasn't dropped things. I actually use it quite a bit, and I find it pretty useful for household stuff, even if all I gave it is calendar access. I noticed today that it has a new menu of things it suggests for you. It's categorized into: • A feed of everything it detects you're interested in • Ideas • Goals • A library of files you've shared with it Clearly they're working on improving the product and making it a full-fledged assistant. They're basically betting that they can become more of a front page, like a chief of staff proactively pushing things to you. Versus the UI for Instinct which seems difficult to make super proactive without becoming very spammy.

Cool video but no actual intelligence showcased and with the use case shown it's practically begging to be banned (Remember, new models need to get permits from the Department of War). I don't understand the strategy, but this is indeed what the company is good at

It's great to boss around your consumer AI agent, but then inevitably, you need some physical arms to do some things, and that is obviously the husband. So why didn't this launch with the ability to delegate to husband from the get-go? 😆

Seems important to repost. Excited to have AI explain to me what this means later.

If you asked me a few months ago, I would have been like, "Wow, these people take themselves way too seriously and are way too dramatic." But after all the shenanigans that Anthropic has been pulling the last couple of months, I am starting to agree this might be more existential than I thought.

At this point, if you're not rooting for DeepSeek over all of the other closed labs, it says a lot about how you think the world should be run

I'm listening to the Sold a Story podcast season two, which is on math education in the US, and it is enough to give me an aneurysm, seriously. The season opens with a bunch of little kids' voices doing very basic algebra, and you learn later that these are poor Black four-year-olds, and all of them are getting the problems correct. Oh, and they're super engaged. Apparently, there was a group that figured out you can have kids go very fast in math if you just did direct instruction. But somehow, culturally, this was deemed "too hard" and too much of a "pressure cooker" for little kids. It's pretty funny because it's not like there was any high-stakes testing or anything. It literally was just teaching the kids instead of "letting them discover it themselves." I did a master's in education, and there was a lot of content in the program about equity, and how socioeconomic class, parental habits and attitudes, and level of education really shape a kid's academic achievement. It's just infuriating to hear that when they discovered a teaching method that works in spite of these disadvantages, it was thrown out as being, I guess, somehow not "fun" enough. It's difficult to believe that they didn't actually have ulterior motives.

I mean, yeah, duh. I would have been shocked if this didn't happen.

Going back and forth on a services contract right now, and it's pretty clear from the formatting that we're just both copy-pasting from ChatGPT lol

Another day, another story I hear of a small consulting or finance firm firing all their employees and replacing them with AI gg junior positions I feel like every parent I talk to kind of half-jokes about this: "Oh, what's the point of school?" And yet, they send their kids straight into the traditional schooling system anyways, one they know hasn't adequately prepared the youth of 2026 So I don't understand how it will magically fix itself to prepare the youth of 2036

LOL, this post tells you about a great business opportunity: take a $7 smart ring (like an Oura) from Pinduoduo, etch a cross on it, and sell it to religious folks for $249. I actually went and looked up these super cheap smart rings. They really do exist at this price and are supposedly accurate, but poorly made. They probably don't hold a charge very long and may be uncomfortable to wear, but even at this price, their sensors apparently are accurate lol. And when you "pay up" in the $30-$50 range, then you're getting something quite decent. The software used to be terrible, but I wonder if that problem will be solved very quickly with the proliferation of AI coding