Highlights

Implementation is what makes academic advances meaningful and what will truly end up changing the fabric of our daily lives.

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This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality.

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While Socrates encouraged his students to seek truth by questioning everything, ancient Chinese philosophers counseled people to follow the rituals of sages from the ancient past. Rigorous copying of perfection was seen as the route to true mastery.

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The most valuable product to come out of China’s copycat era wasn’t a product at all: it was the entrepreneurs themselves.

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Resistance to localization slows down product iteration and makes local teams feel like cogs in a clunky machine.

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Battles with Silicon Valley may have created some of China’s homegrown internet Goliaths, but it was cutthroat Chinese domestic competition that forged a generation of gladiator entrepreneurs.

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A “mission” makes for a strong narrative when pitching to media or venture-capital firms, but it can also become a real burden in a rapidly changing market. What does a founder do when there’s a divergence between what the market demands and what a mission dictates?

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We don’t know the current depth of these technical exchanges, but they could serve as an alternate model of AI globalization: empower homegrown startups by marrying worldwide AI expertise to local data. It’s a model built more on cooperation than conquest, and it may prove better suited to globalizing a technology that requires both top-quality engineers and ground-up data collection.