On china
- What a minute of AI video costs in Beijing vs. San Francisco
Real per-second prices for Veo 2, Kling 2.0 and Jimeng this month, and why the retake rate matters more than the sticker price.
2 min reads likes comments - DeepSeek and the price of intelligence
A Chinese lab released a reasoning model that matches OpenAI's o1 and published how it did it. Nvidia lost about $600 billion in a day. Where the efficiency actually came from.
2 min reads likes comments - Kling came from a short-video company, not a lab
Kuaishou, TikTok's main rival in China, released a video model that rivals Sora's samples, and ordinary users in China can already try it. Video models get built by whoever has the video.
2 min reads likes comments - Ten years between albums
万能青年旅店 released their second album after ten years. On listening to a band that sings about industrial decline in Hebei, and why art gets better once you can see the structure under it.
2 min reads likes comments - ZAO put your face in a movie in eight seconds
A Chinese face-swap app went viral over the weekend and hit a privacy wall within days. China just ran the consumer deepfake experiment at scale.
2 min reads likes comments - Musical.ly is now TikTok, as predicted
ByteDance merged Musical.ly into TikTok this week. A short follow-up to what I wrote in November, and what the feed tells you about the product.
2 min reads likes comments - Watch the recommendation engine, not the lip-sync
ByteDance is buying Musical.ly. It looks like a Chinese news company buying an American teen app. It's really a recommendation engine buying a global audience.
2 min reads likes comments - Ke Jie in Wuzhen
The world's top Go player lost 3-0 to AlphaGo in China this week, and Chinese viewers mostly couldn't watch it live. Why this match will matter more in China than the Lee Sedol one did.
2 min reads likes comments