ChinAI Mood: April 26 - May 4, 2026

AGI is the friends you make along the way

This post appeared in Interconnected.

“There are no equivalent ‘philosopher kings’ in the Chinese AI ecosystem.”

“Updating priors” has become one of those tropey phrases that more and more people say, like “thinking from first principles”. Poker bros started it. Finance bros popularized it. Now tech bros, who are all by default LLM bros, are spreading it more, if only to signal that they know at least something about how backpropagation works.

I am as guilty of doing this as any.

But “updating priors” is a good principle to live by, even though in practice, it requires energy, humility, and commitment to finding the “ground truth” (another tropey phrase). It is especially hard to pull off on topics that other people think you know something about. That’s how I feel about AI in China, or “ChinAI”, as Jeffrey Ding’s inimitable and namesake newsletter calls it. “ChinAI” is a subject matter I treat with much humility, because China is moving fast, AI is also moving fast, and combined is moving faster than the sum of its parts. (Timestamping the title of a post on this subject is the least I can do.)