🔮🇨🇳 Inside the Chinese AI labs where America’s AI controls created its toughest competiton

We put a number to China’s efficiency moat

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“The export controls have become capability-generating – labs in China are forced to be ruthlessly efficient.”

We spent a week on the ground in China, visiting AI and robotics labs and seeing how things operate firsthand. We traveled through Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai to meet representatives from 14 labs, including DeepSeek, MoonshotAI, MiniMax, Z.ai, ByteDance, 01.AI, Alibaba, Ant Group, Xiaomi, AInnovation, Galbot, Unitree, ModelScope, and RWKV; joined by our friends Kevin Xu, Lily Ottinger, Florian Brand, afra, Kai Williams, Lingua Sinica, Jasmine Sun, Caithrin and Nathan Lambert who made it all happen.

Our group at ModelScope

We participated in dozens of hours of discussions with researchers, founders, product leaders, and business owners across the infrastructure, hardware, models and application layers. Every lab is obsessed with ByteDance’s Doubao, and respectful of DeepSeek’s scientific process. Claude is the model of choice for coding, universally rated as the best thing out there. The researchers we met were humble, welcoming, focused purely on technical priorities and building the next big model. Researchers were also very young: at one lab in particular, the average age was 25.

But chip constraints are real. Everyone wanted Nvidia chips, and the constraint was showing up in longer and longer pre-training runs and iterative cycles.