China AI: From Challenger to Export Industry Globally with Jon Russell

Jon Russell (0:00)

The really impressive thing isn't just that China is building its own tech stack, it's so integrated. Companies are going public, they're raising money. It's entirely self-sufficient from the technology to the financing side too, right? So I think that's the really crazy bit for me. It's not like they have to build these companies and at some point they have to go public in America, right? They can do this all now in China and Hong Kong, but that's the ultimate thing, right? Capital is what these companies need. If they can also get that from China too, then that completes the system. So it's almost like a dome has now gone on top, right? Everything's in there.

Bernard Leong (0:41)

Welcome to Analyse Podcast, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business, technology and media globally. I'm Bernard Leong and today we examine a shift. Jon Russell has been tracing across Asia Tech Review. Chinese AI is moving from technological challenger to a commercial industry and geopolitical export model. The key questions are whether its leading companies can turn technical credibility into durable economics, whether China can control more of the AI stack, and what the expansion means for the Southeast Asia's agency over data and infrastructure. So with me, old friend, Jon Russell, writer of Asia Tech Review, and I think now you are also executive director at Ellerton & Co, who has spent a decade reporting on technology across Asia. We will connect IPO, economics, open-weight distribution and data sovereignty into one big regional story, including China.

Jon, welcome back.

Jon Russell (1:36)

Thanks so much for allowing me to be here. I think actually more than 10 years in total, which probably ages me pretty, ages all of us pretty badly, but it's definitely been ahead of the journey in the last 10 or 15 years plus, right?

Bernard Leong (1:50)

Yeah.

Jon Russell (1:51)

Lots of things have changed.

Bernard Leong (1:52)

Well, you were in the Next Web, TechCrunch, The Canned. Then after that, you went into the Dark Side, I shall not name it, being a VC. Which Dark Side?

Jon Russell (2:03)

There's many Dark Sides.

Bernard Leong (2:04)

And then now you're back into the game again. So what have you been up to? Tell me.

Jon Russell (2:10)

I think if we personally, I've done a bunch of things. I'm the least interesting part of this, but yeah, I joined Ellerton & Co recently, which is Singapore comms and marketing company. That's grown pretty quickly in the last 10 years or so, like have more than 30 staff. So yeah, helping tech companies, VCs, any sort of companies in that adjacency to do their comms better. Which I think these days that goes beyond working with the press. Obviously, that's a big part of it. I think modern day comms is about going direct. And I think as a founder yourself who also has a podcast, I think you understand very clearly the benefit of being out there. And I think if you look at other parts of the world, the US being a really key one.

Most tech CEOs now, they have their own platform where they also outreach. So they're not 100% reliant on journalists. And obviously, as an ex-journalist, that's important. But I do think that there's other ways that complement that too. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring this kind of ideology to APAC.

Bernard Leong (3:17)

So you can actually also see some of the Asia Pacific CEOs nowadays also having their own podcast and of course, try to dictate the narrative. I don't like to call myself a podcast. I always call myself a media outlet owner because that makes it easier for me to negotiate who I want to be on the show.

That's why.

Jon Russell (3:34)

Very fair. Very fair. Yeah. I think, I mean, especially if you, I know we're going to talk about Chinese AI companies, but I think there is what I've noticed is some of those CEOs are a bit more prominent. They're taking the stage a bit more on their own, which I think is a definite shift. If you look at how this was done previously, with the big Chinese tech firms, they didn't really talk that often. They mostly spoke during earnings period. It was like they had, I guess, Americans and other Westerners who would do that kind of stuff. I think that part of the world is definitely just changing. Obviously, a lot of them had been in Silicon Valley previously, or they've done a PhD elsewhere.

I guess culturally, they're coming from a different place. But I do think it's interesting. I do think that most CEOs and companies, they should think about how they can do their own comms. That's a bit of a focus of mine at the moment, as well as, obviously, Asia Tech Review, which we do more often now. So between three to five days a week, depending on what's going on.