Mapping the China AI Ecosystem with Rui Ma

Rui Ma (0:00)

The government's not looking to build a multi-trillion-dollar AI, but he missed. The government is like, what is the best outcome from my society? The best outcome is that the best technology survives, so I don't want it to go bankrupt, right, and die too early, but the best technology survives, and it is deployed at scale, using my own whatever self-sufficient tech stack. It is not subjective for interference, and it is also increasingly cheaper, right?

Bernard Leong (0:33)

Welcome to Analyse Podcast, the premier podcast dedicated to dissect the pulse of business technology and media globally. I'm Bernard Leong, and today we return to China with a different question. Instead of treating artificial intelligence as a horse race between Silicon Valley and China, we want to understand the distinct industrial logic taking shape inside China. How is major AI labs are organized? Why intelligence is becoming cheaper? How infrastructure and manufacturing change the economics? And why robotics may be where the story becomes most visible? With me today, old friend, Rui Ma, founder of TechBuzz China, investor and long-time analyst of China's technology ecosystem.

Rui has definitely spent many, many years moving between the US and China, speaking with founders, investors and operators, and most recently building research products that China's AI Labs, Semiconductor Stack and Physical AI Ecosystem. So Rui, welcome back to the show.

Rui Ma (1:33)

Hi, thanks for having me back. It's been a while.

Bernard Leong (1:36)

Yes. So let's start from the main question.

What happens when intelligence become cheap enough to embed everywhere from enterprise software to factories and robots? And what does China's ecosystem look like when we analyze it on its own terms today?

Rui Ma (1:52)

Okay, well, I think that is exactly where China is trying to get to, to have intelligence that's, you know, quote unquote, too cheap to meter. Part of it is just because the market realities, right? China is a very sensitive, price sensitive market. It has a lot less per capita GDP and income than, you know, many of the developed countries and has a fundamentally different shape of the economy in terms of the manufacturing sector, weight in the economy and in the job force, etc. I think that I'm personally a techno optimist. I actually just took a quiz.

I think it's by the American like innovation. So some kind of frontier innovation society. And I came out as a defensive accelerationist.

Which is apparently a name that means I'm for acceleration, but not because I think it's going to take over and destroy the world. But I think it will be much more useful as a tool to defend ourselves against bad actors, but also create solutions for all the problems we have. So I'm an optimist and I hope that future comes to pass. Wow. Okay.

Bernard Leong (3:13)

Then I'm pretty much an optimist in any way. But since we last spoke in 2023, what have you been up to? I mean, how are you getting deeper into AI, semiconductors, manufacturing and robotics? Specifically really looking between both the US and China, tech ecosystems.

Rui Ma (3:34)

Yeah. So well, wow. 2023 is a long time ago. That's like right after. That's right. So I actually worked for two years at an AI startup in Silicon Valley as sort of overseeing sales and very limited operations were very small. So got a good taste of growth of enterprise AI at the time. I think that the main difference, obviously in both environments since then is that just been the conversations completely been overtaken by AI and robotics and deep tech.

If you look at what investments people are most excited about in Silicon Valley, it's overwhelmingly along those three criteria. Now, in China, it might look a little bit different, and we've really adjusted TechBuzz China's research focus. But back in 2023, we were probably still at least half e-commerce and offline to offline, offline to online, these platforms, et cetera. But now we're almost exclusively looking at AI robotics, some new energy, a little bit of semiconductors as it relates to AI. So world's really changed if you look at the IPO, you know, what companies have gone public and are planning to go public.

It's also those sectors, those same sectors.

Bernard Leong (5:01)

Because it's interesting in that way, right? Because ZAI IPO. So we had the first glimpse of what a real AI company getting revenue, looking at its profit centers, looking at the large language models. I think their stock went up early this year after they published a JRM 5.3. How often now do you travel between, say, China and the US? Is it almost like every three months? Because there's so much changes going on between both sides.