ChinAI #290: Around the Horn (17th edition)

Greetings from a world where…

it’s good to be back in the land of Chicken Cottage

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Around the Horn (17th edition)

It appears that after a two-decade+ run, the ESPN show Around the Horn will go off the air. Watching this show at the 4PM central time slot was a daily ritual for me after school. In honor of this legendary show, let’s go Around the Horn with this week’s ChinAI issue. For those new to this, here’s how it works (see ChinAI #283 for previous edition):

• I give short previews of ten articles that caught my eye as I was scanning through sources (all published within the past week or so). The title for each preview links to the original article in Chinese.

• Readers vote on next week’s feature translation by replying to the email and/or commenting on the post with the number of your preferred article. *Votes from readers who are paid subscribers to ChinAI count a little more.

• Main premise is that any of these 10 links would have made for a great feature translation this week — like the Pusha T’s It’s Almost Dry, there are no skips!

1) Why is Baidu the only Chinese company to make it into the first tier of a global AI company ranking?

Summary: In its recently published Global AI Landscape Map, Frost & Sullivan market research firm highlighted three “AI-Native Giants”: OpenAI, Google, and Baidu. This article explains Baidu’s advantages over other Chinese firms in this space.

Source: 雷峰网 (Leiphone) — media portal that covers China’s science and tech landscape, with a focus on AI-related happenings.

2) Chinese software must go global, but it can’t always go it alone

Summary: In October, four Chinese software companies (Guancha Cloud, OceanBase, AutoMQ, and Bytebase) formed the Next Stack Technology Alliance. Their goal is to expand the global reach of Chinese software, showing that it is not just a “cheap substitute” nor “a Chinese product produced to do political tasks.”

Source: OSChina — portal that covers China’s open source community

3) Chinese open source models lead foreign ones, closing in on global first-tier closed source models

Summary: I like to regularly check in on SuperCLUE’s benchmarks on large language models. One of the top-line findings from their October assessments: On Chinese-language prompts, Chinese open source models like Qwen2.5 (Alibaba’s model) and DeepSeek-V2.5 outperform Llama’s best models.

Source: CLUE中文语言理解测评基准 (SuperCLUE) — organization that tests the capabilities of large language models from Chinese and international labs.

4) With the emergence of visual model intelligence, the Scaling Law has not coming to an end

Summary: Will scaling trends continue in AI? We’ve seen some evidence that training large language models on more data and compute is no longer leading to the same performance gains. This article explores what Shengshu Technology’s latest Vidu1.5 model (AI video generator) means for scaling laws.

Source: AI科技评论(aitechtalk) — focuses on in-depth reports on developments in the AI industry and academia.

5) How did the founders of a celebrity AI company get caught up in an arbitration storm?

Summary: The founders of Moonshot AI, a celebrated Chinese AI startup, have become embroiled in an arbitration dispute with investors from their former company. It gets into the weeds of investment agreements and the fuzzy space between hand-shake agreements and the large AI model boom.

Source: 财经E法 (Caijing ELaw) —portal focused on internet governance under the umbrella of Caijing Magazine, a respected business platform.

6) AI Safety Benchmark Q3 Results Released

Summary: Back in April, we translated the first batch of results from this AI safety benchmark (ChinAI #261), an initiative launched by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology along with 17 other groups, including China’s AI Industry Alliance.

Source: CAICT AI安全治理 (CAICT AI Safety/Security Governance) — the government-affiliated think tank’s portal dedicated AI safety/security issues

7) The U.S. Government is Losing Control of the Internet

Summary: The article points out the growing differences between the interests of transnational tech platforms and the U.S. government re: internet governance. It also considers the impact of Trump’s election on U.S. cyber hegemony.

Source: 文化纵横 (Wenhua Zongheng) — leading platform for contemporary political and cultural thought, which also publishes a quarterly journal.

8) StepFun (Chinese AI startup) model ranks highest among Chinese models in this “most difficult LLM evaluation benchmark”

Summary: Many people regard the LiveBench model (sponsored by Abacus.AI) as the most challenging large language model benchmark. This piece probes how this relatively new Chinese AI startup, StepFun, was able to perform so well.

Source: 机器之心 (Synced) — media portal that covers China’s AI landscape

9) Renewable energy generation faces "world-scale problems", can we count on AI?

Summary: As China’s electric grid relies more on renewable energy, one challenge comes from extreme weather conditions that cause fluctuations in renewable energy power generation. For instance, in the Shandong province, which has the largest renewable power grid by installed capacity, during a cold wave at the end of 2023, the wind power output dropped from 18 million to just 500,000 kilowatts in just over a day. Can AI help with this problem?

Source: 知识分子 (The Intellectual) — a platform that covers the state of science in China, founded by Chinese and Chinese-American scientists.

10) Elon Musk’s China Past

Summary: This piece reviews Elon Musk’s connections to China, including a college friend (Robin Ren) who eventually paved the way for Tesla’s Shanghai super-factory as well as Chinese netizens’ obsession with Musk.

Source: 虎嗅 (Huxiu) — well-known platform that shares user-generated content but also publishes their own pieces on China’s science and technology ecosystem.

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***For Around the Horn weeks, I usually mostly read Chinese-language articles, but the Four to Forward recommendations will return next week!

Thank you for reading and engaging.

These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.

Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).

Also! Listen to narrations of the ChinAI Newsletter in podcast format here.

Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at chinainewsletter@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jjding99