Sublime

Moving from discovery to implementation reduces one of China’s greatest weak points (outside-the-box approaches to research questions) and also leverages the country’s most significant strength: scrappy entrepreneurs with sharp instincts for building robust businesses. The transition from expertise to data has a similar benefit, downplaying the imp

As Lars later told Steven Levy in In the Plex, “We sort of underestimated what we could do.”)

on June 11, 2014, the Avenue of the Entrepreneurs opened to its new tenants. Guo had used the tools at his disposal—cash, cement, and manual labor—to give a strong nudge toward indigenous innovation in the local startup. It was a landmark moment for Zhongguancun, but one that wasn’t destined to stay sequestered to this corner of Beijing. Indeed, Gu

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In the eyes of most analysts, China’s technology industry was destined to play the same role in global AI that it had for decades: that of the copycat who lagged far behind the cutting edge. As I demonstrate in the following chapters, that analysis is wrong. It is based on outdated assumptions about the Chinese technology environment, as well as a

Zhou embodies the gladiatorial mentality of Chinese internet entrepreneurs. In his world, competition is war and he will stop at nothing to win. In Silicon Valley, his tactics would guarantee social ostracism, antimonopoly investigations, and endless, costly lawsuits. But in the Chinese coliseum, none of these three can hold back combatants. The on