ChinaTalk

You can read a translation into English of this interview here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-make-fun-of-chinese-ai

Xianyu (咸鱼), the writer behind 葬AI — “Funeral AI” — produces some of the best satire out there about China’s AI industry. ChinaTalk Substack readers may remember his essay“Open Models Are the United Front of AI”.
In this conversation, Irene and Xianyu talk (in Chinese) about:

• Why AI writing isn’t funny;
• How Xianyu made a website for ordinary people to rank video model by meme-ability;
• Why Five Year Plans are a kind of benchmark;
• And why there’s so much Chinglish in AI.

We also disagree about where the hype is worse: China or America.

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The blockade is squeezing Iran. So why does it keep being easier to press the war button?

WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.

• Why the strikes continue when the blockade is doing the real work, and what running the war off two carriers costs the Navy.
• Combatant commanders pitching the president their own wars, and whether Cuba is next.
• The myth that a more lethal military would have won in Afghanistan.
• The Joint Staff J-5’s firing, and what it says about a Pentagon that’s stopped planning.

Plus: join the Navy, see the world (mostly the Iranian coast), and letting AI pick the next war.

Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro

00:01:20 Iran and the midterms

00:10:20 Is Cuba next?

00:24:37 Jensen, spies, and the J-5 firing

00:42:07 The Afghanistan myth

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In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead.

Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data atAccenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University of Maryland, where his counterinsurgency research showed that some of the most influential quantitative studies got the answer exactly backwards.

We discuss…

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Why “inaction is in and of itself risky” — and how government risk-aversion compounds against less-cautious competitors

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The “gun-armor race” in classified AI environments, where defense costs grow exponentially against linear offense

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Entity resolution and predictive modeling for BIS export-control enforcement, and unwrapping the PLA’s shell-company maze

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DOE’s Genesis Mission and Accenture Federal’s “backbone for scientific research”

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

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ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world.

But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent?

To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire.

Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms.

We discuss…

• Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all
• How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers
• Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes
• A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring
• US vs. China corruption

Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds

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Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it?

Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark.

We discuss:

• How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO.
• Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them.
• Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys.
• What counts as a lesson from Ukraine, and discussions on wet-gap crossings

Plus: getting rich as a military analyst, and how to tell real maneuver from sparkling mobility.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 U.S. leverage in Ukraine

00:30:02 Who will fight with the drones?

00:47:05 You don't own the night

01:04:32 Wet gap crossings

01:08:56 What to tell Congress

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Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.
We discuss:

• The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute.
• The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion exports. If imports continue at this rate, China could approach or even reach parity with the US in AI chipmaking within a decade.
• What the MATCH Act would do: How Congress could close this gap by restricting DUV immersion exports and servicing, and whether the US can get its allies on board.
• Will Beijing retaliate? Why a gradual, long-term restriction may be less likely to provoke another rare-earths crisis
• Buying time for AGI: How cutting off DUV imports could preserve America’s AI compute advantage into the 2030s, giving the US more time to navigate the technological, geopolitical, and societal implications of increasingly powerful AI.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:07:11 EUV vs. DUV

00:21:55 What the MATCH Act does

00:41:24 Would Beijing retaliate?

00:58:59 Japan, the Netherlands, and the light-source option

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He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things.

We discuss:

• Why the Department of War isn’t going fast enough to procure, scale, and field drones, and how the DIU’s Gauntlet competition is using real orders, competition, and falling prices to build a drone industry capable of producing at scale.
• What American drone makers can learn from Ukraine’s battlefield laboratory and how the Pentagon is trying to replicate the conditions of electronic warfare in its evaluations.
• Why the US drone industry is “wide but not deep,” how the first orders banning Chinese motors and battery packs are testing the limits of supply-chain decoupling, and why Drone Dominance alone can’t solve dependencies in battery chemistry and rare-earth refining.
• Why the future of drone warfare depends on systems that can operate autonomously under electronic attack, and how Metz thinks mass-produced, increasingly autonomous drones will reshape military procurement, training, and force structure.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:27 How Drone Dominance works

00:08:36 Ukraine, jamming, and the Gauntlets

00:32:41 Component supply chain

00:47:37 Doctrine and forcing functions

01:03:11 Bombers, pilots, and autonomy

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Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products.

Topics covered:

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The Hugging Face hack as a sign of progress? Why Richard sees the incident involving OpenAI research agents as an inevitable discovery rather than simply a disaster, and why finding a solution now is a positive development.

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AGI is coming, but nobody knows what it will look like. AGI is inevitable, and we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what these models can do. Rather than obsessing over leaderboards, we need better evaluations and a more open-minded approach to judging models.

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Open source as a product strategy, not just a way to give things away. How open-weight models can harness global talent, accelerate development, and support a diverse ecosystem of products, and why the real business challenge is gross margins rather than capex.

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Why the AI conversation needs more voices. Why we need to pay attention to diverse perspectives on where AI is going, and be more willing to explore rather than declare the endgame.

AI moves fast: since we recorded, Ant Ling has announced its latest LLM, Ling 3.1 Flash, which was open-sourced on October 14 with 560B parameters and up to a 1M-token context window.

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Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching theCenter for Technology and Statecraft, anIFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come.

We discuss:

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Why Saif started a new think tank, and the value of deep, forward-looking policy research in an AI world moving at breakneck speed;

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CTS’s landmark DUV report, which projects that stopping tool exports today could leave China producing roughly 100x fewer AI chips than the US by the mid-2030s, making DUV controls the US’s most consequential lever over the AI balance;

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How rigorous research actually translates into government policy, and why think tank experience is valuable before working in government;

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Robotics as the next frontier of US-China AI competition, and the security vs. diffusion mindsets shaping AI policy;

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How AI is changing policy research itself, the challenge of bringing AI into government, and what AI-driven economic and social change could mean for humans.

Plus, why everyone should read Lu Xun, why AI might socialize like insects, and AI-nannying.

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I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things.

Check out their show The Argument, it's good.

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Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it was cool and could make you trillions. Kevin is launching his own show, Machine Gods, later this October.

We discuss…

• Why AGI was built on belief, not just money, GPUs, or talent, and how Google had every piece of the puzzle except the conviction.
• What drives Sam, Dario, and Demis, some of the most competitive people alive.
• Whether the Manhattan Project analogy holds, and why the government can’t just take the AI over from the scientists who built it.
• Why Dario is the most hawkish lab leader on China, and what may have changed during his time at Baidu.
• How Washington became the second most AI-pilled city in America, and why politicians fear the machine god for their own power.
• Whether people actually hate AI, and what recursive self-improvement in 2027 could mean for everyone else.

Plus: Noam Shazeer’s “divine benevolence,” why Dario can’t lie to save his life, and Lenin singing the outtro music

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Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on.

Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a former enlisted Navy sailor, and a veteran of the Army acquisition world, with experience at MITRE and across the Department of Defense. We’re here today to talk about why data is the hard part in making AI work to win wars for you — and what standards, integration processes, and governance you need to turn fun tech and cute little language models into things that can actually serve the warfighter.

We’re also going to talk about the dark side of data — how poisoning can happen, the enemy’s vote in the datasets you build to find things on the battlefield, and what it’s like to be a civil servant trying to make big programs happen inside the acquisition bureaucracy.

Our conversation covers:

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Why data is the real bottleneck for military AI, why “AI-ready data” is a myth, and why autonomous tanks are further off than you might think,

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Ukraine’s autonomous systems as a case study: how years of collecting, labeling, and learning from battlefield data created the foundation for autonomy,

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The boring side of AI: how pipelines, standards, governance, and testing and evaluation determine whether models ever make it into the field,

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The adversary’s AI toolbox — including camouflage, deception, electronic warfare, and poisoned data — and how to test against those threats.

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The 4D chess game of building programs inside the Pentagon: navigating requirements, funding, acquisition rules, and the people who make or break a program.

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

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It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and Project Meridian, a future-of-warfare panel made up of Elon, Palmer, Newt, and Emil Michael.

Is either the right way to transform the force?

Arthur Tellis, Senior Technology Fellow at the Institute for Progress, joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.

We discuss…

• The case against Auto WarCom: Justin's argument that centralizing autonomous weapons would slow down the experiments already running in theaters around the world
• Bryan's steelman: a functional command like CYBERCOM or STRATCOM
• Who should command the drones?
• Terrible branding: Tony on why killer drones have so far escaped the culture war
• What happens if Democrats take the House
• Why combatant commands make poor engines of transformation
• Project Meridian: what the board can do that ONA, CAPE, the Defense Science Board, and the FFRDCs can't; why Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion; Elon's belief that stealth is dead; and who the panel should have included instead
• Every base is a target: Operation Spider Web, Europe's low-intensity war with Russia, and why bringing forces home doesn't make them safer

Plus: Newt Gingrich's vital signs, the Pope's AI encyclical, Ben Rich and the Nighthawk, Ghost Fleet, the salmon of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and where everyone would put America's next great military base.

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In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and now the 301 tariffs are in court too.

So ChinaTalk's series on the people suing the U.S. government over tariffs continues.

Ethan Frisch is the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company importing from about 28 countries, and a plaintiff in both the Section 122 suit (which he won) and the Section 301 challenge, argued before the Court of International Trade the day before we recorded. Guest host Peter Harrell — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at Georgetown Law's Institute of International Economic Law, and an attorney — joins Jordan to explain where the litigation goes from here.

We discuss…

• From aid worker to spice importer: wild cumin from northeastern Afghanistan, a company started out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, and carrying hundred-pound duffel bags of spices through customs
• Why a spice tariffs won't protect U.S. industry
• Liberation Day changing businesses overnight
• Suing the president: an even split of fan mail and hate mail, a pro bono partnership, and why Ethan doesn't understand what everybody else is so scared of
• Why the big companies sit on the sidelines: Peter on Fortune 500 firms and major law firms afraid of retaliation, why the lawsuits have come from small businesses and Democratic-led states, and why USTR and CBP have stayed professional anyway
• The Section 301 case: a statute used some 130 times for targeted trade disputes, now stretched to 60 jurisdictions covering 99% of U.S. trade; a forced-labor justification that gives China the same 12.5% rate as two-thirds of the world; and why the government will likely keep collecting through 12 to 18 months of appeals
• Tariffs after Trump: what a 2028 Democrat would cut and what they'd keep

Plus: why you can't haggle with CBP, Jane Goodall's wild honey, pomegranate molasses made under pressure, paying farmers whatever they ask, and whether Zohran should hire Ethan to run the city's supermarkets.

Listeners can use code CHINATALK at burlapandbarrel.com for a free jar of their choice on a first order over $15.

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After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century.

Today investment is contracting, growth is less than a percent, and the financial system that fueled China's growth is now the thing holding it back.

Logan Wright, partner at Rhodium Group and my former boss, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his new book, Broken China: How the Economic Miracle Shattered and What It Means for the World.

Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations co-hosts.

We discuss…

• The crisis that already happened: why the September 2021 protests in Evergrande's lobby were China's catharsis moment
• Decay instead of collapse: why credit growth fell from 18% a year to 5%, why Beijing keeps rolling over loans to zombie state firms, and why in China "the path to crisis is reform"
• Jordan and Brad discuss Xi's Perspective: Does supply-chain dominance matter more than GDP?
• Twelve million graduates a year, the youth unemployment numbers that vanished in 2023, why all of China's new strategic industries add up to about 6% of GDP, and why a $10,000 BYD doesn't matter if your kid can't get a job
• Who's paying for China's AI?

Plus: Logan's case that the US no longer has a systemic economic rivalry with China, and Brad's pushback that Chinese supply-chain controls have so far beaten Western demand-side leverage

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WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan.

We discuss…

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The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to fight with, and how the Iran blockade became the status quo

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The midterm budget squeeze — what a Democratic Senate means for the defense topline, why Anduril won’t keep working at risk, and how a shipbuilding binge could hollow out the force

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Who replaces Hegseth — the two Mike Rogerses, and why the talent pool for a lame-duck Pentagon is drying up

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The AI Force — why a SOCOM-style AI branch cuts against a technology meant to be everywhere, and what a benchmark-setting version could actually do

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Manned-unmanned teaming — why putting sailors on robot ships is “asinine,” and what combined arms for robots should look like

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Gifts for Beijing — the Anduril drone Iran fished out of the Gulf, dud PrSMs as intelligence windfalls, and why compute still can’t blow anything up on its own

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Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit?

We discuss:

• Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions from Beijing;
• Julian’s framework for a K-shaped US-China relationship, with leader-level diplomacy pulling upward while competition pulls downward;
• What Xi’s visit says about the changing political salience of China in the US
• Why Beijing’s public statements on AI risk don’t necessarily tell us how it will handle pacing and safety;
• What the decline of Xi Jinping could mean for a political system and why China’s next succession could be especially difficult to predict;
• China-maxxing from Kissinger to Trump

Plus: The Scholars (儒林外史) and why Qing-dynasty satire about corrupt scholars might make you feel better about America in 2026.

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Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services.

We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission.

Our conversation covers:

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Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful lesson for AI: The hardest part of adopting transformative technology isn’t building it, but redesigning the institutions, workflows, incentives, and decision-making systems around it.

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The government’s need to manufacture its own “forcing functions”: How carrots, sticks, budget cuts, and a willingness to create winners and losers could help bureaucracies move faster.

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Giving the troops the tools and getting out of the way: Why Berntsen thinks the U.S. military’s greatest AI advantage may come from empowering service members to experiment, improvise, and “figure it out.”

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Will AI eventually negotiate with AI? We debate whether models can move beyond advising diplomats and executives to actually conducting negotiations.

Plus, cyber challenges, a chat app for government, and book recs.

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.

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In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.

Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.

We discuss…

• Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent
• What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed
• The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections
• The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats
• Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan
• Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese

Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.

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ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy.

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Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side

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What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause”

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Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation

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Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up

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The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects

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Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan

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