Alice Han

Andrew Yao is the sole Chinese winner of the Turing Award, which is basically the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in CS.

and he, a couple of decades ago, moved from the States back to China, where he originally was from, and he's really become the champion intellect and professor of AI in China.

So apparently there is a class named after him at Tsinghua called the You Class, where the chief AI scientist at Tencent was one of his students, the founder of Moonshot, which has produced Kimmy, and the founder of Pony AI, as well as a range of these Chinese tech founders.

So

Again, I think the story is so fascinating because it shows both the government having a hand and plucking out these highly talented individuals, but also then these individuals going out from the bottom up and making their own companies, which are really driving China's innovation.

I would even hazard a statement, which is that I believe China may be more meritocratic today than America is, given this system, given the way in which education and scholastic intelligence are lionized.

I would say that China today is probably more meritocratic than the U.S.

And one last point about the gold call, which you rightly mentioned, James, is that it's a system that's predicated on your score during the exam.

It's unlike any other, I think, exam in the world.

Certainly unlike the Australian exam system I went through or even the American system I went through as well.

where in those models, you have a hybridized scoring of your exam scores, your essays, your extracurricular activities.

In the Chinese scenario, it really comes down to what score you get on the day of the exams.

Yeah, it's emblazoned on their memory, either as a badge or as a scar.

Yeah.

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