Grace Hsiao

And like you mentioned, because we've been so fixed in software, I think China having a very strong hardware background is now thinking about how can we actually integrate the software into the hardware?

How ready that is to the mass market, I frankly don't think it's really there yet.

So recently I just met with some robotic companies.

They actually can't just plug in a minimax, you know, that's like for them, they need to actually get physical data.

This is where like, you know, now all the hype is on world models, physical AI, you know.

That is a complete different set of kind of technology, essentially, where without the 3D data that these models need right now, the bottleneck right now is that, you know, these hardwares, these humanoids, quadrupids, dogs, whatever you want to call them, they cannot be powered by LLMs.

That's number one.

Number two is despite that China being very strong on hardware, the bottleneck is actually a lot of times in the integration as well as the battery solutions.

You know, you think of China having very strong battery solutions, but most of these gadgets can't last more than like, say, two hours.

And there's no one that's really come up with a better solution so far.

What I've seen the most creative thing so far is like, you know, those glasses you wear, like the meta glasses?

Mm-hmm.

They kind of die within two hours.

But China, like iFlyTech or Rocket, that's kind of a newer player startup, they created these battery capsules where you can just like stick onto your glasses.

It's very lightweight, doesn't really affect your user experience.

And that's actually able to kind of extend it by a few hours.

So to go back to your question, is China trying to do...

Physical AI, definitely.

What is their edge?

I think it's still in manufacturing.