Vivian Wang

I talked to an analyst who I thought put it really smartly.

He said the Chinese government is trying to control what AI says, but unleash what it does.

And so basically, if you are making a chatbot, if you are making some sort of AI product that is going to be feeding information to the Chinese people, you are going to be under a greater degree of restrictions.

But if you are doing robotics, if you are doing something that doesn't really deal with information that could directly influence how Chinese people are thinking, there are a lot fewer restrictions there.

I think so.

I mean, it's hard to say if it came directly from that meeting or just the excitement around Deep Seek in general.

But 2025 and this year have really just been huge moments of development in China's AI scene.

You've seen a ton of new models getting registered.

You've seen a bunch of startups doing really well.

And that's also where you've seen kind of AI get diffused so broadly into the economy in all the ways that we talked about where everyone's using it all the time.

And we see how much they're doubling down on AI just this past March when the Chinese government released its five-year plan, which is this grand economic plan for how China's economy is going to run for the next five years.

And this plan mentions AI more than 50 times.

Wow.

So it's really clear that they are staking basically their entire economic future on dominating AI.

And for Washington, that puts China on a direct collision course with U.S.

tech.

Sure.

And this is really the million-dollar question, right?

And I think the answer is both yes and no.

So when you look at just the models themselves, the DeepSeek, for example, experts I've spoken to actually say that they don't think the restrictions are really making DeepSeek meaningfully less powerful in the sense that, sure, there are some topics that DeepSeek cannot answer.