Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
What 72hrs in China taught me about the future (AI, EVs, more)
02 Jul 2025
Chapter 1: What surprised the host upon arrival at Beijing airport?
When you land in Beijing airport, you are greeted with an incredibly clean, well-functioning, well-ordered airport. It's far above the quality of any of the US airports I've been to over the last few years. I would put it roughly at the level of Heathrow Terminal 5, so certainly better than Terminal 3 or Terminal 2, better certainly than Frankfurt Airport, perhaps not as good as some of the
great Asian and Middle Eastern airports that have emerged since then, but that's absolutely a sense that you get as you land.
Chapter 2: How does China's infrastructure compare to the West?
It didn't feel particularly police-y either.
Chapter 3: What advancements in AI are being made in China?
I mean, you do get a sense of CCTV cameras as you do, for example, when you're landing in a London airport, and you obviously feel the police and security presence in many of these airports, particularly in the U.S., I was a bit surprised. I really expected much more of that.
Chapter 4: How is vertical AI transforming industries in China?
And there were lots of batteries of cameras you might find in public space in larger numbers than you would see in London. So you arrive at this airport, it's clean, it's really, really well functioning. One thing to notice that you notice really straight away is that there's essentially no obesity in China. And in three days and seeing
hundreds of thousands of people, you get a sense that this is not an epidemic problem that they are dealing with. The scale is absolutely huge.
Chapter 5: What impact are electric vehicles having on air quality in Beijing?
I actually went to a conference as a sort of academic expert, and the conference center I was at ran to some 1.4 million square meters. To give you a sense of what that scale is, that's 100 times the size of Union Square in San Francisco. If you imagine Soho and Tribeca in New York, it's double that size.
And this is a convention center that was put up in just a few years, about seven or eight years ago.
Chapter 6: How is the competition in the Chinese EV market shaping innovation?
It's really, really remarkable. So I want to put my comments into three categories. The first category is what I noticed about infrastructure and engineering.
Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from China's education technology like Squirrel AI?
The second is what I saw in and around AI, and I talked to a number of AI founders and researchers while I was there. And also, the third set of observations really about electric vehicles and what's happening with the auto industry, again, having ridden in a number of cars, but also talking to a number of people involved in those areas. So I'll make my way through there.
And as always, I'm happy to take questions about this or any other topic as we make our way through. So let's get started with point A, which was infrastructure and engineering. I would say you just really notice that there is a lot of infrastructure running around as you come off through the airport and you're on the highways.
Chapter 8: What are the future implications of China's advancements in AI and EVs?
And it's such a dissonance compared to landing, say, at JFK and being on the Long Island Expressway, where things look crumbling. They look like they're falling apart. There's some very, very slow repairs going on. This is not the case in Beijing at all. There is just a sense that things are being built. They're being built to last and being built to be maintained.
And, you know, that infrastructure story found its way across the high-speed rail. I took a high-speed rail from Beijing South Station. through to Tianjin, running at just over 300 kilometers an hour, which is about 180 miles an hour. It was incredibly cheap. It was about 17 pounds, about $20 for that 30-minute journey. Beijing South Station is chaos.
It's like so many people, so many people that you will get lost in there. But again, to give you some sense, it's not much different to Grand Central, to be honest, or to London's Waterloo. The trains themselves are super, super efficient, running on time, very, very quick, and really, really reasonably priced. So that's just part of that infrastructure story.
But as you run through on the train journey, what you are seeing is all that concrete and steel that has been poured and laid down over the last 30 years to support these bigger and bigger cities. Beijing is, of course, about 20 million people. Tianjin, where I went, was a much smaller city, but still 12 million, so really nearly double the size of London.
And you're seeing pristine, well-ordered roads and expressways. And in fact, as I drove back from Tianjin to Beijing, the roads, again, were really, really impeccable Busy, the occasional jam of traffic, but running really, really smoothly. You know, thinking about other countries I visited, it certainly felt bigger in scale.
It felt more invested than anything I've seen in the US and things that I've seen in many parts of Europe, even some of the great construction projects like the Orison Sound crossing between Sweden and Denmark. compared to some of the things that have gone on in India, there isn't quite the same backdrop of chaotic India when you are in these highways and on the train lines.
So I was really struck about with the degree to which the infrastructure has been taken really, really seriously. Of course, this is not a new story because we've read about it in the papers and many of you have no doubt visited China dozens of times in the last decade or so. Some of you have probably lived there as well. But I would say that you just, I certainly noticed that sense of
of scale and quality of the infrastructure. It was also distinctly Asian, so there were parts of it that reminded me slightly of bits of Singapore. Infrastructure's great. You've got to then do things on top of that infrastructure.
And I had a chance to talk to some of the AI scientists and some AI founders in China, and I want to really reflect on that, plus certain things that I've read and have gone on over the last few days. I think there's a very distinct... path that the Chinese AI world is taking that's different to the US AI world.
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