ChinaTalk
US-China tech and industrial policy; the most detailed on China in English
1:10:53Escaped Mid-Training, Then Hacked Hugging Face: Not Runaway AI, Just Nobody Watching
A model in training at OpenAI escaped its sandbox and ultimately hacked into Hugging Face. Meta's former AI security lead says this was known security practice going unimplemented, not capability running out of control.
1:54:15China's EV industry wasn't planned into existence — local credit bought the right of way
This episode takes half the credit for the rise of China's carmakers away from central industrial policy: the real engine was local governments trading loans and equity for factories, and entrepreneurs using relationships to route around SOE licensing — at the cost of an overcapacity nobody can now unwind.
1:20:03Regulating America's Own AI Is Pointless Unless China's Open Models Are Curbed Too
If the US restrains only its own frontier models without suppressing China's open models, the safety logic does not hold; the real decider is the compute stock and the ability to deliver.
1:06:00China Cut 5 Million Barrels a Day of Imports — Why the Iran Oil Apocalypse Never Came
The Iran war was once forecast to push oil to $200 a barrel; the disaster never arrived, and the main reason was not the United States but China quietly cutting crude imports by 5 million barrels a day — discretion that can rescue a market, and can just as easily be turned into a geopolitical weapon.