The enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.
Read this the other day and shared with many IRL. Very well articulated historical context and balanced view of "techno-realism" in China, meanwhile an emotional piece resonates deeply w me. 🙏
The data from this week sharpens your framing: Chinese inference costs dropped 99% in one quarter (Tencent Cloud -97.5%, DeepSeek -90%). When compute becomes nearly free, 'optimism and fear coexisting' stops being a cultural observation and becomes a structural one. Industries that can absorb displacement are adopting rapidly; ones that can't are watching from the same feeds. The workers who survived the 90s restructuring trained their children to code. We cover exactly these convergences at China AI Dispatch.
Read this the other day and shared with many IRL. Very well articulated historical context and balanced view of "techno-realism" in China, meanwhile an emotional piece resonates deeply w me. 🙏
Brought back memories. Thank you for writing it.
The data from this week sharpens your framing: Chinese inference costs dropped 99% in one quarter (Tencent Cloud -97.5%, DeepSeek -90%). When compute becomes nearly free, 'optimism and fear coexisting' stops being a cultural observation and becomes a structural one. Industries that can absorb displacement are adopting rapidly; ones that can't are watching from the same feeds. The workers who survived the 90s restructuring trained their children to code. We cover exactly these convergences at China AI Dispatch.
As with any technological revolution in China, innocent people will be sacrificed in this wave
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Web advertising in the PC era
Baidu fraud searches in the search era
The screen is full of loan portals that are easy to accidentally touch
Now, the income is 3.5 yuan for 6 kilometers
In the future, 1,000 clicks earn 0.5 yuan in income