I hope you are having a great end of your weekend. I was battling COVID all week, but am finally starting to feel better. Here’s this week’s list!
Next guest on Before We Get There podcast
The podcast will be on break this week for Chinese New Year, catch the next episode with BJJ blackbelt and coach Kenneth Tay on February 6. If you haven’t listened to it yet, this week’s episode was a great one. Founder of Lion City Meadery, Sanjay Jegatheeson joined me to talk about his entrepreneurial journey and many other activities. Listen to it on Spotify!
Big AI news this week
While Trump announced the huge US AI project, China is making waves with both DeepSeek and ByteDance, making headlines for models that beat ChatGPT on certain metrics. DeepSeek is notable because the model is open-source, and both have been developed for considerably less investment than the leaders we see today. Most of the headlines I saw focused on how ChatGPT and other Silicon Valley organizations are losing their lead to China. Frankly, I don’t think anyone should be surprised, China’s tech sector is huge and has been catching up or passing the US in many areas like EVs, digital payments, and solar. Because of the protectionist measures and limitations, the government puts on many areas, most big software applications and web services have a Chinese equivalent: Uber=Didi, Amazon=Taobao, Slack=Lark, Google=Baidu, Apple=Huawei/Xiaomi, etc. Naturally, gen AI would go in the same direction. Overall, I think it is a good thing for consumers; competition is beneficial for progress and prices.
Social Media trend this week
Speaking of China, the TikTok situation in the US led to a mass of “TikTok” refugees downloading Xiaohongshu (Rednote). Xiaohongshu is similar to TikTok and Douyin, but like Facebook and Instagram, there are slight differences in the style of content, user base, and engagement. The app reached the top of the Apple download charts and many Americans were shocked by how advanced Chinese cities and homes looked. There’s more to be said about how desperate users were to replace TikTok that they found an app that is all in Chinese to use instead. But I would rather focus on American social media users discovering more about China, which is the cool part. Most Americans really only know about China from what they hear on the news since their soft power is not as strong as Korea or Japan, so people aren’t consuming Chinese media. This was a nice introduction to many people on how advanced China is. Many American users were extremely impressed not only with the architecture and size of Chinese cities, but things like home appliances, Chinese-built cars, and how cheap groceries are. As someone who liked China enough to live there for 5 years, it is great to see more people learning about the country and people
Game I played this weekend
I’m not a huge gamer, but I enjoy relaxing by playing sometimes. My favorite genre is strategy games, over the years, series like Total War, Age of Empire, and Civilization have been my go-to’s. Recently I’ve found Paradox, a developer that makes historical strategy games that are intensely complex and take many hours to even understand the mechanics of why you keep getting destroyed every time. This weekend I started played Victoria 3, a game that starts in the mid-19th century and tasks you with progressing your country over the next 100 or so years. This game’s focus is economy and politics, so keeping your people happy and employed, and enacting laws that meet the demands of various political movements and lobbies are at the core. Sounds exciting right? I always enjoy taking the side of the underdog, so instead of playing as the US and trying to expand to the Pacific, or the Brits and expand their already giant empire; I chose to play as the Qing Dynasty, which collapsed during this period. I’ve only gotten through about 25 years, but am having a blast.
That’s all for this week, have a great Lunar New Year!