Show Notes
Robots are here, and they’re going to change the world, with Unitree currently in pole position. Joining me to discuss are Niko Ciminelli, longtime SemiAnalysis advisor, robot kid and VC along with Reyk Knuhtsen, robotics lead at SemiAnalysis. Lily Ottinger cohosts.
Our conversation covers:
Why robots are the real general-purpose technology because, for the first time in history, we can decouple capital from human labor.
How everyone keeps underestimating Unitree: the DJI and BYD playbooks, the danger of dismissing “robot dogs,” and why iteration speed matters more than dancing demos.
China’s edge: vertical integration, actuator manufacturing, and supply chains that make Chinese humanoids much cheaper than American ones.
Why you can’t AI your way out of a hardware problem or from a supply chain that makes your robot far more expensive to build.
What America should do next: allied supply chains, special economic zones, and industrial policy.
suno song: https://suno.com/s/EBSxwT7ltOerJJGD Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from ChinaTalk
Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss:
He was recently promoted to DIU’s acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Co-hosting are Brian Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a retired submariner, and Justin McIntosh, a twenty-year retired Green Beret who served in the 1st and 5th Groups, who now works in defense tech and writes a Substack called Mind of Things.
Richard Bian is the head of product operations for Ant Ling, the foundational LLM at Ant. If you don’t know Ant, they most famously make Alipay, which makes your money and your world run when you’re in China and sometimes beyond. Richard is a former software engineer at Microsoft and Square, and he previously served as head of open source at Ant, where he scaled the open source initiative into a dedicated team. He’s lived and worked in Singapore, Canada, the US, and China, and he loves to build products.
Saif Khan makes his ChinaTalk debut. He is perhaps my favorite example of posting-to-policy that I’ve seen over the course of my time following Washington. Saif wrote some truly excellent deep dives into AI and semiconductors during his time at CSET, then went into the NSC and Commerce in the early-to-mid 2020s, across both the Biden and Trump II administrations, to help manifest the export control regulatory regime we have today. He is now out of government and launching the Center for Technology and Statecraft, an IFP-affiliated think tank, which is already producing excellent, grounded, technical, forward-looking work that will certainly shape many an AI policy discussion in the years to come.
I join Matt and Jerusalem for an unhinged conversation (most entertaining of the year?) about China, AI, corruption, politics, and various other things.