Top all-time · #12249
David Cheng
Personal blog · earnedintuition.substack.comstartupsbusinesseconomics
David Cheng writes Earned Intuition, a personal blog at earnedintuition.substack.com about startups, business and economics. Since 2026, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “A week in Beijing and Shanghai with the people building AI in China”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite this blog for an account of China's AI race, based on a week in Beijing and Shanghai with people building AI there, covering internal competition among labs and why Chinese models are open.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Scars and signals from a decade of investing in early stage venture.
Most-linked posts?
- A week in Beijing and Shanghai with the people building AI in China6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-09-23
What Hacker News says?
https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex... Kind of says that internal China competition is more intense than from America. I think there is both, but I would say it isn't like the "whole state" is backed against "us" in AI.
Comment linking /p/involution-without-export-is-wasted
on “DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models”Submitted Involution Without Export Is Wasted Effort as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme. Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0] [0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involutio…
Comment linking /p/involution-without-export-is-wasted
on “Mistral Large 4”Submitted A week in Beijing and Shanghai with the people building AI in China as a story · 7 points
HN discussion"A week in Beijing and Shanghai with the people building AI in China": https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex... does a decent job of exploring some possible reasons
Comment linking /p/involution-without-export-is-wasted
on “The AI Race Just Got Awkward”Submitted Involution Without Export Is Wasted Effort as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere are 1000 Chinese labs. They are involuting, they cannot coordinate and the state won't let them coordinate because the state wants domination, not actual profits for anybody. So the market forces are allowed to dominate. Because of the basic huge recession going on in China, you can't actually make money in China doing China things. So they gotta gird up their export stuff and try to export. That entails stron…
Comment linking /p/involution-without-export-is-wasted
on “The AI Race Just Got Awkward”