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title: "notes inside china ai labs lambert"
source: newsletter
source_url: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/notes-from-inside-chinas-ai-labs
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ingested: 2026-05-09
feed_name: Interconnects
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created: 2026-05-10
updated: 2026-05-10
sha256: 104e69a4870c1e5442b67434c131ff290923711870dde2940dc5abcc4623e2e5
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# Notes from inside China's AI labs - by Nathan Lambert Subscribe Sign in Notes from inside China's AI
Notes from inside China's AI labs - by Nathan Lambert Subscribe Sign in Notes from inside China's AI labs Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China. Nathan Lambert May 07, 2026 211 29 30 Share Article voiceover 0:00 -16:35 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Staring out the window on a new, high-speed train from Hangzhou to Shanghai I’m gifted with views of dramatic ridgelines speckled with wind turbines that are silhouetted against the setting sun. The mountains cast a backdrop to a mix of spanning fields and clustered skyscrapers. I’m returning from China with great humility. It’s a very warming, human experience to go somewhere so foreign and be so welcomed. I had the honor of meeting so many people in the AI ecosystem who I knew from afar, and they greeted me with big smiles and cheer, reminding me how global my work and the AI ecosystem is. Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe The mentality of Chinese researchers The Chinese companies building language models are set up as the perfect fast-followers for the technology, building on long-standing cultural traditions in education and work, along with subtly different approaches to building technology companies. When you look at the outputs, the latest, biggest models enabling agentic workflows, and the ingredients, excellent scientists, large-scale data, and accelerated computing, the Chinese and American labs look largely similar. The lasting differences emerge in how these are organized and conditioned. I’ve long thought that a reason that the Chinese labs are so good at catching up and keeping up with the frontier is that they’re culturally aligned for this task, but without talking to people directly I felt like it wasn’t my place to attribute substantial influence to this hunch. Speaking with many wonderful, humble, and open scientists at the leading Chinese labs has crystallized a lot of my beliefs. So much of building the best LLMs today comes down to meticulous work across the entire stack, from data to architecture details and RL algorithm implementations. All points of the model can give some improvements, and fitting them in together is a complex process where the work of some brilliant individuals needs to get shelved in favor of the overall model maximizing a multi-objective optimization. Where American researchers are obviously also brilliant at solving the individual components, there’s more of a culture of speaking up for yourself in the U.S. As a scientist, you’re more successful when you speak up for your work and modern culture is pushing the new path to fame of “leading AI scientists”. This results in direct conflict. The Llama organization is heavily rumored to have collapsed under the political weight of these interests embedding themselves in a hierarchical organization. I’ve heard of other labs saying that it can be needed to pay off a top researcher to get them to stop complaining about their idea not making it in the final model. Whether or not that’s exactly true, the idea is clear. Ego and desires for career advancement do get in the way of making the best models. A small, directional shift in this sort of culture between the U.S. and China can have a meaningful impact on the final outputs. Some of this has to do with who is building the models in China. There’s an immediate reality at all of the labs that a large proportion of the core contributors are active students. The labs are quite young, and it reminds me of our setup at Ai2, where students are seen as peers and directly integrated in the LLM team. This is incredibly different from the top labs in the US, where the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. simply don’t offer internships. Other companies like Google nominally have internships related to Gemini, but there’s a lot of concern about whether your internship will be siloed and away from anything real. To summarize how the slight change in culture can improve the ability to build models: More willingness to do non-flashy work in order to improve the final model, People new to building AI can be free of prior phases of AI hype cycles, allowing them to adapt to the new modern techniques faster (in fact, one of the Chinese scientists I talked to really actively attached to this strength), Less ego enabling org charts to scale slightly, as there’s less gamifying the system, and Abundant talent well-suited to solving problems with a proof of concept elsewhere, etc. This slight inclination towards skills that complement building today’s language models stands in contrast to a known stereotype that Chinese researchers tend to produce less creative, field-spawning, 0-to-1 academic style research. Among the more academic lab visits on our trip, many leaders talk about cultivating this more ambitious research culture. At the same time, some technical leaders we talked to were skeptical about whether such a rewiring in the approach to science is likely in the near term, because it’ll take a redesign of the education and incentive systems that is too big to happen within the current economic equilibrium. This culture seems to be training students and engineers that are excellent at the LLM building game. They also, of course, have an extremely abundant quantity. These students told me about a similar brain drain happening in China as in the U.S., where many who previously considered academic paths now intend to stay in industry. The funniest quote was from a researcher who was interested in being a professor to be close to the education system, but remarked that education is solved with LLMs – “why would a student talk to me!” The students have a benefit of coming at LLMs with fresh eyes. Over the last few years we’ve seen the key paradigm of LLMs shift from scaling MoE’s, to scaling RL, to enabling agents. Doing any of these well involves absorbing an insane amount of context quickly, both from the broader literature and the technical stack at your company. Students are used to doing this and excited to humbly drop all presumptions about what should work. They dive in head first and dedicate their life to getting the chance to improve the models. These students are also so magically direct and free of some of the philosophical chatter that can distract scientists. When asking questions on how they feel about the economics or long-term social risks of models, far fewer Chinese researchers have sophisticated opinions and a drive to influence this. Their role is to build the best model. This difference is subtle, and easy to deny, but it is best felt when having long conversations with an elegant, brilliant researcher who can clearly communicate well in English, basic questions on more philosophical aspects of AI hang in the air with a simple confusion. It’s a category error to them. One researcher even quoted the famous Dan Wang premise of China being run by engineers, relative to the lawyers of the U.S. when probing in these areas, to emphasize their desire to build. There’s no track in China that systematically enables the growth of star power for Chinese scientists, akin to mega mainstream podcasts like Dwarkesh or Lex. Trying to get Chinese scientists to comment on the coming economic uncertainty fueled by AI, questions beyond the capabilities of simple AGI, or moral debates on how models should behave all served to capture the upbringing and education of these scientists (edited 1 ). They are extremely dedicated to their work, but have grown up in a system where debates and opinions on how society should be structured and changed are not encouraged. Zooming out — Beijing especially felt much like the Bay Area, where a competitive lab is a short walk or Uber away. I got off a flight and stopped by Alibaba’s Beijing campus on the way to the hotel. Then, in 36 hours we went to all of Z.ai, Moonshot AI, Tsinghua University, Meituan, Xiaomi, and 01.ai. Tr