China Tech Talk

I’ve been wanting to do an episode on GLM-5.2 & Zhipu for a while, but didn’t get a chance to do so. Last week, I did a live stream on Carl Zha’s channel and here is my piece on it.
I’ve had very good experience with GLM-5.2 so far and will probably move up a level in coding plan if their next release makes a similar level of jump. I’ve also had good experience with Kimi 2.6 & 2.7. Although in terms of Software engineering, GLM-5.2 is clearly better from my personal experience.
I would just recommend everyone to get off Opus and Claude Code. Try the cheaper GLM through ZCode or Kimi through Kimi Code. Or you can get both. Sometimes, one model would be better and other times, the other one will be better.


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This week, I welcome Andy from Multipolarity podcast onto my show. I’ve been listening to his show for a while and always enjoyed him and Phillip Pilkington’s discussion on geopolitics, European politics and the increasing multiploar world that we live in.
We talked about everything for quite a while. I was really interesting in how someone with multipolar view from Europe would look at the Russian/Ukraine conflict as well as the Iran conflict. I think you will find that we had a lot of common view point. It seems like European leaders are waiting for Trump to fall apart and lose elections so that the democrats can get back in power and fix everything. I’m not sure that’s a good approach, but there is definitely the European pitch of “If you continue to support us with Ukraine, we will help you squeeze China”.
As two people that think this world has profoundly changed to multipolar, we both think this is not an approach that works well with the current power dynamics globally. In fact, a dramatically weakened US from Iran conflict would not only hurt Trump, but hurt the position of the collective West.
And we also finished up agreeing on something I’ve personally been thinking about. What happens to UK as it goes on this decline? Do we have Scottish independence or a unification of Ireland. These are actually real problems that few people seem to be talking about publicly.


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When I started really getting into Chinese EVs in 2022/2023, there really wasn’t that much material in English about what was going on in China's EV industry. When I did search on YouTube, I would often find content by Wheelsboy, Elliott Richards and my guys today China Driven/Will Sundin.
I remember watching some of the earlier content by Will and just seeing his driving experience on various NIO and Li Auto models. This was before Li Auto was really known by anyone outside of China. You could see back then just how good the L1 and L9 were and why people in China were buying them instead of BMW.
So, I managed to get hold of Will this week and bring him on the show to talk about how he moved to China, got into doing videos of Chinese EVs, his experience with NIO, Li Auto and experiences with China’s EV sector as a whole. We ended the show talking about his experiences from the recent Beijing Auto Show and also what vehicles Will would buy. It was a really great chat with Will and I would love to have him back on the show in the future. Please follow him on his Youtube channel and X/Twitter.


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I had the pleasure this week to welcome Marcel on my show. I would recommend everyone to follow Marcel on X as well as on his website and YouTube channel. A really good guy and we had a great discussion. I first followed and noticed Marcel because of his commentaries on China’s EV industry and especially NIO. However, he actually talks about more than that on both X and our episode. I think he is very well tuned into China’s tech industry as well as life in Shenzhen. He even mentioned to me that his work involves helping German companies navigate challenges in the China market as well as understanding Chinese companies entering European market + opportunities from all of this.
I was pleasantly surprised that he mentioned Tuya as the under the radar company that he thought very highly of. I actually only found out about them a few months ago as I was getting really into embodied AI supply chain in China.
So, I recommend everyone to check it out and let me know what you think. And I recommend everyone to visit Shenzhen.


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I had the pleasure to join Grace on this episode of AI Proem. We covered a lot of topics here. A lot of stuff on AI, semiconductors and robotics, but obviously also all the other techs that I talk about.
I didn’t break ground on anything new, but I did voice my opinion regarding China’s housing market slowdown at the end and how I think people are completely misreading the story.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com