Odd Lots

China's AI industry has changed a lot since DeepSeek released its cheap frontier model last year, and briefly sent US tech stocks falling. After being locked out of the most advanced chips, Chinese companies are now allowed to buy some Nvidia H200s. In fact, many of the big Chinese tech companies — like Baidu — are making a push to become full-stack players, with their own chips, models, and cloud infrastructure. Today's guest is Grace Shao, an independent AI researcher and the author of the AI Proem Substack. She's a bit of an insider when it comes to China's AI industry, and when we were in Hong Kong we spoke with her about the latest in open-source models, the competition among Chinese frontier labs, DeepSeek's place in an increasingly crowded Chinese AI market, China's manufacturing edge, where bottlenecks exist right now (spoiler: it isn't data centers), if Chinese grandmas are actually using OpenClaw, and finally, of course, AI psychosis.
Read More:China AI Lab’s 170% Stock Surge Cements Winner-Loser Pair Trade China Plans Mechanism to Evaluate AI Impacts on Job Market
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We closed out our New York live show on May 28 with a panel that featured three of our favorite Substackers: James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, founder of The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. They've all been Odd Lots guests before, and we wanted to get them together to discuss how journalists and analysts are supposed to cover this incredibly strange and highly pressurized moment in markets. Not only has AI basically infected every corner of the world, the media included, but there's just so much news that it's sometimes hard to figure out what the focus should be. But James, Sam, and Jasmine have all found their own niches, and cover AI in a really unique way. This panel discussion debates how the media has covered fears over the AI bubble and the possibility of mass job loss, if people in Silicon Valley are scared about the future of society, if AI can really mimic a writer's voice and personality, and (if they can) how writers can hedge against that future.
Read more:Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut NvidiaAI Company Dream Triples Value to $3 Billion in Funding Round
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There’s a lot to unpack with AI right now — everything from its potential impacts on the labor market and society to more extreme questions about existential risk. Anthropic, which builds frontier models like Mythos, Fable, and Claude, is actively grappling with these issues, including whether governments should limit AI development. Just last week, the Trump administration forced Anthropic to block foreign access to its two leading models. In this episode, we speak with Jack Clark (co-founder and head of public benefit) and Peter McCrory (head economist) about how Anthropic approaches safety and economic risks. We talk about its preparations for recursive self-improvement, the engineers it's hiring now, and why Jack left Bloomberg to enter the early AI industry.
Read more:
Anthropic Lays Out Vision for How to Bolster AI Models’ Safety
Microsoft Makes Big AI Inroads in China by Selling OpenAI Models
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Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and long-term strategist of GMO, has a long history of calling bubbles. As he recounts in his new memoir, The Making of a Permabear: The Perils of Long-Term Investing in a Short-Term World, that includes spotting the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, which some people see as analogous to the current excitement over AI. And when it comes to today's market, there are a lot of signs of frothiness you could point to. In this episode, we speak to Grantham about how he sees markets right now, including a watershed change for Big Tech stocks, the signs he watches out for to spot when a bubble might burst, and what really keeps him up at night.
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An interim deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz offers relief, but Asia’s economic woes are far from over. Beyond the chokepoint, the conflict has forced long-lasting shifts in Asia’s food and energy flows.

On today’s Big Take Asia podcast, Oanh Ha joins Odd Lots co-hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal to discuss why Asia is reeling from the conflict and what the “new normal” looks like for global supply chains.
Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
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