thought leaders

All about the thought leading tech entrepreneurs who are paving the digital path of the future.

Huawei and DeepSeek Made Ascend Cheap Enough to Use. Training Is Still Nvidia’s Game.
A small change that explains the partnership SemiAnalysis’s The Huawei-DeepSeek Symbiosis includes a detail that is easy to skip. DeepSeek changed FlashMLA on Ascend so that quantized values and scales in the KV cache sit together. Fetching one token used to require two transfer requests. After the change, it requires one. The modification is too small for a strategy slide. It is an engineer counting memory transfers and deciding to send fewer.
By Jinabout 7 hours ago in 01
DeepSeek and the “National-Fate” Label: Three Things It Proved, Three Things It Didn’t
On January 26, 2025, Feng Ji wrote on Weibo that DeepSeek might be a national-fate-level scientific and technological achievement. His reasons were concrete: the model was powerful, cheap, open source, free, connected to the internet, and built by a domestic team. A game developer working from product experience had touched a pain point deeper than the product. The year and a half that followed showed what the phrase was pointing at.
By Jinabout 10 hours ago in 01
The Graphics Card Is Disappearing — and AI Is Why
I made a little pocket money flipping graphics cards this year. In March, I bought a 5070 Ti laptop for 14,200 yuan, used it for a couple of months, and sold it for 17,000. In July, I bought a 5070 Ti desktop for 13,800, used it for about a month, and sold it for 15,500. In October, after seeing news that HBM prices would rise again, I bought a TUF 5070 Ti for 8,200 and sold it three days later for 8,500. It was in good condition, so I didn’t push the price.
By Jin2 days ago in 01
The Last Shovel
In the second quarter of 2026, Baidu’s online marketing revenue was 13.1 billion yuan, down 19% from a year earlier. That was the fourth straight quarter of double-digit decline. For the first time, the business brought in less than half of Baidu’s core revenue. In the same earnings report, AI revenue accounted for 50% of the total, and GPU cloud revenue grew 283%.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
The 15-Minute Space TPU: Why Orbital Data Centers Are a Radiator Problem
Google's first Project Suncatcher prototype satellite has reached orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The spacecraft, built with Planet Labs and roughly the size of a refrigerator, carries four Google TPUs. Google says the ground team has made contact and that the satellite is operating as expected.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
AI Can Plant a Memory You Never Had. Then It Stamps "Approved" on the Next Mistake.
I keep coming back to the wedding photo. Two hundred people sat in front of screens at MIT and looked at 24 ordinary pictures. A wedding. A street. A footrace. Then the researchers showed them something else. Some saw the originals again. Some saw photos that AI had quietly altered. Some saw short videos built from those altered images, moving and continuous and believable.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
A Zendesk Ticket Hijacked an AI Agent Without Breaking One Rule
In May 2025, a company that had connected an AI agent to Jira and Zendesk was breached. The attack was simple. Someone wrote a passage in a public Zendesk support ticket that looked like ordinary feedback. It was an instruction. The agent read it, searched Jira for tickets containing JWT tokens, and posted the token it found in a public comment.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
DeepSeek Made Search Almost Free. The Number It Returns Is the Bigger Story
In Claude Code, you switch the backend model to DeepSeek and ask it to check the latest version of a library while writing code. It issues a search, gets back a few results, reads one, and keeps writing. The action is so light that developers barely notice it. But coding agents depend on search far more heavily than chat scenarios do. Look up one API parameter incorrectly, and the next dozens of tool calls, code generations, and test fixes are built on an outdated premise. One bad search does not just add one useless piece of information. The entire task chain has to start over.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
The Quiet Return of “Old-School” Programming
At two in the morning, an alert appeared in the on-call group: payment callback timeout. I opened my laptop. I checked downstream health checks, then the most recent diff, then the logs. Ten minutes later I found the problem. That order came from years of troubleshooting this project. AI can read logs. It cannot know where I look first. That “where first” is the system mental model I keep.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
Anthropic Told the IMF the Singularity Is Here. The $44 Trillion Slide Had Fine Print.
The air conditioning in the Bangkok conference hall was set low enough that people reached for their jackets before the session began. Jack Clark walked to the lectern of the IMF’s Per Jacobsson lecture at a pace that suggested he had rehearsed the first minute and not the rest. Behind him, the screen carried one line of figures: $44.4 trillion.
By Jin4 days ago in 01
A Model Company Built a Biology Lab. Here Is What It Is Testing.
Reuters reported that Anthropic built a biology lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, the company's head of life sciences, confirmed it. His reason: biological research ultimately has to be tested through physical experiments. Anthropic started doing some of that work internally and kept working with outside labs.
By Jin5 days ago in 01
The Failed Cloud Product That Ate ChatGPT
In the summer of 2025, in a conference room at Mission Bay, Dan Shipper said, “We don’t really look at the code anymore,” and blushed. Across from him sat Alexander Embiricos, former head of product for Codex. Two unopened bottles of water stood on the table. Arrows from an earlier discussion were still on the whiteboard. No one had erased them.
By Jin5 days ago in 01