Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

AI in 2025 – A global perspective, with Kai-Fu Lee

Jan 2, 2025

Kai-Fu Lee, a leading AI researcher and entrepreneur from Taiwan, explores the future of AI in 2025, emphasizing the contrasting trajectories of the Chinese and U.S. markets. He highlights how Chinese companies are crafting unique generative AI solutions without predefined SaaS layers, leading to specialized integrations. Lee predicts a shift towards 'AI-first' applications across industries, with significant reductions in operational costs and an increased focus on inference over training. The discussion also touches on the evolving role of productivity tools and innovative search technologies.

50:23

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Kai-Fu Lee

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Quick takeaways

The Chinese market's adoption of generative AI is characterized by incremental development and a focus on creating domain-specific solutions, unlike the swift western reception exemplified by ChatGPT.

As we approach 2025, a shift towards AI-first applications is redefining user interaction and productivity in creative processes, dramatically altering how tasks like document creation and complex inquiries are approached.

Deep dives

Generative AI's Global Impact

Generative AI is making significant waves in Asia, particularly in China, although the scale is not yet comparable to the U.S. The emergence of numerous competitive models has made the technology more accessible, albeit with a slower adoption rate than witnessed with ChatGPT. Kai-Fu Lee highlights that while the research community is buzzing about generative AI's potential, the experience of users in China differs due to local dynamics. The ability of Chinese companies to create affordable, effective AI models is gradually fostering innovation and applications in the region.

Intro

2min

The Rise of Generative AI Tools

7min

Enhancing Research and Writing with AI

4min

The Future of AI: Innovations and Inferences

16min

Balancing Speed and Quality in AI Applications

2min

Enhancing Search Experiences Through Intelligent Design

2min

AI Affordability and Future Prospects

17min

Kai-Fu Lee joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Kai-Fu is a storied AI researcher, investor, inventor and entrepreneur based in Taiwan. As one of the leading AI experts based in Asia, I wanted to get his take on this particular market.

Key insights:

Kai-Fu noted that unlike the singular “ChatGPT moment” that stunned Western audiences, the Chinese market encountered generative AI in a more “incremental and distributed” fashion.
A particularly fascinating shift is how Chinese enterprises are adopting generative AI. Without the entrenched SaaS layers common in the US, Chinese companies are “rolling their own” solutions. This deep integration might be tougher and messier, but it encourages thorough, domain-specific implementations.
We reflected on a structural shift in how we think about productivity software. With AI “conceptualizing” the document and the user providing strategic nudges, it’s akin to reversing the traditional creative process.
We’re moving from a training-centric world to an inference-centric one. Models need to be cheaper, faster and less resource-intensive to run, not just to train. For instance, his team at ZeroOne.ai managed to train a top-tier model on “just” 2,000 H100 GPUs and bring inference costs down to 10 cents per million tokens—a fraction of GPT-4’s early costs.
In 2025, Kai-Fu predicts, we’ll see fewer “demos” and more “AI-first” applications deploying text, image and video generation tools into real-world workflows.

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