Zixuan Li is Director of Product and genAI Strategy at Z.ai. He was educated at Renmin and Tsinghua University in China, and at MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Z.ai has released frontier open source LLMs but is largely unknown in the West except among AI experts. Steve and Zixuan discuss the AI race from the perspective of a startup in Beijing.

https://chat.z.ai/

Chapter markers:

(00:00) - Introduction and Guest Background
(05:14) - Z.ai's Evolution and Challenges
(10:37) - AI Model Comparison and Industry Insights
(34:04) - Pragmatic Views on AGI in China
(35:51) - Specialized Models and Scientific Contributions
(39:02) - AI Chips and Model Training in PRC
(50:54) - Open Source AI and Future Predictions

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

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