Kevin Xu
@kevinsxu
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Building/Investing @ Interconnected Capital; Writing @interconnect_ed; ex. GitHub, PingCAP, Obama White House/Commerce Dept; hockey fan
Joined March 2009
2023: 170.13%.2024: 66.71%. 2023-2024 average annual return: 112.21%. 28 more years to go to reach my inner scorecard of 30+% return per year for 30 years. More in my annual letter 👇.
NEW POST: 2024 Annual Letter: Generational Company, Generational Wealth by @kevinsxu.
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DeepSeek is probably the least understood tier-1 AI company. Some interesting facts about DeepSeek:. - never received/sought outside funding (thus far). - self-funded out of a hedge fund (called High-Flyer). - entire AI team is reportedly recruited from within China, no one.
DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M). For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs, the ones being.
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1/ Morris Chang gave a sobering speech at the TSMC Arizona fab opening ceremony. He proclaimed that "globalization is almost dead" and this is just "the end of the beginning". Sadly no one listened; no covered the speech. Here's my transcript of what he said in a thread🧵👇.
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Jensen Huang, two days after Nvidia's historic quarterly earnings, flew to Taiwan to deliver the commencement speech at National Taiwan University. Not MIT. Not Harvard. NTU. He didn't talk about his wealth or success. Instead, he shared 3 near-death Nvidia stories and painted a.
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Who knew bikini model calendars would be the reason why America can't onshore advanced chip manufacturing.
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Me: Hi Senator Obama, I’m Kevin, a field organizer here in the Charlotte field office. Obama: hey Kev, you look like an organizer!. He would know. He was one. That was the last day anyone ever called him a “Senator”.
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When asked about the cost gap between its Arizona fabs and Taiwan fabs during $TSM earnings call, here was what Wendell Huang, its CFO, had to say:
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Tencent?. Huawei. Makes sense. DJI. ummm. sure. CATL. hmmm. ok. But Tencent? . Honor of Kings must be getting a bit too popular inside the Pentagon.
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Lee Kai-Fu's unicorn AI startup, apparently just forks LLaMA's architecture and changed a couple of tensor names. thanks to open source, it was pointed out in a HF thread for all to see: that's the state of AI in China, folks.
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As a passport carrying 🇨🇦, I'm embarrassed we need a US plane to shoot it down. As a passport carrying 🇺🇸, I'm embarrassed we need to shoot everything down. As a person of 🇨🇳 heritage, I'm embarrassed we can't navigate a balloon . As a citizen of the 🌎, I'm just embarrassed.
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According to the DeepSeek V3 paper, 139 engineers and researchers including the founder, Liang Wenfeng, worked on building this model. OpenAI's R&D team is ~1200 people. Anthropic's is at least 500.
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If passed, the RESTRICT Act basically spells "game over" for all China tech companies in the US . Not just: social media, ecommerce, networking equipment, drones. But also: SaaS, cloud services, infra, even open source software. Section 5 (see screenshot 1) spells out all areas
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Conflict and drama between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse 🧵.
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Gary Locke was my boss at the Commerce Department. He is inspiring, honorable, and the epitome of the American dream. He grew up in a housing project, became Governor/Secretary/Ambassador. His father fought in WWII. Locke is the BEST of America. Trump is the WORST.
Goddamn this shit is infuriating. Gary Locke is as American as the day is long. Trump rewriting history as if he effectively responded to the virus is utter garbage. We lost 70 days and thousands of lives due to his incompetence and disregard for what was happening overseas.
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Huawei poaches chips talent from the west because that's where the talent is. Renault poaches EV talent from China because that's where the talent is. That's how the global marketplace of talent works. Stop freaking out, just pay up for your talent (and keep training more)
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Beg to differ . DeepSeek's progress is direct evidence that US export control *is* working. Imagine if there were no export control at all? Where would the US-China AI race be? Every AI model startup founder in China laments the lack of GPU access. However, doesn't mean they give.
I don’t think the US chip export controls are having their intended effect. Chinese model DeepSeek v3 very strong, and trained with OOM less money: . “DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training”. (h800 is h100 with lower interchip bandwidth)
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To those of you who still think “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” are just benign jokes, my community is hurting, (literally) bleeding, and crying for help. Are you listening?.
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Wang told Rubio: "好自为之". I would not call that a sign of amity. If you don't know the connotation of that phrase, ask the "China consultants" nearest you, pay them well, and don't call them "my quant"
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This is the reason, in Morris Chang’s mind, why US semiconductor manufacturing won’t succeed to the level of Taiwan. It’s raw work ethics
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At this very moment, 3 of the top 5 apps on Apple US are made by Chinese tech. We are either in a national security crisis, or this is all a big nothing burger, or DC policy elites have so little credibility among ordinary Americans it doesn’t even matter if they are right
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16/ "Anyway I came here specifically to see the end of the beginning and to wish TSMC the best, in the full expectation that we are going to have success. And it will be a very meaningful success as Mark has just said. And my dream lives. Thank you very much." /END.
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Kumamoto supermarkets are now full of Taiwanese foods and products. Local international school expanded facility and hired Taiwanese teachers to cater to kids of TSMC engineers. All to support TSMC's success in Japan. Until Phoenix does the same and more, we have no chance.
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Night before his NTU commencement speech, Jensen hit up the Taipei night market, just like another normal person. What a guy. What a GOAT.
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With TikTok blackout imminent, the app that shot to the top of the chart is. not IG, not YT, not Snap, but RED!. The irony is so rich in this one I don't even know where to start. (Oh also, Lemon8 is another ByteDance app)
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Here is our translation of Zhang Yiming's last speech, possibly ever. It was delivered in March at ByteDance's annual all-hands, 2 months before resigning as CEO. One of the most philosophical, meditative, and self-aware tech CEO speeches I've ever read.
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Two weeks ago, RedNote topped the download chart . Today, it's DeepSeek. We are still in January. If constraint is the mother of invention, then collective ignorance is the mother of many downloads
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BREAKING: China Association of Automobile Manufacturers announces that Tesla has passed China’s data security test and cleared its data security risks. Announcement comes shortly after Musk met with Premier Li
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In the Chinese open source community, there is this thing that I would call open source "zeal" or "calling" (开源情怀). Most engineers are thrilled if their open source projects--a database, a container registry, etc-- are used by a foreign company, especially a silicon valley.
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11/ "The twenty-some years in the past have witnessed a big change in the world. A big geopolitical situation. Globalization is almost dead. Free trade is almost dead. And a lot of people still wish they would come back, but I really don’t think they will be back for a while.".
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This pod between @adam_tooze and @KaiserKuo is so friggin good. A must listen (link in next Xeet)
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1/ TSMC's earnings call last week revealed more details on how much and why chips will cost *much more* now that "globalization is dead". Thread🧵of salient parts w/ transcript screenshots from @KoyfinCharts + my own takes in bracket []👇.
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Morris Chang, the now 90 years old founder of TSMC, gave a speech (in Mandarin) last week (ht @ruima). Among other things, he shared personal views on Taiwan's advantages + sized up competition from 🇺🇸🇨🇳🇰🇷. Thread of highlights + his slides in traditional Chinese👇
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Polygon's design choice, trading off Consistency for Availability, is similar to a generation of popular NoSQL distributed databases: MongoDB, Cassandra, Dynamo, Cosmos, etc. No surprise Stripe chose @0xPolygon for its crypto payout product. 3/5.
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Arizona fab is delayed, so TSMC wants to bring 500 workers from Taiwan to speed things up. These workers will be on EB-2 visas. In response, Arizona Pipe Trades 469 union (for pipefitters) started a petition lobbying AZ lawmakers to deny their visas.
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15/ "So before we see a single wafer, we have more than a thousand people being trained. This I think is a very good sign that we are prepared. It’s a very good sign that my dream of 25 years ago will now be fulfilled by Mark.".
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Like I said, this conflict between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse. How this conflict gets resolve may make or break US industrial policy.
Conflict and drama between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse 🧵.
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One non-technical interesting thing in the DeepSeek V3 paper: . Everyone at the company got a shoutout, even the Business and Compliance team . Very on brand, given its idealistic vibe
DeepSeek is probably the least understood tier-1 AI company. Some interesting facts about DeepSeek:. - never received/sought outside funding (thus far). - self-funded out of a hedge fund (called High-Flyer). - entire AI team is reportedly recruited from within China, no one.
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Before you read this White House statement, consider these facts first. In 2023, the Big Three sold this many cars in China:. GM: 2,099,000.Ford: 467,000 (Ford includes Taiwan here).Stellantis: ~100,000 (groups China, India, elsewhere in APAC together, so I only took 50%). And.
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2/ "When I started TSMC back in 1987, I had a dream. Probably because of my background, which up to that point, was primarily America. Probably because of my background, my dream was to build fabs in the United States.".
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Meanwhile, a Taiwanese news YouTube channel with ~3 million subs made a video saying:. - American workers are lazy.- They use their phones at work (with a grainy photo), a big no-no at TSMC fabs.- Workers join TSMC as a springboard to work at Intel.
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Answer: open source is the soft power of technology diffusion; China has recognized that . Western policymakers need to get smart on open source's soft power fast, and stop being bamboozled by closed source AI labs' regulatory capture schemes . Or get caught flatfooted, again.
What's the best explanation you've heard for why China is leaning so hard into open source? It's now an official position from the foreign ministry apparently.
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US export control is no doubt hurting "the Chinese". It is also starting to hurt Americans. Here are some inconvenient facts from independent research done by the New York Fed. 🧵👇.
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More on the RESTRICT Act:. Section 11: there's civil penalty for up to $250,000 for violating the Act -- presumably if someone uses a VPN to access a banned TikTok, that would be a violation. The US may, indeed, be out China-ing China
If passed, the RESTRICT Act basically spells "game over" for all China tech companies in the US . Not just: social media, ecommerce, networking equipment, drones. But also: SaaS, cloud services, infra, even open source software. Section 5 (see screenshot 1) spells out all areas
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Zhang Xiaojun, one of my favorite independent tech journalists in China, wrote a long piece on the state of VC investing in Chinese AI startups. Some interesting takeaways:. - Vast majority of the $$ are concentrated in ~10 startups led by either already successful and wealthy.
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.@JiayangFan is an accomplished, professional writer. I'm neither of those things. But we both learned English as a 2nd language & I'd love to do an open thread about all the insecurities/self-doubts/etc re writing in Eng. Are ppl interested in this thread?.Are you up for it JY?.
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If Chinese people do it, it's called "stealing". If Stanford people do it, it's called "the next big thing". If anyone else does it, it's just called "forking". That's where things stand right now in the geopolitics of open source.
We must ban open-source because China keeps stealing… oh wait what… umm nevermind.
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@hlntnr Tested and wrote about this exact topic a week ago. tldr: model is *not* censored when open version is deployed locally, so it "knows" everything . it *is* censored when accessed via the official chatbot interface . censorship happens in the cloud, not in the model.
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14/ "And we hired almost 600 engineers here a year and a half ago, we sent them to Taiwan, and they were under training in Taiwan for one year to a year and a half. In the meantime, about the same number of Taiwan engineers underwent training in Taiwan also.".
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Morris Chang and Joe Tsai did an event together at the Asia Society. The one newsworthy item was Chang sharing over lunch (later revealed by moderator during event) that TSMC Arizona will reach TSMC Taiwan's capabilities in 1-2 years. Sounds like TSMC AZ may be doing better
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5/ "However, we ran into cost problems. We ran into people problems. We ran into cultural problems. And before long, the dream fulfilled became a nightmare fulfilled." [nervous laughter from the crowd].
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10/ "The romance of the beginning is gone! The initial excitement is gone! A lot of hard work remains, a lot of hard work…".
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A great human story from @restofworld @violazhouyi of TSMC's Arizona struggles. For people who are bicultural and worked in between US/East Asia, the observations are familiar anecdotes. For people who haven't, it is a jarring but real account.
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palantir business model: collective delusion and gaslighting.
this take not looking all that hot today. Alex Karp: "There is no tech scene in China and Russia. There are no software companies.".
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3/ "So, eight years from our start up, we started in 1987, and in 1995, we broke ground in a town called Camas, which is in the state of Washington, just on the border of Oregon, In fact, it's very close to Portland, Oregon.".
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9/ "It is a Taiwan custom. I did not understand what the name meant at first, but now, I’ve heard it so many times, I’ve been at 'first tool-in' ceremonies so many times, I now understand what it means. Basically it means, the end of the beginning. for a factory".
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Had a long 💛to💛 w/ mom. She told me when she came to 🇺🇸 in 1992 by herself, she brought a grand total of $1600. Once she only spent 50 bucks a month & was ecstatic -- confident she could keep going and bring me to 🇺🇸 one day. Things immigrant parents do for their kids.
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My new @interconnect_ed post profiles Polygon @0xPolygon's origin story, core technology & potential as an investment. To me, Polygon is web3's MongoDB, and more. Summary 🧵👇 1/5.
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The man who DELIBERATELY crosses off the "corona"virus to call it the "Chinese" virus will NEVER speak for the Chinese AMERICAN community.
Asian Americans are VERY angry at what China has done to our Country, and the World. Chinese Americans are the most angry of all. I don’t blame them!.
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This is quite a profound observation . the parallel between Jack Ma at his height and Musk today with DOGE etc, never mind the parallel between Trump and XJP, in terms of political power is eerily similar . Ma was an informal emissary during Trump 1.0, met him at Trump Tower
This take is not wrong. Jack Ma, instead of being a face of private business, had way more political ambitions than the western world cared to recognize. At the height, he was nicknamed “Governor Ma”, as his clout was comparable to a provincial boss (proven by several.
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A separate website was made, targeting AZ lawmakers to "Stand With American Workers, Hold TSMC Accountable". Narrative is on TSMC insulting American workers by bringing in cheap foreign labor, not creating jobs. Site is funded by Arizona Pipe Trades 469.
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China's Third Plenum Decision doc just dropped. Generative AI made a grand total of ONE appearance, under Section 10 "Deepening Reform in the Cultural Sector". It is treated as a cultural and cyberspace problem, not a magic pill of productivity. A short 🧵on the implications👇.
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12/ "In the meantime, because of the change in political situation, the new dream, well…it’s the old dream revived, has the help of the US government, the federal government, the state government, the local government.".
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There are many legit differences between Mainland and Taiwanese cultures, broadly speaking. Though in the narrow confines of huge tech companies, e.g. TSMC, ByteDance, Alibaba, etc. the cultures could not be more similar
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Where is the source/proof that DeepSeek has a 50k H100s cluster?. (just trying to learn and update my priors).
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A good day to share this rarely scene photo by @PeteSouza of Gary Locke, Steven Chu, & Eric Shinseki. Pretty sure @BarackObama never asked them where are they REALLY from before nominating them to be the Commerce, Energy & Veteran Affairs Secretary respectively. cc @ChrisLu44
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6/ "It took up several years to untangle ourselves from the nightmare. And I decided that I needed to postpone the dream, just postpone, just postpone it…".
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8/ "Incidentally, this ceremony was called the first 'tool-in'. Nobody outside Taiwan understood what that meant, so now it’s called 'opening ceremony'.".
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To my fellow Chinese Americans: . Stay strong!. We've been bombarded with #coronavirus news on WeChat long before Twitter noticed. We've been worried for our parents, relatives, friends in China for weeks, sending them information, love, masks.
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4/ "We called it Wafertech. It was a well-conceived semiconductor factory. Its technology was completely up to date at that time. It was, I thought, a dream fulfilled.".
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7/ "25 years passed and we have a new chairman, Mark Liu. And he happens to share my dream! Now you see a partial, not yet fulfilled, but progress of this dream.".
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"My dream has been to become an R&D engineer at TSMC". Until enough people say that in America -- for TSMC or Intel or Samsung or any chip maker -- CHIPS Act is nothing but a band-aid (and, so far, an ineffectual one).
We’ve been trying to get access inside Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for 2 YEARS. TSMC is the world leader in advanced chips & in the midst of a global expansion. But can their business model work outside of Taiwan? @EricCheungwc @JohnnyMees & I went to find out.
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Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD, was born into a peasant family with 7 other siblings. His father, a carpenter, died when Wang was 13. Mother died when he was in junior high. His home town, Wuwei (无为), can literally be translated to “no achievement”. Whether you like BYD or.
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This post from the same IBEW 640 FB group showed screenshots of dismissive, insulting and racist comments from a (supposedly) popular Taiwanese online forum about US workers.
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An interesting think tank report, sadly diminished by a misleading headline. Half of this 3.4B to BYD came in the form of purchase subsidies, i.e. incentives for consumers to buy EVs. The fact that BYD got the most just means people wanted BYD EVs the most. Tesla was 2nd.
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13/ "Not only that, we did learn from our experience earlier, and we are far more prepared now.".
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Out of the ~$53 billion incentives, only last week did some $238 million get distributed. That's less than 1%. And they are funding R&D hubs, aka "labs", not the fabs we desperately need to make more chips (. What's happening to the fabs subsidies?.
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We don't want Asian countries making our chips . But we want (need) Asians to make our chips . But we don't want THAT many Asians, only the "good" ones we like (need). City on this hill only shines (immigration) when it needs you.
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Also, can't help but see this picture as a giant middle finger from the desert cactus to the looming fabs 😂🙃
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Local IBEW 640's Facebook group is lit up with posts about TSMC claiming US workers lacking skills as a disguise to bring cheaper labor from Taiwan. (IBEW = International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers).
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2/ "We're not able to share with you a specific cost gap number between Taiwan and US, but we can share with you that the major reason for the cost gap is the construction cost of building and facilities, which can be 4 to 5x greater for US fab versus a fab in Taiwan."
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Skipped dinner yesterday b/c felt compelled to produce an English version of Jack Ma's Bund Summit speech. Don't normally do translation, but most coverage of speech + Ant IPO cancellation has been lacking & simplistic. Worth reading in its entirety👇
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Before you take for granted that China is restricting US autos domestically, it's not true. It is true for social media and Internet companies, not true for autos. As a former Obama White House staffer, I respect and am fond of many who work in the Biden admin. But this post-fact
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All these attempts to restrict open source, first in AI, then in chip design (i.e. RISC-V), are: ill-advised, short-sighted, bad for innovation, and impossible to enforce. Or in one word: dumb!.
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Profile update. Excited to work with @ericabrescia and Hubbers everywhere to bring GitHub to more developers all around the 🌏.
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This is massive validation for @0xPolygon, the incredible team built by @jdkanani @sandeepnailwal @anuragarjun @MihailoBjelic, and the potential of the web3 ecosystem in India.
3/ USDC provides an open platform for connecting people with value, with Twitter users able to bring a digital wallet and receive payments. By building on USDC for Polygon, it allows for large-scale transactions at pennies cost. Yes, crypto payments can reach internet scale!.
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"In semiconductors, especially the most advanced semiconductors, globalization is dead. Global free trade is also dead." -- Morris Chang, founder of TSMC, said yesterday.
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This is the most accurate, and most profound, thread on the larger implications of DeepSeek. We've had:.- Linux vs Windows.- Netscape vs IE.- many many OSS databases vs Oracle.- Kubernetes vs AWS. DeepSeek is the Linux/Netscape etc of the AI era.
DeepSeek v3 and R1 open source releases have similar vibes to Mosaic's Netscape browser release in 1994. It ushered in an entirely new era, a pivotal moment in the development of the Internet. That it's a Chinese company makes it all the more interesting of a plot twist.
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@JosephJacks_ small nit: he said around 600,000 H100 equivalents of compute including other type of GPUs. but larger point stands. this is a BFD 😉.
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0/ NEW POST: "What Does Agora $API Do?". With Clubhouse becoming the hottest social app in SV since probably Snapchat, and it being built on Agora, more ppl may want to know what $API actually does. It more than deserves its own deep dive. Thread👇.
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OpenAI decides to crack down on API access from "foreign countries of concern", starting with PRC/HK. It's a continuation of preventing cyberattacks from state-affiliated entities, disclosed in Feb (. But also signals new phase of AI export control🧵👇
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