China AI Digest (Aug 16, 2026)

Three podcasts, one lesson: being right isn't enough — you must survive being right. AI Weekly Talk dissects the collapse of Situational Awareness: Leopold Aschenbrenner up 439% at $45bn, then down 67% in July as 4x leverage forced a fire sale of SK Hynix and CoreWeave to Citadel. Zhang Xiaoyun spends four hours with Nvidia research VP Ming-Yu Liu on Cosmos 3, world foundation models, Sun Tzu, and Jensen Huang's mandate — "take it to Cosmos 97." What's Next unpacks MIT's "cognitive debt" EEG study and Wharton's guardrail trial, where free-ChatGPT students scored 20% lower on the exam.