China AI Digest (Aug 2, 2026)

Three podcasts, one question: what do you hand to the machine, and what do you keep? Zhang Xiaoyun spends an hour and forty minutes with Tsinghua's Liu Ziming — first author of the KAN paper, just back from MIT — on China's neo-lab frenzy: product-less research labs raising at hundreds of millions of dollars, with world models and AutoResearch (AI for AI) soaking up the capital. AI Weekly Talk turns one year old and publishes a letter to its "shareholders", arguing the "buy the bottleneck" trade is approaching its end — and that waiting is also a kind of action. Dafang Says AI+ maps four ways the product manager's job is being rebuilt: capability becomes command, scenarios become skills, tasks become agents, experience becomes an asset.