China AI Digest (Aug 23, 2026)

Three podcasts, one scissors: intelligence keeps getting cheaper while the machine underneath it gets vastly more expensive. AI Weekly Talk uses Niu Lai — the animated flop that took ¥7,705 in ten days, then went viral past ¥10m — to argue that 20-person teams like Cursor have voided the old rules about team size, category and moats. LatePost's Wan Dian Liao opens up distillation, the technique nobody will discuss on the record: agent-trajectory copying, Zhang Yiming telling ByteDance's Seed team not to distil, and Anthropic's 16 million harvested exchanges. Dafang Says AI+ goes to Pike County, Ohio, where OpenAI and Nvidia have locked eight gigawatts on a twenty-year lease — and argues that power, not model quality, is now the binding constraint.