Industrial Maximalism and Its Discontents: Dan Wang on US-China Competition – # 104

Links:Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Futurehttps://www.amazon.com/Breakneck-Chinas-Quest-Engineer-Future/dp/1324106034Dan's 2025 annual letterhttps://danwang.co/2025-letter/Related episodes:Jian Lian on Industrial Maximalism, Manifold Episode #99https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/jian-lian-on-chinas-industrial-policy-and-global-strategy-99(00:00) - Introduction and Welcome (02:14) - Breakneck - Dan's huge book (05:00) - China's Technological and Political Landscape (21:07) - Industrial Maximalism and its Discontents (47:59) - Chinese Researchers in Silicon Valley and Tsinghua (51:09) - Excerpts from Dan's 2025 annual letter (52:56) - China's Market Competition and Innovation (56:34) - AI, Automation, and Future Risks –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 [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.