afra wang (@afrazhaowang)

My first piece for @NewYorker is out today! As Xi Jinping lands in DC to start his state visit, you'll hear a lot about the US-China AI race. I'd like to tell a complementary AI story. This past May, a few days after Trump visited Beijing, I went to the town people call China's vibe-coding capital, Liangzhu. There, you learn that China's AI scene is not monolithic. It's also full of contrarians, cool vibe coders, spiritual seekers, and people who love AI but refuse to join the 996 grind. Liangzhu is on the edge of Hangzhou. I hung out with a group of anti-mainstream builders who use AI to make whimsical apps for fortune-telling, mental well-being, and creativity. Some of them run their lives entirely by bazi astrology (their founder almost became a Taoist monk). They meet on "Crazy Thursday" to vibe-code together. Rent is cheap, so they can get a bigger place with a living room to have friends over (unthinkable in Beijing or Shenzhen). In Liangzhu, they want to use AI to forge their own future. It’s a ground-level story—less about model capabilities, hyperscalers, or AI policy, and more about how people in China are using AI, and the human stories behind it.

thing i know about the company behind GLM: 1. is known as "Zhipu" before being rebranded as a sleeker "". The Chinese name still tells you the lineage: “智谱” means knowledge graphs or intelligence graph. It is born from the academic knowledge graphs AMiner from Tsinghua 2. came out of Tsinghua’s orbit, and an embodiment of the Tsinghua-to-company pipeline 3. Tang Jie, the founder, is still “Professor Tang” to many people. He reads less like a Silicon Valley founder and more like a CEO grown out of China’s University-State-Industry system 4. is very 2G / 2 enterprise: it's the AI company that installs controllable large-model capacity into banks, governments, SEOs, schools, and office systems 5. one funny detail i cannot stop thinking about: Tang Jie owns “big model” is a literal china-english translation for 大模型 (LLM) but funnier 6. Tang Jie was also the undergraduate research advisor of Yang Zhilin, Moonshot’s founder.