huaijiang (@huaijiangzhu)

my spicy theory is that chinese ai labs keep winning because of culture, not talent or resources. chinese labs still have a deeply hands-on engineering culture. deepseek and kimi are flat organizations where science and engineering are fused: the same people move between algorithms, data, and infra, doing whatever it takes to make the model work. but sf tech bros have decided that “researcher” is the high-status title while infra is merely support work. every new sf ai startup calls itself a “lab,” every ambitious engineer quietly upgrades their title to “research engineer,” and the infra work is left to whoever failed to escape it. but at frontier scale, infra determines experiment velocity, and experiment velocity determines research output. at frontier scale, infra **is** research.