Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI

Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI – Odd Lots

Mentioned

Bullish

MINIMAX— Chinese AI startup MiniMax is valued at $20B but generating $1-1.2B in revenue with strong growth trajectory, focused on multimodality capabilities and making money through managed services despite open source models.
ZAI— ZAI (GLM) is publicly listed in Hong Kong, generating significant revenue through focus on coding capabilities, positioned as China's answer to Claude Code/Codex with strong developer adoption.
DEEPSEA— DeepSeek is pushing frontier research and acting as foundational layer for China's AI ecosystem, with V4 demonstrating ability to run on domestic Huawei infrastructure, reducing foreign dependency.
MOONSHOT— Moonshot (Kimi) is focused on AI agents and preparing to go public next year, part of the profitable Chinese AI startup ecosystem generating substantial revenue.
ROBOTICS— China has significant manufacturing and supply chain advantages in robotics with entire supply chains concentrated within 50km, enabling rapid innovation cycles and production at less than 50% cost of anywhere else globally.
ALTDATA— Chinese AI labs are optimizing data acquisition by waiting out exclusivity contracts and purchasing proprietary training data at fraction of original cost (1/10th price), creating cost advantage in model development.

Not investment advice.