On AI:AM

David Li

Founder, Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab

David Li founded the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab and co-founded XinCheJian, China's first hackerspace, in Shanghai in 2010. For fifteen years he has argued that shanzhai, the copycat electronics culture the West sneers at, and open-source hardware are twins separated at birth, and that Shenzhen's advantage is iteration speed rather than intellectual property. He reads China's AI conversation as overwhelmingly practical: which product to bolt a model onto next, rather than a race toward a finish line.