Louise Matsakis
@lmatsakis
senior business & China editor for WIRED. my Signal is louise_matsakis.83. SIGN UP FOR THE MADE IN CHINA NEWSLETTER HERE:
Zhang didn't ask Nolan about celebrities or Hollywood. Instead, she opened by asking whether he considered himself "a bard for a civilization at dusk." Zhang claims she wasn't referring specifically to the United States
The donations highlight growing tensions inside OpenAI over the company's efforts to shape AI policy
Palantir has promoted using AI chatbots to generate suggestions for what troops should do next in the battlefield. In one demo, an AI chatbot comes up with 5 options, including one titled "Support-by-Fire-Then-Penetration-Shock-and-Destruction"
Chinese phones have more advanced features like folding screens, powerful cameras, and AI. But Apple is once again dominating in China. It turns out brand still beats hardware, @zeyiyang.bsky.social reports
In Donghai, the “crystal capital of China,” the answers we found had little to do with top-down industrial policy and everything to do with how fast small players iterated, scaled, and competed
This week's edition of Made in China includes stories from @ivylala.bsky.social, @yaling.bsky.social, & @radiimedia.bsky.social Sign up for Made in China, our weekly briefing on everything you need to know about Chinese tech, here: wired.com/newsletter
Meta doesn't want to crack down on all the scams too quickly because it will hurt revenue
Meta itself estimates that it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the United States lol
this is the craziest thing I've read in a long time???? Meta projected that 10% of its revenue last year, $16 billion, came from scams. Meta intentionally charges the scammers MORE and knows that people who click on scams are more likely to see more of them www.reuters.com/investigatio...
one answer to that question, Dan said, is that the US needs to learn to swallow its pride and accept investment from Chinese companies
Dan said that Moses absolutely should have been indicted by people like The Power Broker author Robert Caro, but the broader point is, how do we get the US back to a place where it can recover some of its engineering muscles?
Dan said "it doesn't make sense that we are still stomping on Robert Moses' name" at a time when NYC can't build infrastructure to save its life
$670 million worth of Labubus have been sold this year so far already, @zeyiyang.bsky.social reports
One of the highlights of my career has been reporting on China & working closely with @zeyiyang.bsky.social. So I’m really excited to share that we’re launching a new newsletter together for @wired.com. It's called "Made in China." You can sign up for it here: www.wired.com/newsletter/e...
One thing we found in our reporting is that a reference to the "Trump Card Visa" has already appeared in application forms for Global Entry, the program that lets you skip the normal immigration line at the airport when you enter the US
last thing I wanted to note: I heard from a lot of readers that they were intrigued by Mixue, the Chinese drink and ice cream chain that now has more locations than Starbucks or McDonald's worldwide. Here's the Mixue flagship store in Zhengzhou when I visited in October!
While the US basically gave up on the idea of soft power and threw the global economy into chaos, an American livestreamer was doing a tour across China, showing his fans impressive skylines and infrastructure in cities like Shanghai
The American argument against Chinese manufacturing used to be about "slave labor" and intellectual property theft. That's a hard case to make when small business owners are showing customers their factories in China and explaining they simply can't make these things here
I checked a few super pro-Trump media sites to get a sense of how they're messaging in this moment. Here's one of the top opinion pieces right now on Townhall. Can't say I find this narrative very inspiring or convincing. "reality doesn't care about your hopes and aspirations."
When I read the details of what ICE did in this case—showing up at the house of a young protestor’s parents, texting them out of the blue—a wave of familiarity washed over me. It eerily reminds me of the way China seeks to intimidate student activists and journalists
It was later expanded to some 80 cities around the world. A 2022 study found the program prevented up to 895 premature deaths and saved $465 million in medical costs per median city annually www.wired.com/story/air-mo...
I'm constantly impressed by how thorough and thoughtful Paresh is in his reporting. For this story, he brought in historical context about what happened the last time we let CEOs work in the government
The most updated version shows that the contract was canceled and was only worth $8m. There’s no evidence the government started paying out $8b; about $2.5 million has been distributed www.fpds.gov/common/jsp/L...
Seemingly in response, DOGE changed the link on its website to an old version of the contract that contained a typo saying it was worth $8b www.fpds.gov/common/jsp/L...
What is even the point of this? Isn’t this what everyone wants their tax dollars to go to?