I found David Cheng’s thoughts about his recent China trip fascinating — These two linked assessment are notable. First:
The Chinese tech ecosystem is closed, for two compounding reasons. First, B2B SaaS never worked in China, so there is very little shared surface for work in the first place. Second, every company competes with every other company, and there is a real fear that if any company touches another’s data it will be “eaten.” The consequence is that there is nothing for an agent to practice on.
And then, the other side of the coin:
This matters to anyone building here: the American interoperability we treat as a convenience is actually [an AI] training asset. Open APIs made integrations easier; they also create the environment for agents to learn in. That is not a gap that closes by spending more on post-training. It closes only if the underlying ecosystem opens, and the underlying ecosystem is closed for reasons that are competitive and structural rather than technical.
(Emphasis his.) I think often about the contingent developments that made AI agents of the LLM variety possible at all. Among them: the development of an open web, which is to say a scrapable web. The internet absolutely didn’t have to be this way — Minitel. In many ways, those shapes would have been more consistent with tech history. Also: the success of open source, which larded that open web with huge piles of code to study. Again, this wasn’t destiny, and as recently as the 1990s would have seemed improbable.
Based on David’s note, I might now add a third lucky stroke: the relative ubiquity of open APIs. Really, what it means is, “Web 2.0” came home to roost at last —