Five Chinese AI companies got asked about artificial intelligence risks by CNBC. Zero of them responded. That's a 100% no-comment rate, which in financial journalism counts as a story.
Z.ai stayed silent. Moonshot stayed silent. MiniMax stayed silent. Alibaba stayed silent. Tencent stayed silent. CNBC called this newsworthy enough to write about, which tells you everything about the state of tech reporting in 2024.
The angle here is that Silicon Valley won't shut the f*ck up about AI dangers while Chinese companies refuse to comment. This is apparently suspicious. A more rational explanation is that Chinese tech executives understand something their American counterparts don't: talking to CNBC changes nothing about your product roadmap and generates zero incremental revenue.
Sam Altman will spend four hours on a podcast explaining why AI might kill everyone while simultaneously raising another $10 billion to make sure it happens faster. Chinese companies just build the models and skip the performative hand-wringing. One approach involves a PR team. The other involves shipping code.
The real story is that some poor CNBC reporter had to email five companies, wait for the non-responses, then write 400 words about how those non-responses reveal something meaningful about geopolitical tech strategy. That's not journalism. That's a Mad Lib with a deadline.
Retail traders will read this headline and think they've discovered alpha. They'll open their brokerage apps and buy shares of something tangentially related to Chinese AI, probably a semiconductor ETF that's down 40% year-to-date. Then they'll wait for the earnings call where the CEO also declines to comment on competitive dynamics.
Five companies said nothing. One news outlet wrote about it. Thousands of idiots will trade on it.
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