It seems as if everything is AI now — well, not this podcast. But you can't discuss U.S.-China relations without understanding which one is ahead in artificial intelligence. Who leads on the scorecard?

In our eighth episode, reporters Rachel Cheung and Savannah Billman discuss Rachel's upcoming story on where the United States and China score across the stack of technologies and capabilities that make AI possible.

We also have an excerpt from our upcoming Q&A with veteran diplomat Sarah Beran on the role of U.S.-China diplomacy in an evolving international environment. You can read these stories and more at thewirechina.com.

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Reporter Noah Berman and editor Tom Mitchell take us to small-town North Carolina, where a new magnet factory has set up shop. Vulcan Elements wants to make magnets without sourcing any materials from China — a difficult task, because Chinese companies monopolize the supply and production chain for the rare earths needed in the process.

Also in this episode, an excerpt from this week's Q&A with Kei Koizumi, former Deputy Director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a preview of our upcoming issue, which you can read this weekend at thewirechina.com

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In our sixth episode, reporters Eliot Chen, Rachel Cheung, and Savannah Billman discuss the latest breakthroughs in Bytedance’s AI video generation tool, Seedance 2.0. The extremely lifelike videos went viral around the world, but also triggered existential questions for the film industry and the Chinese startups looking to make a profit from AI cinema. We also explore why AI diffusion in China is so low despite the high technical capabilities of domestically developed models and tools.

Coming up this week, we have an extract from our latest Q&A with the economist Eswar Prasad about his new book, The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order is Spiraling into Disorder, and a guide to the other articles you can read in this week's edition, published every Sunday evening EST at thewirechina.com

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