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Bloomberg

Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore the most interesting topics in finance, markets and economics. Join the conversation every Monday, Thursday, and Friday

Odd Lots

There's this weird contradiction that hovers almost all conversations regarding the Chinese economy. On the one hand, the growth and rising material prosperity is undeniable. And of course, Chinese industrial giants are at the frontier in all kinds of things, like batteries. On the other hand, you always hear about a soft domestic market, and a general state of unease among workers who fear that precarity is around the corner. So how is this contradiction explained? And how does it affect day-to-day life? On this episode, we bring back one of our regular guests Dan Wang, who recently returned from a long trip to Shanghai. We discuss his observations, the general ennui he saw, the signs of domestic weakness, and the way in which phone culture is reshaping Chinese society.

Read more: It’s Too Soon to Breathe Easy on China’s Economy

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What Dan Wang Saw on His Last Trip to China

In the China tech space, Baidu is now a full-stack player in the AI industry. The company makes its own chips, has its own AI models (Ernie), its own cloud system, and it's integrating AI into its self-driving car business, Apollo Go. But before all this, Baidu was known for being China's leader in search. Things, obviously, have changed a lot since the company was founded in the late 1990s. In today's episode, we speak with Baidu CFO Henry He about the company's AI ambitions. He talks to us about maximizing token spend, how Chinese tech firms are thinking about safety and alignment, the global robotaxi competition, and how the core search business fits into the company now.
 
Read more:
Chinese AI Stocks Rally on Demand Optimism and Policy Support
US Seeks AI Partnership With EU on Regulation, Supply Chains
 
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Baidu's CFO on How It Became a Full-Stack AI Player

We know that companies around the world are investing heavily in AI. So intense is the race to win the AI battle, that it feels like there's almost no upward limit on how much you could spend on it. So how are CFOs thinking about capex in the AI age? In this episode we speak with Winston Cheng, CFO of Chinese-founded multinational tech firm Lenovo. Lenovo is known for its personal computers, especially its Thinkpad line of laptops, but they are making a push to move beyond its role as one of the leaders in personal computing, integrating AI agents into their devices and investing in building out an “AI Cloud” infrastructure alongside Nvidia. We talk to Cheng about how Lenovo's allocating capital during one of the biggest capex booms in history. We also discuss involution and market competition in China, and how Lenovo's been adapting its supply chain to tariffs.
 
Read more:
AI Sales Start to Justify Data-Center Spending Boom, Report Says
Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of ‘Illicitly’ Accessing AI Models
 
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How Lenovo's CFO Is Allocating Capital During One of History's Biggest Booms

The Strait of Hormuz has (mostly) re-opened! Crude prices are still up since the start of the war with Iran, but popular predictions earlier this year of $200-a-barrel Brent didn’t pan out. Why is that? We last talked to Rory Johnston, the founder of the Commodity Context newsletter, at the start of the conflict. And in that conversation he said that the Strait’s closure would lead to $200 oil if it persisted for any length of time. Today, he returns to tell us what he’s learned about the oil market since then. He explains the various factors that kept a lid on prices, including some re-routing, Trump jawboning, and (crucially) surprise import reductions from China.
 
Previous: Rory Johnston on How Oil Could Surge to Over $200 a Barrel
 
Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots

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Rory Johnston on Why His $200 Oil Prediction Didn't Turn Out Right

The last time the World Cup came to the US was 1994. Before then, the World Cup was an enormously popular event with surprisingly limited commercial significance; the 1990 tournament in Italy, for instance, lost money for broadcasters. But that all changed in 1994, when American companies sought to make their mark in the form of advertisements and sponsorships: firms like McDonalds, Mastercard, and General Motors saw the potential to reach a global audience through one of the world's most watched sports events. Today, we speak with Joey D'Urso — a freelance sports journalist and author of the recent book More Than A Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power — about the 1994 World Cup and this year's competition, which is being held jointly, by the US, Canada, and Mexico. We also talk about other surprising stories of corporate and geopolitical influence in the world of football.
 
Read more:
Unilever, Pepsi Tap Celebrities, Players During World Cup
Mexico’s Sheinbaum Invites Merlín the Duck to National Palace Amid Soccer Craze
 
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How the 1994 World Cup Transformed the Business of Football Forever

China's AI industry has changed a lot since DeepSeek released its cheap frontier model last year, and briefly sent US tech stocks falling. After being locked out of the most advanced chips, Chinese companies are now allowed to buy some Nvidia H200s. In fact, many of the big Chinese tech companies — like Baidu — are making a push to become full-stack players, with their own chips, models, and cloud infrastructure. Today's guest is Grace Shao, an independent AI researcher and the author of the AI Proem Substack. She's a bit of an insider when it comes to China's AI industry, and when we were in Hong Kong we spoke with her about the latest in open-source models, the competition among Chinese frontier labs, DeepSeek's place in an increasingly crowded Chinese AI market, China's manufacturing edge, where bottlenecks exist right now (spoiler: it isn't data centers), if Chinese grandmas are actually using OpenClaw, and finally, of course, AI psychosis.
 
Read More:
China AI Lab’s 170% Stock Surge Cements Winner-Loser Pair Trade 
China Plans Mechanism to Evaluate AI Impacts on Job Market
 
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Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI

We closed out our New York live show on May 28 with a panel that featured three of our favorite Substackers: James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, founder of The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. They've all been Odd Lots guests before, and we wanted to get them together to discuss how journalists and analysts are supposed to cover this incredibly strange and highly pressurized moment in markets. Not only has AI basically infected every corner of the world, the media included, but there's just so much news that it's sometimes hard to figure out what the focus should be. But James, Sam, and Jasmine have all found their own niches, and cover AI in a really unique way. This panel discussion debates how the media has covered fears over the AI bubble and the possibility of mass job loss, if people in Silicon Valley are scared about the future of society, if AI can really mimic a writer's voice and personality, and (if they can) how writers can hedge against that future.
 
Read more:
Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut Nvidia
AI Company Dream Triples Value to $3 Billion in Funding Round
 
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How Substack Creators Are Covering This Strange Markets Era

There’s a lot to unpack with AI right now — everything from its potential impacts on the labor market and society to more extreme questions about existential risk. Anthropic, which builds frontier models like Mythos, Fable, and Claude, is actively grappling with these issues, including whether governments should limit AI development. Just last week, the Trump administration forced Anthropic to block foreign access to its two leading models. In this episode, we speak with Jack Clark (co-founder and head of public benefit) and Peter McCrory (head economist) about how Anthropic approaches safety and economic risks. We talk about its preparations for recursive self-improvement, the engineers it's hiring now, and why Jack left Bloomberg to enter the early AI industry.
 
Read more:
Anthropic Lays Out Vision for How to Bolster AI Models’ Safety
Microsoft Makes Big AI Inroads in China by Selling OpenAI Models
 
Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
 
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Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier

Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and long-term strategist of GMO, has a long history of calling bubbles. As he recounts in his new memoir, The Making of a Permabear: The Perils of Long-Term Investing in a Short-Term World, that includes spotting the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, which some people see as analogous to the current excitement over AI. And when it comes to today's market, there are a lot of signs of frothiness you could point to. In this episode, we speak to Grantham about how he sees markets right now, including a watershed change for Big Tech stocks, the signs he watches out for to spot when a bubble might burst, and what really keeps him up at night.
 
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Jeremy Grantham on How to Tell If a Bubble Is About to Burst

An interim deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz offers relief, but Asia’s economic woes are far from over. Beyond the chokepoint, the conflict has forced long-lasting shifts in Asia’s food and energy flows.

On today’s Big Take Asia podcast, Oanh Ha joins Odd Lots co-hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal to discuss why Asia is reeling from the conflict and what the “new normal” looks like for global supply chains.
 
Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
 
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Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rory Johnston on Why His $200 Oil Prediction Didn't Turn Out Right

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