AI Superpowers

Why it’s on the list: Kai-Fu Lee — former president of Google China turned venture investor — argues that the AI race has moved from discovery to implementation, and that China’s data volume, execution speed and government appetite give it the advantage in that phase.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Amazon Books at Washington Square, Tigard — December 2018 (Books photo album)

• Chip War — cited inside the book as “a widely discussed book by Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China,” in its argument about computing power as the decisive arena of US–China rivalry.

• @WillManidis’s thread — named in the replies to his question “what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?”, June 2025. Full set of replies: what is the single best book… (tweet).

Connections

• Chip War — where the book is cited in the corpus; the same US–China computing-power thesis Kyle was mining Chip War for.
• what is the single best book… (tweet) — the thread that recommended it; the full recovered list lives there.
• Kai-Fu Lee — the author.
• Technological Innovation — the portfolio idea this sits closest to.