A Week with AI Developers in Beijing and Shanghai
A qualitative report offers first-hand field insights into China's AI development landscape, focusing on engineering talent, research culture, and startup dynamics across major tech hubs in Beijing and Shanghai. China is playing an increasingly influential role in the global open-weights and large language model (LLM) ecosystem. Understanding its talent density, resource allocation, and local market strategies provides key context for global AI competition and open-source collaboration. The account highlights how Chinese AI teams navigate infrastructure and compute constraints while maintaining rapid commercialization and open-weights model development. It also explores the distinction between Beijing's research-heavy talent concentration and Shanghai's international business-oriented ecosystem.
## BACKGROUND
Large language models (LLMs) and open-weights releases have become central drivers of generative AI development. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai serve as primary tech hubs in China, housing top universities, venture capital firms, and AI laboratories that regularly release competitive open models to the global developer community.