Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅 (@ZeyiYang) / X

Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅

1,971 posts

Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅

@ZeyiYang

Two cats in a trench coat writing about China and tech for @WIRED. he/him, 外星人. DM is open. zeyi_yang(AT)wired.com. Ask for Signal/Protonmail/etc.

NYC

wired.com/author/zeyi-ya…

Joined August 2018

Pinned
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Oct 1, 2025
In college, I'd always walk past an unremarkable store in Beijing that sold trendy but tacky toys. That store has turned into Pop Mart, $45-billion Chinese toy empire behind Labubu, the biggest fad of 2025. This is my big story to explain how they got here
A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu
From wired.com
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Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 2, 2022
Over a long conversation this week, 李老师不是你老师@whyyoutouzhele told me how challenging it is to become the unlikely central hub of China protest information & the immense pressure that came with it. Here's his story told in his own words. @techreview
How Twitter’s “Teacher Li” became the central hub of China protest information
From technologyreview.com
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Sep 21, 2023
Can you tell this influencer selling you a cosmetic product is not real, but an AI-generated avatar? Chinese e-commerce sellers have started to deploy deepfakes like this to livestream 24/7. All it costs is $1000 and a 1-minute training video. technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/107…
00:00
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Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 16, 2022
LMAO Elon Musk was not lying when he said he wanted to build Twitter into WeChat. The first thing he copied is link blocking to other services, like what WeChat did to Alipay & Douyin. BTW, in China it ended with the gov demanding platforms to stop link blocking, years later.
206K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 6, 2022
我们特别刊发了@techreview 这篇对李老师@whyyoutouzhele 采访的简体中文版本，包括李老师口述内容的原文，欢迎中文读者阅读和分享。这是采访时我给我留下最深印象的几段： “如果我始终能够保证独立性的话，那可能是一根蜡烛，可能是一根火炬，就是立在那里。” technologyreview.com/2022/12/05/106…
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 2, 2022
Over a long conversation this week, 李老师不是你老师@whyyoutouzhele told me how challenging it is to become the unlikely central hub of China protest information & the immense pressure that came with it. Here's his story told in his own words. @techreview technologyreview.com/2022/12/02/106…
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 4, 2022
😬
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 2, 2022
这些天，李老师 @whyyoutouzhele 已经成为了很多人搜索、确认国内抗议信息的第一目的地，他也一周涨了60万粉。我有幸采访到了李老师，在这篇文章里，他口述了这几天的真实经历、如何从微博时期就开始接受粉丝投稿、如何在每秒十几条私信的情况下尽可能避免犯错、以及收到死亡威胁对他造成的影响。
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 2, 2022
Over a long conversation this week, 李老师不是你老师@whyyoutouzhele told me how challenging it is to become the unlikely central hub of China protest information & the immense pressure that came with it. Here's his story told in his own words. @techreview technologyreview.com/2022/12/02/106…
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Mar 23, 2023
This very popular belief is completely false. Chinese people are seeing as much trash, batshit crazy things, and "bad influence" on Douyin. The idea that the Chines TikTok is this utopian heaven of online content is laughable. I wrote about it a bit here:
Why the stress around Chinese apps in the US is overblown
From technologyreview.com
79K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Aug 16, 2024
It’s talking-biz-official now: last week was the end of my 2.5 wonderful years at MIT @TechReview. And I’ll be joining @WIRED to cover China as a senior writer in September, still doing what I love. For now I’m taking a break to travel. HMU if you are in Seattle or Bay Area! 🫶
Talking Biz News
@talkingbiznews
Aug 15, 2024
.@ZeyiYang joins @WIRED to cover tech in China: talkingbiznews.com/media-news/wir…
52K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Jan 17, 2025
Scoop: we identified 3 outsourcing companies that are urgently hiring English-speaking content moderators to work for Xiaohongshu/REDNote, a sign that the platform is scrambling to grow its censorship capacity as thousands of TikTok refugees come in.
Xiaohongshu Scrambles to Hire English-Speaking Content Moderators
From wired.com
24K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Dec 18, 2023
So did Google's new chat bot Gemini use Chinese tech company Baidu's LLM chatbot Ernie Bot for training data? Quite a few reports from Chinese users that, if you ask Gemini who it is *in Chinese*, it'll answer it's Ernie Bot and it is developed by Baidu.
Jeff Li
@jefflijun
Dec 18, 2023
听到传言后我自己测了一下，目瞪狗呆😓
33K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Feb 15, 2024
WOW! I'm still in shock that I'm receiving this year's @ASME1963 NEXT Awards for Journalists Under 30. Eternally grateful for all the editors and reporters I've worked with, particularly my colleagues at @techreview! asme.memberclicks.net/american-socie…
10K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
Apr 3, 2025
This is true. I ran the numbers on 185 countries/regions on Trump's tariff list today, and it's correct for 182 of them. Here you can see all the numbers. (unit: millions in USD) Data is from the US Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration.
James Surowiecki
@JamesSurowiecki
Apr 2, 2025
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us. So we
19K
Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅
@ZeyiYang
May 17, 2024
Scoop: GPT4o has a data pollution problem: its longest Chinese tokens are almost entirely (>90%) about porn and gambling spam, likely due to insufficient data cleaning. But it could lead to tricking the model to hallucinate or generate unsafe answers.
GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites
From technologyreview.com
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