Episode Details

Yang Wang is Dean of Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Professor Wang received his BS degree in mathematics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1983, and his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1990 under the supervision of Fields medalist David Mumford. He served as Chair of the Mathematics department at Michigan State University before joining HKUST.

Topics

• 2:50 – US-China Relations: Has China advanced through the development of human capital or the theft of intellectual property?
• 16:23 – Academic Culture in China
• 33:00 – Hong Kong Protests: Economic inequality, housing prices, and outside actors.
• 1:04:09 – Coronavirus COVID-19: Has the Coronavirus established a new mode of online education in Hong Kong? Yang makes a forecast about the epidemic’s trajectory.

Resources

• Transcript
• Yang Wang, Dean of Science at HKUST
• Yang Wang (Faculty Profile)

Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. 

Mechanize is hiring! 

https://mechanize.work/b/hsu 

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. 

For example: 

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary 

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary 

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.