A few weeks back in Singapore, I joined the FutureChina Global Forum, hosted by Business China. I wasn't only there for the panels. I was there to see friends I hadn't seen in a long time: Got to reconnect with my good friend Jiang Changjian — the host of @WaterDrop_Inc 's IPO day at the NYSE, and the moderator of this forum's AI track. I didn't expect him to have so many fans in Singapore. Then again, he first made his name right here, decades ago, winning Best Debater at an international varsity debate championship — and a lot of people still remember those debates. Also saw my old Singapore friend Tin Pei Ling. She's now Co-President at MetaComp, and clearly crushing it. Ran into my teacher from my Hupan University days — Daniel Zhang ("Xiaoyaozi"), Managing Partner at FirstLight Capital and former Chairman & CEO of Alibaba Group. Caught up with my big brother Liang Xinjun (@liang_xinjun), Co-founder of Fosun Group, who's guided me often throughout building Waterdrop. Plus our business partner Xie Xin — CEO of Lark / Feishu (@Larksuite) and Vice President of ByteDance. Great conversations. Matching energy. Honestly? It felt great. Jiang Changjian's take: don't freeze progress out of fear — build real governance, so technology stays accountable to people. Daniel Zhang's take: AI will be everywhere, but humans still hold the deeper wisdom — we'll find a way to work with machines, not against them. And Liang Xinjun's line on stage still hits hard when I think back on it: "AI's penetration into the economy and daily life is still under 1%." That's not a bubble warning. That's a starting gun. Because the real fight was never "whose model is bigger." It's data, real deployment — and whether AI, once wired into real workflows, can grow into sustainable cash flow. Looking back, Singapore remains the bridge for Chinese companies going global: China-side application and engineering depth on one end, capital, talent, and trusted governance on the other. For companies choosing Singapore as an international or regional HQ, it's a launchpad to the world. Two genuinely great days — big thanks to Business China. Already looking forward to next year's FutureChina Global Forum.

Six leading AI labs. A new generation of models in the pipeline. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 5.5, Grok 5, Gemini 4 Argon, Meta's next flagship, and DeepSeek's next-gen release are among the most anticipated in AI. The race is playing out across deeper reasoning, agents that take on real work, and open-weight, cost-efficient options. If you could try only one first, which would it be — and what's the first capability you'd benchmark?