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Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s the plan:

• Tech News Takes — super-short analysis and commentary

• Tool of the Week — tools you’ll find useful

• Strategy Tips — strategy nuggets (for business and life)

• F/T Shoutouts — sharing launches, tech events, and other reads

China’s Self-Driving Alliance

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

Japan’s first TSMC fab is live

• What’s up: In 2021, TSMC announced a new $7B fab in Japan, one of the first fabs outside Taiwan. And last week, that fab started mass production of 12-28nm chips (not bleeding edge, but instead used for cars, image sensors, etc.). This is the first of two planned fabs. The second one, announced in Feb 2024, is expected to come online in 2027 and will produce more advanced 6nm chips.

• So what: This is awesome for Japan. We’ve written before about their huge investments in the chip industry ($6B+ in subsidies to TSMC alone!), and the rubber is finally starting to hit the road.

Addictive feeds banned for CA minors

• What’s up: SB 976 is a California law that got passed in October 2024 and went into effect January 1, despite heavy pressure from big tech lobbyists. The law prohibits tech companies from showing minors addictive feeds (i.e. recommending content based on user data, past content consumed, etc.). It can be over-riden by a parent providing consent. NetChoice, a lobbying group for Meta, Google, X, and others, sued to block it. But a judge ruled that most of SB 976 should proceed as planned (a restriction on nighttime and schoolday notifications was blocked by the judge).

• So what: There’s been a lot of research and concern recently about social media and mental health. Per Statista, 55% of adults are concerned about social media’s impact on kids’ mental health, and 32% of adults have been negatively affected themselves. On the other hand, social media companies depend on highly engaged younger users, so they’ve been hesitant to age-gate access or otherwise limit usage. This law seems like a reasonable compromise — kids can still use the apps (now a key part of social life) but avoid some of the downsides. I’m curious to see 1/ if other states follow suit, 2/ if it moves the needle on mental health.

Self-driving alliance in China

• What’s up: Last week, a group of 4 districts and 4 self-driving companies in China banded together. They’re co-launching a pilot program that will allow the robotaxis from any of those companies to travel to any of those districts.

• So what: Because the districts are agreeing to a standard regulatory framework, they’re saving the self-driving companies from needing to implement 4 different sets of rules. Plus, since the robotaxis can now travel between districts, they’re more useful to riders, and it’s easier for multi-district companies to manage robotaxi inventory.

WhatsApp Payments off-the-leash in India

• What’s up: India unblocked WhatsApp’s payments earlier this week. Previously, India’s payment regulators had capped WhatsApp payments at 40M users (in 2020) and then at 100M (in 2022). In that time, WhatsApp’s overall userbase in India has grown to more than 400M users, and its competitors for payments in India (Walmart’s PhonePe and Google Pay) grabbed 85% market share.

• So what: In the longer-term, it sounds like India plans to implement a 30% cap on any app’s share of transactions. So here’s my theory… if they see WhatsApp as the strongest player… but they want to avoid taking WhatsApp away from customers after it’s already been introduced… then a gradual set of caps makes sense. And now that Google Pay and PhonePe are established, India can uncap WhatsApp and let market forces divide market share, then later add the 30% cap.

🛠️ Tool of the Week 🛠️

Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes

RAG in just a few lines of code? We’ve launched a predefined RAG tool on our developer platform, making it easy to bring your data into a Knowledge Graph and interact with it with AI. With a single API call, writer LLMs will intelligently call the RAG tool to chat with your data.

Integrated into Writer’s full-stack platform, it eliminates the need for complex vendor RAG setups, making it quick to build scalable, highly accurate AI workflows just by passing a graph ID of your data as a parameter to your RAG tool.

Learn more about our production ready RAG tooling here.

🧭 Strategy Tips 🧭

China’s Self-Driving Alliance

Today’s strategy tip is all about playing nicely with your rivals.

Specifically, we’ll dive deeper into the self-driving pilot program in China, using the theory of co-opetition to unpack it.

Let’s start with the framework.

Easy enough, right?

Ok – so let’s get back to the self-driving example from China.