Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica

0:00Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today, with a potentially historic meeting between President Trump and Xi just a couple weeks away, and AI governance expected to be a major part of their agenda, I'm excited to share the third and final installment of my Nathan Goes to China series, in which I'll offer my thoughts on U.S.-China relations, and what we can do to improve our chances of successfully navigating the AGI era. I begin with an overview of what I think our goal for the U.S.-China relationship should be. In short, I argue that our goal should not be to win, but rather to realize a future of peace and abundance in which both countries and the world as a whole can share in the tremendous benefits of AI without running extreme risks or creating new AI sorts of democles. I call this a Pax Machina, or perhaps better, a Pax Robobica. From there, I move on to a high-level assessment of China's strengths and weaknesses relative to

1:00the United States. My core point, which I expect most China watchers will find rather obvious, but might still be news to Silicon Valley AI obsessives of a certain age, is that China's rise, in general, and in the field of AI research specifically, should not be understood as a recent change, but as a return to the long-term historical norm, which to me suggests that any attempt to delay Chinese progress can succeed for a short period of time, at most. Beyond that, we should expect China to be a top-tier live player in essentially every major area of human endeavor, and we should not be surprised when more and more labor and the life-saving technologies, from domestic servant robots to disease cures, are invented first in China. After that, I attempt to articulate the Chinese perspective on recent history and international relations. In short, the Chinese have learned very much the hard way by living through what they call their century of humiliation,

2:02that technological inferiority is extremely dangerous, and that technological strength is the one great source of power and security. And so they are naturally determined never to fall behind, or even to become overly reliant on other countries for key technologies ever again, no matter what it takes. And they understand American semiconductor export controls and are general rhetoric around winning the AI race, as reflecting our desire to keep them down, or potentially even worse. That said, while technological leadership and self-sufficiency are non-negotiable parts of the Chinese strategy, it's my view that the United States and the Westmore broadly should see this as a motivating challenge, but not necessarily as a threat. After all, Chinese rhetoric suggests not only that they share many of our concerns regarding AI safety and control, but also that they would prefer a collaborative international approach to global AI governance, and would rather avoid

3:04an AI arms race. So far, at least, they've backed this up by publishing their research in English, and especially by releasing open-weights models for all to use as they wish. China has established itself as the leading provider of global AI public goods. The second half of today's episode focuses on what I believe the United States should do in response. For starters, given our geographic good fortune and our pureless, cultural, and economic dynamism, we should not fear China, but we should learn both from China's mistakes and their successes. We too must make sure that we don't fall behind the technological frontier, which means that we can't simply exclude Chinese technology, but rather we will need to actively seek to develop state capacity with American characteristics, and also to learn from China in the areas that they now lead. In AI specifically, I emphasize above all the importance of maintaining a shared AI paradigm,

4:04and how dangerous it would be for us to allow our relative text acts to diverge to the point where neither side can be confident about the others' capabilities. This, I think, is how today's AI competition could turn into a cold or even a hot war, and this is a big part of the reason that I remain skeptical of export controls, even though I do recognize that they will help America keep its lead in AI for a bit longer than we otherwise would. All together, unless you are very confident in short AI timelines and willing to bet on your own particular flavor of recursive self-improvement going well, such that nothing else much matters. I believe the overall picture suggests that the United States should seek a deal whereby we trade chips, and perhaps even some chip making know-how for Chinese expertise in solar energy, batteries, robotics, and much more. Effectively re-coupling our economies without creating vulnerabilities or dependencies that either side finds unacceptable. Some of my ideas I recognize might seem a bit fanciful. I don't expect

5:08that we'll see jointly controlled research compute. Software security standards robust enough to allow Huawei to compete in the US market, or confidential computing arrangements that allow each side to verify the other's claims without exposing secrets in the immediate future. But I do think we can make some very meaningful moves to reduce tensions unilaterally even in the lead-up to the summit. By simply, for example, clarifying that rules meant to limit China's access to chips are not meant to interfere with AI safety or other research collaborations. More broadly, I strongly believe that in this, the age of hyperstitioning, having recently taught sand to think, everyone, and especially our AI leaders, should be carving out more time to dream about better futures. And so, without further ado, I hope you enjoy the conclusion to my China series, and more importantly, that you come away inspired to do your small part to help realize the great global human dream of a Pax Robotica. Hello, and welcome back to the cognitive revolution.

6:14This is going to be part three of the Nathan Goes to China series, US China Relations, what the US should learn from China, and what we might be able to do to improve our relationship so that we can navigate this rapidly accelerating AI future together successfully. That may sound like a lot, and it is a lot. And so, I should say that if you're jumping in now, and you haven't heard the first two, the first one is about my experience going to China, the tech setup to go there, review of Chinese AI's, deep-seek mini-max, and Kimi that I used while was on the ground, and just a bunch of observations about the experience and how technologically advanced China has become, and what a frictionless, smooth experience even as a visitor one can have there. I wouldn't say that is super important for today's episode, but it does give a good flavor of the technology deployment and integration that China has achieved. So, if you're not familiar with

7:15that, it could be useful background. The second episode in the series was AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics. I think that actually does going to be the most important episode of the series. That one is much more fact-based reporting. I went there, I talked to a lot of people, I looked at a lot of reports, a bunch of papers, and I basically make the case that there is a real meaningful culture of AI safety in China that in some ways it looks different from ours, but in many ways it looks very similar, and a lot of the research that is being done is quite similar. Above all, just wanted to put to rest the idea that we hear a little less frequently than we used to, but still sometimes that if we slow down at all, if we do anything to regulate our AI companies, that we'll be handing the race to China because they don't care, they'll never slow down, etc., etc. I think that is plain wrong, and I think the second episode in the series about the culture of AI safety in China from what the companies have today in terms of safety systems and

8:20deployment, the research culture, and also the regulatory environment, I think it makes it pretty clear and hard to argue that we could never hope to enter into any sort of meeting of the minds or even deal with China. So if you haven't heard that one, especially if you're coming in skeptical that there's an opportunity to have a meeting of the minds with the Chinese government with the Chinese AI community, I would go there first. I think that could be more powerful to a skeptical audience because it really is just a bunch of facts, whereas this one I'll be getting a little bit more opinionated and giving my takes. Okay, with that said, I think one thing that is very often painfully neglected from China discourse is what should our goal be? We talk about China a lot, but it always strikes me that there's never really a goal state. What is it that we are trying to accomplish in our relationship with China? It just seems like we breeze past that,

9:22and we jump to like, well, we want to win. Okay, well, what do we want to win? And why? And what would happen if we lose? And is there even a win condition that we can achieve? Like so much of that stuff just gets skipped over, and it's extremely frustrating to me. So I thought a good way to start from my own take on the US-China relationship would be by stating a goal. And the goal that I have, and everything that I'm going to articulate today, is achieving what I'll call a PACS machina between the United States and China. Maybe we could even call it a PACS robotica. But the idea is we should be aiming for mutual prosperity and peace and enjoyment of the benefits of the AI age for everyone. That sounds extremely simple, but I think it is a very important guiding principle. And I just want to start very clearly. That's what we should be going for. Prosperity for everyone. The benefits of AI for everyone. Unlimited access to expertise for everyone. As robotics come online,

10:27a life of increasing leisure for everyone who wants it. Robots work in the factories, robots work in the fields, picking the fruit. Even robots in our homes, cleaning for us, doing our laundry, making our meals. This is the future that we should all be striving for, and we should be striving to get there together. On the downside, we want to avoid the worst outcomes from AI. Obviously, we want to avoid AI-cost pandemics. We want to avoid an AI-arms race. We want to avoid an AI cold war. We want to avoid creating a new AI sort of damacles akin to the nuclear sort of damacles that hangs over our heads, collectively as humanity, in the form of 10,000 or so nuclear weapons that are still online, many of which I understand are still on trigger alert. I hate that that is the way that we live. We take it for granted. It's been that way my whole life. But there is a non-trivial risk every year that we could have some sort of accident or misunderstanding or surprising escalation

11:32to nuclear war. And if that were to happen, it would obviously be extremely terrible and devastating for all of humanity. But what's clear is that we've created this incredibly overwhelming power that sits there threatening us all the time. And it's way more than we need for deterrence. It's enough to destroy the world classically, however many times over. Why do we have it? I think it was a mistake to create it. And I don't want to see us create another sort of damacles that hangs over humanity that's AI-powered in the same way that we did with nuclear technology. So again, on the plus side, we want to achieve this Pax Machina where we can all enjoy the benefits of AI and we can all live like aristocrats with robot servants. And on the downside, we want to avoid all these terrible outcomes that have been worried about, even predicted for a long time, and are now obviously starting to materialize at least in their early forms. To do that, I think we are going to need to work together. If we don't, there's a lot of ways that this could

12:35go wrong. And on this point, by the way, Anthropic sponsors this podcast and obviously Anthropic has been quite vocal in terms of their policy commitments when it comes to denying China chips and trying to slow Chinese AI down in order for the United States to have a lead. And so I feel like I should just address right off the top. I think very highly of machines of loving grace. I think that's another way to describe what I would hope for from a Pax Machina. Go read the first half of machines of loving grace and think about how great life could be if do cure all the diseases. If we do make major strides in helping people with mental health, if we have a century of progress in five years, it'll be a lot to take in. But we have transformed life dramatically for the better. My son's experienced surviving cancer and getting back to basically full health in a six, seven month time frame is an incredible fruit of technology. And so I think we shouldn't want a lot more technology.

13:38I really appreciate Dario for putting that vision down in such concrete terms. I think it still remains the best vision of an AI future that we should all be excited about from any of the Frontier Lab company executives. But I don't think it's going to necessarily be easy to achieve all of that. And I really agree with something that Dario said in 2017, there's a video clip that I actually retweeted at one point. In that clip, he says very plainly that technology races can raise the risk of safety catastrophes. Technology races can raise the risk of safety catastrophes. I think that is true. And I agree with Dario of 2017 on that point. I think that the more we ratchet up the tension and the AI-specific tension between the United States and China, the more risk we have of ending up with what I sometimes call the nuclear outcome, which is to say that we get the militarization, we get the sort of dame of clays, and we maybe even still miss out on a lot of the civilian

14:41benefits in the way that we have all these nuclear weapons, but we don't have the nuclear power plants that we really are pretty obviously should have. Two anthropics credit have criticized this point of the anthropic worldview quite a bit over time. So two things can be true at the same time. I'm a big believer in the machines of loving-grace vision. I'm an enthusiastic and sincere endorser of Claude. I appreciate so many things that anthropic has done. Their interpretability work and leading that agenda is amazing. The model welfare work, I think is super important. The model organisms work that they do. The constitution itself, I think, is super inspired and one of the more moving pieces of writing that I've read in quite some time. So there's a ton to appreciate and that I do still have these misgivings around what I see as a better us-than-them mindset that whether it's with respect to open AI or with respect to China, I think is driving anthropic to push the frontier at a pace that I think at this point is becoming clear is a little bit unwise. I do think that antagonizing China makes it much more difficult to slow down. So I think

15:50that we really need to rethink some of those assumptions. Again, to anthropics credit, I've made these criticisms before they ever came on as a sponsor. My expectation and belief is that it will be totally fine for me to articulate the contrary opinions that I have and I don't think it's going to have a big impact on our business relationship. So I credit them for being open-minded and being willing to support me in this project, even though I certainly do not tow the company line on every aspect of the anthropic worldview. I guess one other disclaimer I should give is I did recently take this trip to China. I was there for about two weeks. I paid my own way so there's no financial conflict. The only things that I accepted from my gracious hosts were handful of lunches, a couple dinners here and there, which was very kind of people to provide and I think I can confidently say has not totally changed my worldview. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. I've got a text. The summer might be almost over but a new

16:54bombshell is entered the villa. Meet the voices of DeepGram Flux TTS. I'm Drew, low-key casual. I'm Alexis an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley, always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause and keep talking without losing the plot. Bansy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic. By now you know my story. Claude drafts my intro essays and I rewrite them. Not because the drafts are bad but so I can stand behind everything I publish. Well, I have an important update. Claude Fabel 5 is the first model to have me rethinking my rule. Today I now think co-authorship, not sole ownership, should often be the goal. Where the model excels, rewriting its work can be more about vanity or a misdemeanor sense of duty than integrity. I feel it most in songwriting. I'm no lyricist but

17:59I'm good with a song concept and Fabel writes some amazing verses. I give it feedback on its misses and I push it to aim for higher inspiration and layers of meaning, optimize syllable density and above all write a hit song. These days I get compliments on just about every song we write together. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai slash TCR. That's Claude.ai slash TCR. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Once more, that's Claude.ai slash TCR. So, okay, let's get into it. I want to start with a sort of brief net assessment. Basically,

19:02just trying to address like, where are we right now? Where are the two countries? What is our relative power? How should we understand the current situation? In some ways, I think this shouldn't be necessary, but I do see a lot of what I would call cope with respect to China that kind of echoes in a lot of ways the cope that we see with respect to AI. Where it's like, sure, the AI has come this far, but they'll never reason. Okay, a little, a little reason, but they'll never discover new knowledge. Okay, well, yes, I guess they are discovering new knowledge, but they'll never change paradigms, right? And that's kind of where we are now. We've gone all the way up the ladder to, well, until AI can deliver a paradigm shift of the Einstein calver, then it must be topping out. We don't need to worry about it that much, right? Even with these autonomous hacks, it's like, sure, they broke out of their sandbox and did these zero days. But is that really that bad? People seem to have a real hard time accepting that the trend that we are on is probably going to continue for a little bit longer. And you see this with respect to China as

20:03well. I have heard people that I think are very smart claim confidently that China can't innovate, that they can copy, they can borrow, they can modify, but they can't truly innovate. And so because I still do here, such frankly wrong-headed perspectives on what China is and the state of Chinese development, I feel like I have to spend at least a few minutes here describing where they are today and how that compares to where we, the United States, the West are. Okay, so the first thing I would want to say is simply that China has arrived. China is a world power and any notion that we might have, that we can contain China's rise is frankly ridiculous at this point. That ship sailed a long time ago. I think it generally is to America's credit that we want other countries to prosper and we have a positive some worldview. So I don't know where it's really come from that we want to contain

21:06China's rise or slow their development or prevent them from getting rich. But I think that in addition to being kind of wrong-headed is just plain failing to grapple with just how far China has come. And I think it does help a little bit to zoom out historically and just consider the fact that for thousands of years form the vast majority of the time, China has been one of the most developed, one of the technology leaders, one of the strongest countries in the world. This is not a new thing. In fact, the period in which folks like Dario and myself grew up where China was down and the US was the sole superpower, that has been very rare. There have been a lot of chapters in Chinese history so there have been definitely ups and downs. But the depth of civilization that's there,

22:06the incredibly strong tradition of education, the quality of human capital that the Chinese have had, going back many centuries, has always been super strong. And the period from the Western incursion into China and the Japanese incursion into China up through let's say 1990 or 2000 or whatever, when China was down, that is one of the lowest low points in Chinese history. And it's an anomaly. It's an exception. So we should understand first of all that what we're seeing now with China coming back to the frontier and being a world leader, that has for the majority of history been the case. That is not new. That is really reversion to the mean. And so we should expect, I think in general, that China will be a force because they do have these incredibly strong foundations. And we should not forget that. We should not tease ourselves. We should not

23:07cope about it. When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes say, if we didn't want to eat our food or whatever, kids are starving in China. And that literally was true at one point in time. Going back to the revolution and the episodes following the revolution and some of the crazy stuff that the Communist Party did, it really made some obviously very big missteps, which put their people in a very bad position in addition to, of course, the impact of foreign powers. There were times when people were actually starving in China. But I think people of our generation have kind of absorbed that and somehow have this background bias that everybody in China by default is poor and that there's this rapid rise, but that that's the exception. And the reality is really the reverse. It was the downtime that was the exception. China being on the frontier, being a world power, being a leader, that is the norm and we should expect that's going to continue. As just one illustration of just how well people in China are doing today,

24:09before I was going, I was talking to a friend who lived in Shanghai like 25, 30 years ago for a while. And I asked him, what should I do that I might not do if you don't tell me to do it, which is one of my favorite travel questions. And he said, get a haircut there or anything that's kind of a bodily service could be a massage, whatever. And he said, they do an incredible job with it. They have different ways of doing it than we do and you will not be disappointed. I wasn't so sure if that would be true today because you think these service jobs like haircuts and massage, maybe they become more expensive or the quality may be degrades as the society gets richer. I didn't really know what to expect. What I decided to do randomly one night was get a pedicure. Something I think I've done like one other time before in my life. But I was like, okay, it's a lot. Let's try it. So I walked into this place, random place. And again, I spoke in previous episodes about how formal and organized the Chinese economy is now. Prices are on the wall. There's no negotiation, no haggling, no bait and switch, not even any tip culture. So it's a very

25:12predictable experience. It was kind of late. They were getting toward closing. There weren't many other people there. And I don't think too many random Americans walk into this establishment. So I became a center of attention. I was down to talk and they wanted to talk to me. We were talking through translators. We'd be talking into my app, translate, let them read and vice versa. And one young guy who was probably in his mid 20s who was working there wanted to compare phones with me. And I was like, huh, okay, sure. I've got a Google Pixel. And sure, if he had an iPhone 17 and that's somewhat confusing because this service probably took 45 minutes or so. I think I paid like $12 for it. And this was in Shanghai, not a low rent district. So how does my $12 turn into going through the business, whatever margin ownership's taking, rent overhead, translate to where they can get an iPhone 17. I've been 17s, by the way, are not cheaper in China than they are in the United States. Even the Xiaomi phones and the Huawei

26:21phones, like those are also pretty expensive. And maybe not quite as expensive as an iPhone, but they're up there pushing toward $1,000 for the top end of their cell phone market. So again, people are doing quite well. Even people who have, like, what would seem to be not super high-wage jobs can at least in some cases afford an iPhone 17. I think one way that that's potentially happening is due to the concentration of family wealth that is happening due to the fact that everybody's mostly just having one child. I heard one analysis that was like even though there's a generally competitive environment in China and people are pretty achievement-oriented, there's a fairly high level of youth unemployment. And one reason that somebody said that is the case, is that many young people and many families just have it pretty good because they have four grand parents, they have two parents, obviously. And there may be multiple apartments that this family had, but now that there's only just one grand kid, some of these kids are just gifted in a

27:24apartment where they can take one of the family apartments and go rent it and take that income. So even though this guy's income working at this pedicure place couldn't have been very high, like it had to be fairly low, it seemed like the disposable income is still a pretty high share of overall income and sure enough he's got an iPhone 17. So why do I tell that anecdote? Just to really emphasize that like even working-class people in Chinese cities are doing reasonably well. Obviously it's a huge society and it contains everything, but even a guy working at a pedicure place for what couldn't be much more than $5 an hour had an iPhone 17 and was keen to talk to me about how our phones compared. So I think that's really quite interesting. If we zoom out and look at the biggest picture aggregate economic statistics, again we see a story where we can tell ourselves that the United States is still the biggest economy in the world and we're still ahead in some ways,

28:26but I don't know that that's really the most accurate way to look at it. If you just look at headline dollar-denominated GDP, US GDP is about $30 trillion per year. Chinese GDP is about $20 trillion per year. So that would obviously mean the US would be 50% bigger. But if you look at it in PPP terms, purchasing power parity, then the Chinese economy measures at $45 trillion and the US economy being dollar-denominated doesn't change, so it's still $30 trillion. So in that case it's the Chinese economy that is 50% bigger than the United States economy. Obviously a lot more people, so per capita, the US definitely, in either analysis, will still have higher income. But we should take very seriously, I think, and having spent even just a little time there, you do see that things are quite cheap. You can go out to dinner for two for under $10 in Shanghai and have a pretty nice meal. That's not every meal, certainly some are more than that, plenty are more than that, but you can do that.

29:30And you definitely cannot do that in New York or San Francisco or even Detroit. So the fact that goes farther domestically is very obviously and readily apparent when you spend any time there at all. And I think the PPP story, in my view, probably tells a more accurate story than the dollar denominated GDP statistics. I think it would be probably more accurate to say that the Chinese economy is 50% bigger than the American economy than the American economy is 50% bigger than the Chinese economy. Go there, spend a little time, buy some stuff, see how cheap it is, and I think you'll come away feeling like, yeah, it probably is the case. That in some real fundamental sense, the Chinese economy is bigger than the US economy. You see this in all kinds of quality of life things too. I took the high speed train from Beijing down to Shanghai and it was about 60 bucks for the ticket. I didn't get the highest class people. It's like, oh, you should have got the first class.

30:32It's amazing. Well, the second class ticket was totally fine. It was quite comfortable. You just started a lot more spacious than a plane. It left at exactly the moment that it was supposed to leave. The trains definitely run on time. They go like 200 miles an hour. We made a number of stops. And so people who don't live in major cities from what I understand have pretty good access to high speed rail two. When I say don't live in major cities like tier three cities, they'll still have millions of people. So it's a bit of a different analysis. But people who live in cities you've never heard of, I think still have a quite good access to the high speed rail. It's not just a couple cities that are connected. It's a really well built out network. And again, to the point of how strong the technology integration is, one thing that I saw people do on the train that was amazing was actually have food delivered to the train at an upcoming stop. We left it, I don't know, 10 in the morning, let's say from Beijing and got to Shanghai at three in the afternoon or

31:35something. And so you're going to have lunch on the train. Well, people were ordering on their phone to the next stop indicating what car they're on on the train. And then I didn't see exactly how the handoff worked, but you could get food delivered to you on the high speed train when you made a stop for five minutes or whatever at a few places that we stopped at along the way. And another little nicety is that the prices in the Chinese airports from what I saw are basically street prices. So just that all around you have this feeling of like people are doing very well. We should not pretend otherwise. We should not cope. We should not tell ourselves that we're still the richest, we're still the best. I think it's really not true. And a short trip to China, I think would disobey a lot of people of that notion. I think we should also be very careful about any ideas that we have that the Chinese government is somehow not legitimate. And we've recently made this mistake in

32:37Iran, right? Where we know that the government is like not very popular or at least if there's a major dissenting force. And some of us thought that we could just go in and take out the leadership and then the people would rise up and overthrow the government and create a whole new government. Obviously that didn't happen, even though there was a lot of very real discontent and real desire to get rid of the regime there. I think that at times people have a similar notion about the Chinese government because we know that there's censorship and there's not the same level of political freedom obviously that we enjoy in the West. And so we feel like because it's so different on these dimensions that we really value, we sometimes feel like the Chinese government must not be really legitimate. Like the people must not really like it or support it. And if they could, they'd probably get rid of it and they'd probably opt for democracy and freedom and all that kind of stuff. And again, I think we should be very careful with these kinds of notions. There's possibly some truth to it.

33:43Certainly if you go back all the way to Ten of In Square, like there was a big protest. Some of the people were not happy with the government at that time. Some people wanted more democracy and freedom. I'm sure that there's some latent feeling there in some parts of Chinese society. It wouldn't deny it entirely. But when Dario talks about the concept of eternal 1991 in the second half of machines of 11 Greece, it's the part that I don't really agree with. What does he mean by eternal 1991? Well, he and I are pretty much the same age. So we were like 8, 9, 10 years old at this moment in time where the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union fell and it was the quote-unquote end of history. And we had a pretty simple view at the time, right? Because we were kids. But the view that we had was like our way of life had just been ratified as the best. We were the chosen people. We really were this city on a hill. We were the good guys. We deserved to be rich because we had the best values.

34:45And in retrospect, that might have been the peak for our culture. It certainly hasn't gone great since then. So we had this expectation that the world was going to be full of peace and trade and the American way was going to go everywhere and China would adopt it too. And we're just riding so high at that time. But it was the first feeling that we had. Why do I mention that now? Because I think that today the Chinese government has done so well for its people that if anything, they are living in their 1991 right now. They have had such a great run. They have seen the return of the Chinese nation to prosperity, to technological leadership, to a state where it is respected globally by the

35:45rest of the world. There's this notion of the mandate of heaven that goes back many centuries in Chinese thinking. And the idea is basically the government to be legitimate has to do certain things well. It has to rule effectively. It has to rule with wisdom. It has to deliver for people. The key idea I think is like who is really delivering is who is legitimate. And so because this government has delivered so well for people for basically two generations now coming from a very low point to a very high point in what is in world of short terms, a remarkably short period of time, something that only probably is possible because it is a reversion to the mean because the human capital was always there even when everything went to hell. People I think consider the Chinese government legitimate. I don't think it is seriously questioned. I do not think that could get our message into the Chinese society that people would rush to

36:52adopt the American way of life or would take to the streets to try to overthrow the government. I really don't think that's true at all. They, I think appreciate how well the government has done for them. It's not going anywhere. I think I'll talk more about the risks that I see in the Chinese system. It is not just, of course, there is a lot of censorship. We're not allowed to go and prostitutize religion or prostitutize democracy in China. But even if we were, I really don't think we would be very successful. I think they would look you and be like, this is actually all working pretty well. We're enjoying prosperity. We're enjoying peace. They haven't had a war in a long time. We are enjoying living our lives. They do have a lot of freedom which shouldn't be ignored or forgotten either. There are certain things that they're certain freedoms they don't have. Some of those freedoms are freedoms that we value a lot. But most of the daily life there is very free. You get up in the morning. You're free to do what you want. You're free to work whatever

37:55job you want to work. You're free to have all kinds of hobbies. You're free to go to bars. You're free to go to music shows. You're free to play music yourself. You're free to do all kinds of things. You do get to choose your own path as an individual in China with certain no-go zones. But I think in many ways people feel that they are quite free. They also feel that they're safe. That is something that the government delivers on as well that we should not underestimate the value of. People there really do, especially because they do have this living memory of the culture and revolution, all over the place you go and see signs where it's like, oh, this alleyway during the cultural revolution was renamed to this, but then after that it was restored. That wasn't that long ago. So like older people lived through it and younger people have heard about it from older people. They still see it when just the signage and the history that's kind of posted all over the place. So they know what it's like to go through chaos. And I think they do

38:56really value the stability, the safety, the peace, the prosperity that the government has delivered. In China, I think they are living their eternal 1991 right now. Times have never been better in any living memory than they are right now. And the government has very strong support. So we should not have any illusions that we're going to get the Chinese people on our side. If we pick a fight with the Chinese government, it's not going to happen. An AI-specific version of this is we should give all the Chinese researchers green guards and then they'll all come to the United States. Again, this is a total fantasy. This is like coming from the assumption that China is a place that people want to escape. That life there sucks. And if only they could get out, they would. Now, historically, there was truth to that. But today, no. Today, we see people come here and many choose to go back. The founder of moonshot famously did a PhD here,

39:58went back to China, started the business there. This is just not in step with the current reality. I'm sure that if it was easier to get a green card to the US and have permanent residents here, probably more people would come. So I support making it easier for people to come to the United States Chinese or otherwise, especially super talented people. That's been a great strength of the United States. We should do more of it, but we're shooting ourselves in the foot when we go away from our unique strength of assimilating immigrants and being able to attract the most talented and ambitious people from all over the world. That might be the number one great strength of the United States. And we're doing damage to it. We should be trying to attract top AI talent absolutely across the board. But don't make the mistake of thinking that all the top AI talent in China is just dying to leave. That is absolutely not the case. It is home. It is a great place to live. Their money goes a lot farther there. Their families are there.

41:00And life is good. So it is absolutely, I think, a combination of fantasy and arrogance when we think that if we just let them, then they would all flock here and work for our companies. That is quite clearly wrong these days. Life in China is good. Another factor, of course, is that the Communist Party wouldn't necessarily let them all leave even if we did say everybody could come to the United States. One of the things that I thought was really interesting while I was there was talk about Manus. Manus, of course, is the agent app that burst onto the scene with a shiny demo while back. And it was a legitimately cool product. When I first tried it, I did find it to be a step ahead of Open AI's operator at the time. They were famously acquired by Meta for I think like $2 billion. Great outcome. But then the Chinese government stepped in and said, no, we're not allowing this. You guys are critical technology. We're not going to allow an American

42:02company to acquire you. So as far as I understand right now, that transaction has been totally unwound. And the founders are in China. And not really sure what's going to happen there. I guess they're going to just try to build Manus and China. It's a bit strange. People in China that I talked to felt like this was a big mistake for the Chinese government to do this. First of all, they were like it's not like Manus is such a foundational technology. It was a very good harness implementation. But it's not like this is like super core tech. It's not as core as foundation models. It's obviously not as core as chips or other infrastructure. It's an app layer thing. And people were like, man, that sucks. What's going to happen are Chinese entrepreneurs going to try to leave before they start companies? Are they going to make sure that they are like well established in Singapore or even try to go to the US before they start companies? People did not like this. And they were also like what's going to happen in terms of venture in China? Like if you can't get acquired by anyone, this is like a huge outcome. This is like what venture capitalists dream of. If that kind of deal isn't going to be allowed, people are going to be able to raise money. It seems like it's

43:04going to slow down the Chinese VC startup ecosystem. Everybody seemed to agree that it was sort of an own goal that just put a lot of entrepreneurial energy in the Chinese environment in an uncomfortable position and might have some like blowback long term. It certainly doesn't seem like a great move to me. But in fairness, it is worth being clear about the fact that the Chinese government also won't let all their AI researchers believe in mass to come to the United States at this point. I think the bottom line of this initial section is simply that China is going to be a force on the world stage and is going to be a leader in AI for the foreseeable future. And we should accept that as the baseline fact and plan accordingly. We should have no illusions long-term that we're going to prevent China from being an AI power. This is just ridiculous. I think it's probably also

44:04we're doing a little bit more history of Chinese AI to try to drive that point home a little more. Because again, I think there's an analogous thing to the broad China history story where if we zoom in to just my lifetime, China was poor and now it became rich. And it might seem like it's the anomaly of its rich. But really, it was that period where it was poor and in disarray that was the exception. I'd say the same thing is kind of true in AI. If you hadn't been paying attention to AI prior to ChatchyBT and you saw ChatchyBT and you're like, oh my god, ChatchyBT. And now you look at what's happening. Oh, China's catching up. China's closing the gap. China's fast-following. True. But it does miss a bigger picture. First of all, why is no one else in the world able to do this? If it was just a matter of imitating, if it was just fast-following, other countries should be able to do a similar fast-follow. And yet we're not seeing that. Even

45:06mistral in Europe, the European champion is moving away from focusing on their own model development and becoming more of like a neo-cloud, which might be a decision. Probably is the right decision. But that's because it's super hard to do this fast-follow. And there's a lot more going on than just simple distillation. So the Chinese, in fact, have been committed to AI for a long time as they have the custom of looking out at the technology landscape, trying to identify the core technologies that are going to be strategically important for the future and investing in them in a focused, coordinated way so that they can ensure that they are in the top tier when it comes to those technologies. AI has been no exception to that. They've done that for AI. The first Chinese five-year plan that mentions AI was the one that was adopted in 2016. So already 10 years ago now, you had the top tier of the Chinese government aware enough of AI, emphasizing its importance to the

46:14point where it made it into the five-year plan. That's a huge indicator, I think, that their leadership, their academia, their industry has been thinking about this for a long time. For reference, 2016, that's only a few years after the beginning of deep learning. I think Alex Net was 2013. So it was only three years after the breakthrough in computer vision that kind of turned a lot of people on to, oh my god, deep learning could really work. And 2016 is the same year that Sundar Pichai declared that Google was going to be an AI first company. So you have China at the national level, AI, as a strategic priority in the five-year plan as of 2016, shows a lot of foresight and a long-standing commitment to leading in AI. There is real substance to it going back quite a ways. It is not something that is just an overnight success story far from it. Another way to compare the US and Chinese commitment to AI or AI trajectory over the last

47:19several years would just be to look at how many companies are operating at or near the frontier. I asked Chatchy PT to do this and it came up with 11 American companies and 12 Chinese companies as companies that have shipped frontier or near frontier LLMs in the last couple of years. So we have roughly the same number. Obviously, again, if you're a person of high LLM taste, then you're really discriminating. You might say, well, there's only two real frontier companies in the world, and those are both American. And I think you could say that at least for now. But the depth of talent in China is incredible. It also goes with that saying probably, but a lot of the researchers at American companies are Chinese. They're Chinese American or they're literally just Chinese citizens who are here for education and on work visas. And they're certainly not the equivalent going on in China. Everybody of the Chinese companies is Chinese. The American companies

48:19has a significant part of the American AI workforce is also Chinese. I've heard and I have not verified this myself, but I've heard through the grapevine, the AI events, the sort of whisper networks that I'm somewhat a part of that there are teams at OpenAI that are all Chinese and that actually conduct their business in OpenAI Slack in Chinese. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's at least plausible. That's how much Chinese talent there is at American companies. Another interesting fine point to put on this is looking at where things were just before chat GPT. I credit a friend of a friend that I met in Shanghai who pointed this out to me and I did go back and verify it. He pointed me to the super glue benchmark, which was popular kind of up until about 2022. He said, you can still go look at the final leaderboard for super glue, which was a big one back in the

49:27day. What you'll see is that there's a lot of Chinese companies that were on that leaderboard. As of 2022, competition was already pretty neck and neck. I did go back and indeed the number one spot on that final update was a Chinese company. Definitely a bunch of American companies also in the top 10. It's said the American companies actually have more of the entries in the top 10, but then lots of Chinese companies in the kind of 10 through 20 range. This was before the current chat GPT plus hype. This was the result of Chinese strategic investment in AI paying off already as of 2022. Why were the Chinese companies a bit behind on LLMs? I don't really know the answer to this, but what that same person who pointed me to super glue said was the Chinese companies just didn't really see the point in spending so much money to create a giant LLM. They looked at GPT2,

50:31they looked at GPT3, and they were kind of like, that's an awful lot of money to burn to get an AI to write bad poetry. That's the way, but why would we spend all this money to create something that has no use case? Again, reflecting maybe a bit more practical and a bit less ideological view of AI in China than we have in the United States or at least in Silicon Valley. Now, as it became clear that, oh, instruction following works. Now you have an AI assistant, and then obviously everything from there, from reasoning to agents, they've clearly seen the use cases, and they've clearly been making the investments to try to be neck and neck with the United States at the frontier. It was an anomaly in that, like 2022, early 23 time frame, where it looked for a moment, like the US was way ahead, but this was purely an American invention. If you start there and don't look back, then yeah, it looks like another case of Chinese fast

51:39following. But I think a more zoomed out view would be like, trying to headband investing in AI for a long time. They've definitely been laying the foundation. They've been building their talent bench. The talent bench is super deep. It's probably the deepest in the world. A lot of their talent has found its way to the United States, which is definitely to our credit as a society that welcomes people, knock on wood, from around the world and allows them to put their talents to their highest and best use. But the competition was already fairly tight as of 2022. Maybe a mistake by the Chinese companies to take a pass on that initial scaling push in language models, but it's a fairly reasonable one because indeed, as I can tell you, as a user of GPT-3, it wasn't really that useful. We were able to get it to write basic marketing copy, and that was about it. It took fine tuning to get it to do even basic tasks that required any rigor or consistency. It was a lot of money to spend for not a lot of return.

52:46You really had to believe that there was a lot more coming with scaling law conviction. than maybe Chinese company leadership had at the time, but they had all the fundamentals in place so that when it became clear that there really was something there, then naturally they were able to join in the process of mapping out this frontier and increasingly pushing the frontier in various ways. We should not see China's rise as an anomaly. We should not see Chinese strength in AI, and as an anomaly, we should see these things as the baseline of zoomed out long-term history. We should understand that the moments that many of us started paying attention happened to be moments when China was behind much more so than they normally are. There is no keeping them down. There is no denying them. Powerful AI, they are absolutely going to be a force to be reckoned with for a long time. The question then becomes, how do we deal with China

53:52not can we somehow avoid it? We have to find a way to coexist. We have to find a way to navigate the future, not necessarily together as in the full alliance, but in a way that understands that both of these world powers, both of these great countries, both of these proud technology embracing entrepreneurial and innovative civilizations, they are both going to be there for the foreseeable future. Until the singularity, I cannot foresee any moment in which the Chinese don't get to say as to how the future is going to go, and we should not pretend otherwise. Now, at the same time, we should also be realistic that China is not omnipotent. I think sometimes people like me who realize, wait a second, we have been failing to appreciate the fundamental strength that China has had for such a long time because of the moment that we happen to be born in.

54:53We sometimes then flip the other way and say, oh my god, we can't possibly beat them. Look at all these incredible strengths they have, look at the high speed rail, etc. I think that also is going to mistake. There are very real problems in Chinese society and just massive constraints on what the Chinese government can do. One really, really big one, which is obvious, but super important, is they have this massively aging society, and they're very worried about it. It's something that came up all the time in my short travels in China is how we can use this AI technology to deal with the problems that we're going to face as a rapidly aging society. This comes in the form of ant group and they're AI doctor. We talked about Dau Bao in recent episodes, AI companionship for lonely seniors. In robots too, who's going to take care if you've got one grand kid and four grandparents and two parents that I need to be taken care of? Who's going to do that?

55:57The answer that they're increasingly thinking of is maybe robots can fill that gap. That's a big problem that they're going to be dealing with for a long time. I think it was Tyler Callan who I would credit this first having pointed out to me that aging societies tend to be more peaceful. Old people don't want to go to war. They're hopefully wiser. Then also in the Chinese context in particular, when you only have one kid or you only have one grand kid, sending that kid off to war and that kid doesn't come back, that's the end of your family. I do not think they are going to be taking the one grand kid of four grand parents and sending them off into pointless conflict. I think if there's one thing that would get the Chinese public riled up to the point where you actually might see sustained protest in the street, if there's one thing that could lose them the mandate of heaven, it would be launching a pointless war and taking people as one kid or one grand kid and throwing them into

56:57some conflict where people are dying without a good reason. The Chinese government does have obviously incredible state capacity. That's not in doubt. But I think we see how much state capacity they have when it comes to building something like a high speed rail network and how much we've struggled with that. Then they think, well, it's probably similar when it comes to how many people they have. They could mobilize the biggest army ever in the history of the world. I don't think that's the case. I think that the mandate of heaven that the Chinese government currently enjoys is based on their ability to deliver for the people. I do not think they're going to act lightly when it comes to throwing those young men into conflict. Another huge challenge that the Chinese system has is succession. I ask people repeatedly while I was there, does anyone have any idea what comes after President Xi if he were to suddenly die, for example?

57:58He's 73 years old. So he's not super old. Any very well could stay strong and sharp for another decade. It could go another way. We've seen that in our own geriatric presidents lately. A four-year term is a lot and a lot can change. Right now, nobody has any idea what comes after President Xi. It's possible that there's some understanding in the elite upper echelon of the CCP as to what would happen next. But as far as I can tell, nobody in the public has any idea. There's no apparent successor. One person said, I think as we get into the next five-year plan, we might start to see a successor be introduced and get the public kind of comfortable with and familiar with this person. It's frankly negligent for a leader who has in many ways delivered for his people like President Xi has. I think it's a huge blind spot to not have a better

59:00succession plan in place. So this could create massive chaos, massive challenges, massive uncertainty. One person also said, if there's ever going to be an actual war, it would probably be most likely to happen after a transition at the presidential level in Chinese politics. Because a new president might feel the need to do various things to consolidate their power. It's very opaque to outside observers, but there's definitely factions and we see people being purged. And I think even for the most savvy China watchers, it's very difficult in many cases to know what's going on. Certainly, I wouldn't even pretend to. But the person's point was when somebody is new in the job and they don't necessarily have the full party behind them, this would be a moment where going to war could be in that individual's interest because they could put aside other political issues. Anyway, it is a blemish on Xi's record. I think that he doesn't have some sort of succession plan

1:00:03in place unless it's hidden. And maybe they feel like they can do that. But nobody in China that I spoke to had any idea what would come next. And I think in many ways, the measures that they are taking to ensure very high level of stability and continuity now are pushing risk into the future when that change comes, it could be a quite destabilizing one. Another big thing that I think we should not underestimate about China is that they don't know how strong their military really is. We've seen it with Russia invading Ukraine where they thought they were going to be able to take over Ukraine in a few days, they'd get to Kiev and that would be it. Well, obviously that didn't happen. The Chinese government isn't somewhat of a similar position where there obviously are students of everything that's going on in the world. So I think that they know that it's actually quite unclear how strong their military really is. They haven't had a war in a long time,

1:01:10they haven't had a real test of it. They have had famously a lot of corruption in the military over time. And they just don't know. If we actually tried to launch some campaign, if we actually tried to invade Taiwan, would we be successful? I think they really have a lot of doubt and they should have a lot of doubt. It's going to be tough for them to get enough confidence that they're going to make all-in roll the dice moves on something like invading Taiwan. I think that they're going to be reluctant to do that because again, all the young men that they'd be sending for the most part are the only child and the only grand kid of their entire family. I do not think they're going to take losses very well. I think they're going to have a huge reluctance. Another big challenge honestly that the Chinese have is they're still not very well trusted by the world. They are respected because they have achieved so much and they are recognized as powerful. But I've heard a couple

1:02:18anecdotes recently. One was from Aropae who's from Uganda and another was from a friend in Brazil. And what the young woman from Uganda said was, when Chinese people come to our country, they are really just trying to make profits and take it back to China. Whereas, she said, when Americans come to our country, we feel that they are actually trying to help us. They're trying to build schools. They're trying to help us rise. They, I say, a happy friend, said, I'm not confident at all that China is going to continue to open source models. Is this just bait and switch maneuver on their part to get us all in the China camp? If there's a big spheres of influence, division between the US and China spheres, we join the China camp and then all of a sudden the open source release is stopped and we've got to pay proprietary API fees just like we would to the US companies. There's not a lot of confidence that dealing with China will be anything other than a transactional

1:03:28relationship where you better be on your toes to make sure you're not taking advantage of. I think actually being in China and going through even tourist places there and finding that prices are posted and I wasn't getting bait and switch. I think at the retail cultural level, that view is outdated. But at the geopolitical level, it might still be valid and it's certainly the kind of thing people should be very careful of. So this is a real challenge, even despite all the things that China has done with open sourcing their AI models and plenty of other initiatives that they have, they are not that trusted. The US still, despite our rather flagrantly untrustworthy behavior in recent years, I still think has more trust from most parts of the world than China does. Okay, so all of this so far has been a tale of the tape, right? Where is China and where are we with respect to China? And the highlights are basically,

1:04:30they have for most of their very long history been a leading power in the world. The experience that we had at the end of the Cold War of being triumphant and having no rivals, that was really only possible because China was at an unusually low point. But the human capital and all the other fundamentals were always there and sure enough, here they are possibly stronger than ever. To the point where I think their government has incredible legitimacy and support among the people, even if there are some things that people would like to see done differently, even if they would like to be able to speak a little more freely on the internet, I think that people broadly do recognize that the government has delivered and that the social contract there or the mandate of heaven, it's valid, it is legitimate. The same thing is true in AI. We should not think that just because Chatchy PT and GPT-4 came out by the time when we didn't see similar products from China, that means that the Chinese AI ecosystem is some rapid copycat catch-up

1:05:36game on the contrary. They've been talking about AI in their five-year plans since 2016. They've been investing systematically to build up the talent. They've got just as many companies operating at or near the AI frontier as we do. They probably have a deeper talent bench. Certainly if you include all the Chinese citizens at the American AI companies. We should be realistic about the fact that when it comes to geopolitics broadly and when it comes to AI specifically, China is a force that has the fundamental strength to compete with the United States or the West for the foreseeable future and there's really nothing we can do about that except plan for it and try to navigate it successfully. That means that a Paxmachina is going to require constructive bilateral relations,

1:06:36ideally friendly by bilateral relations but that might be a lot to ask in the current moment. But we just absolutely cannot do the same thing that so many people are doing with AI itself, which is deny the reality of the strength that we see and pretend that it won't go any further. I think the biggest mistake that we can make perhaps would be to underestimate the fundamental strength of Chinese society as a whole and of the Chinese AI ecosystem in particular. Okay, now I'm going to take a moment and try to articulate the Chinese perspective on the US China relationship to the degree that I can. I think the big narrative that motivates so much of what the national government in China is doing is the story of the century of humiliation. And again, it's important to remember that this is still something that is in living memory for

1:07:38Chinese people. The cultural revolution ended in 1976. So people who are 70 years old now were 20 years old at the end of the cultural revolution, which means that they grew up in and they remember these extremely turbulent, chaotic, very tough times where at some points people actually were starving in China. So this is extremely motivating. They think of themselves rightly as one of the world's great civilizations and they never want to go back to the low point that they experienced not so long ago. So what is the key lesson that they take away from that whole experience? I think pretty simply it is you cannot afford to fall behind the frontier of technology. I think everybody's familiar with this famous quote from a Chinese emperor, which basically went like,

1:08:40why would we need to trade with you? We have everything. We have the finest goods. There's nothing that anybody could want in the world that I can't get from within the Chinese empire. Well, that may have been true at that moment, but fast forward a little while and that insularity did not age well, obviously, and when the European powers came calling and China didn't have military technology to measure up to what the Western powers had or to what Japan had after it did a quick catch up of its own, this created the possibility, which in fact was realized for China to be invaded, for it to have terms dictated to it for the Japanese invasion and the war, and this was not pretty stuff. Then of course, the revolution and there's all the turmoil and fall out that came with that and people just lived way below what they would expect Chinese civilization to be like for basically a century and they call it the century of humiliation and the takeaway is we will never

1:09:43again allow ourselves to fall behind on technology because if we do foreign powers might come in and do that to us again and we will just never allow that to happen. I think that's the starting point that you should understand the Chinese government as working from and they're pretty committed to the bit. They're not going to fall behind but they also extend that now to not wanting to be dependent. They don't want to have critical technologies that somebody could cut them off from and so our chip ban, by the way, is like really hitting a nerve in Chinese political thought because it's not just that we're trying to deny them something that's valuable but it goes straight to the story of oh, if we are not at the technology frontier and we are dependent on other powers for key things that are required to be at the technology frontier then we are not

1:10:44secure and that means all this could happen again. And this is why for all that I love the first half of machines of loving grace. In the second half when he basically says what we're going to do is we're going to build this coalition of democracies and we'll box out our adversaries, namely China, until we have such a decisive advantage that essentially we can make them an offer they can't refuse and they'll have to recognize that it's better off to join the alliance than it is to try to compete with democracies. This is exactly what they are afraid of. This is exactly what has happened to and what they are trying their damnedest to prevent. So it's not what feels maybe to a western reader like oh, it's interesting that Daria would propose that. He must really believe AI is going to be super powerful to be able to pull something like that off. That's one idea of what we might do if we have such super powerful AI. I wonder what we would do. The Chinese I think are reading that very differently. They're like oh my god, they're trying to do it again. And we should be very careful

1:11:50about sending that message because that will mobilize and strengthen Chinese resolve in a way that few other things could do. When they hear that kind of thought coming from credible people, and Daria definitely is a credible person because he is bleeding. One of the top AI companies in the world, they're like man, we know what it's like when somebody comes in and takes over our country and deposes our government and treats us like shit. And we can't do anything about it because their technology is better than ours and that's in the end. All that matters. We know what that's like. We are not going to allow that to happen again. What do we have to do to make sure that we're not put into the bind that Daria describes putting us into? I think another thing that we should keep in mind too is that this is again just trying to give you a sense of what the Chinese narrative point of view is. Robert Wright would call this an exercise in cognitive empathy. They are very

1:12:54sensitive to unfairness and what they see as hypocrisy on our side. So for example, you will often hear in Western discourse. You can't give chips to Chinese companies because China has civil military fusion. So if the company is having technology, then the Communist Party just automatically gets it. What the Chinese perspective on that is is the United States created that system. We have the military industrial complex. We have the Defense Production Act. So it's the classic meme right of their wicked civil military fusion, our blessed military industrial complex. They just see us as being blatantly hypocritical and motivated in our unfairness. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be somewhat cautious about how we think about sending certain technology into China, given the fact

1:13:55that yes, the government does have the ability to take technology from companies when it feels that it needs to. But we should also be mindful that from their perspective, this is something that the United States pioneered. And now that China is doing it, we're somehow saying it's not okay for them to do it. So they're quite sensitive to that. To the point that I heard several times, that Chinese companies actually have a somewhat similar impulse as at least some American companies to avoid dealing with the military. They know that if they are seen to be doing business with the Chinese government and particularly the military, then that will really hurt their ability to do business abroad. It'll hurt their ability to buy stuff and it might get them put on various lists, sanctions, ban, and so on and so forth. They specifically talk about the unfairness with which Huawei in particular was treated quite a bit. The way I would tell this story in simple terms is

1:14:59basically after the century of humiliation, it's trying to begin to rise and push toward the frontier in technology. Obviously, this was a generational project where there was a lot of low-end manufacturing first and they gradually climbed the value chain. And Huawei was one of the very first companies that got to the level of being truly globally competitive at a core technology that had international importance. A real national champion, not in the sense of being chosen by the government, but in the sense that the great national effort of revitalization, rejuvenation, pushing back to the technology frontier, Huawei was one of the very first companies that actually made it and got to the level where on the merits their technology was actually winning globally. On a pure value for money basis and they felt like this is huge. We have got one in a key industry

1:16:02that was taken the world by storm. We are there at the frontier. We are winning as much as we're losing. This is amazing. And they really feel pretty hard done by by the fact that the United States tried to bully our allies into not allowing Huawei into their infrastructure. Why? Because they have ties to the Chinese government and they're going to spy on us. Okay, now I think that is a risk that we should be mindful of. But from the Chinese perspective, they look at the Snowden revelations and the fact that the US was spying on everybody we could possibly spy on, including apparently having wire tapped the German chancellor's phone calls and they say, you're doing exactly what you accuse us of doing. And there is a lot more evidence that you've been doing it and you've been doing it to your allies and the very countries you're bullying to try to keep them from buying telecom infrastructure from our first company that broke through

1:17:04and was truly globally competitive in a frontier industry, you're accusing them of doing exactly what you yourselves have been doing. So they just look at that and say, well, the clearly they're out to get us. Clearly, the United States is uncomfortable sharing power. The fact that they would be so brazen as to be spying on everybody, their own allies so extensively, to have all this come to light and still then to say that we can't have Chinese telecom because they might spy on people. My God, what absolute hypocrites, what motivated reasoning. Clearly, they just want to keep us down. That I think is the lesson that the Chinese leadership class, because I heard this from multiple people. So this is definitely not just something they'll present and she thinks himself. This is pretty well percolated through educated society in China that this is just plain unfair and hypocritical

1:18:05by the United States and the only reasonable interpretation is that we're trying to keep them down. So you come forward to the chip ban. Same thing. Here we are. This is the big frontier of technology today. It's going to change everything. It's going to up and power dynamics. It's going to potentially allow some countries to gain the decisive strategic advantage over other countries. And before it even really gets kicked off in a serious way, before we even have agents that can book a plane ticket reliably, we've banned our companies from selling these chips into China. Why? Well, from their perspective, it just reads as we're trying to keep them down. That's the view I think they have today. I alluded to distillation earlier. I guess I'll say my view on distillation just speaking as Nathan is I think it's pretty rich for the American

1:19:12AI companies to first collect all of the shared inheritance of humanity. Our entire intellectual heritage. Everything that's ever been written in the full internet, all the books, the holes of culture and knowledge find a way to put it into a product and then say, oh, but it has to stop here. Nobody else can take information out of our product and use it to train an AI. That's not right. Well, wait a second. You just did that. You just reappropriated all of culture, all of knowledge, all of the intellectual achievement of humanity. And now you're trying to say that other people shouldn't be allowed to reappropriate knowledge out of your product into their products. Why? Why is that fair? I don't think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's honestly how most of the world thinks about it. So I think it's maybe fair game for companies to decide who they do and don't want to do business with. I wouldn't say they should have to serve customers who they believe are trying to do distillation. But I don't really feel comfortable

1:20:20with the US government using the force of the state to try to police some sort of anti-distillation policy. So that's Nathan's view. I think the Chinese view, broadly, is that the Chinese companies do not just say, oh, yeah, we're distilling. I was at one big company and one of the researchers who presented an interesting paper to us on diffusion language models. So again, just shows they have fundamental research going on into different architectures for language models. But his point on distillation was not all Chinese companies are doing it. He was like some probably are, but we're not. That was his key point. We at this big tech company, we are not doing that. And one person there also said, there's all this talk about these illicit accounts that people are creating on Anthropic and trying to get tokens and there's resellers and whatever. He said, I think the big reason that's happening is because Chinese engineers are just like everybody else. They want to use the best coding models. And so we recognize that Anthropic has the best coding model and our people

1:21:23want to use it. And Anthropic won't sell it here. So that naturally creates this black market where people are trying to find a way to get access to the best stuff. They still want their clawed in China. And so the point was what looks like distillation when you see activity coming from China, in a lot of cases, it's just people wanting to use the best stuff. You should be flattered by it. It was basically the attitude that I heard at this one big tech company. So are some of the Chinese companies taking shortcuts with distillation? I'm sure they are. Obviously China has had a long history of, let's say, reappropriating IP. It's happened in multiple ways. Some of it has happened through tech transfer where they said, look, if you want to come do business in China, you got to have a joint venture and you got to teach Chinese people how to do the things that you're doing. And that's the only way you're going to come into this market and sell to our people. So that's been legal tech transfer. There's also been obviously a lot of outright IP theft over time. And it seems

1:22:27like, in particular, there's been some analysis that suggests that some of the Chinese models talk a lot like clawed or some of them even say they're clawed. And that's probably as close to a smoking gun as we're going to get to say that yes, that almost for sure is going on. But it's also important to say it's not just distillation, right? They have excellent talent. They have excellent engineering. You can read the Chinese papers that come out of places like deep seek and Kimmy. They are innovating on the attention mechanism. They are finding all these efficiencies. The RL zero paper from deep seek that came out at the beginning of 2025 was for me one of the most important papers, honestly, that I've ever read in AI because it's shared with the world that even on a pure RL basis with no supervised fine tuning, you can get chain of thought to start to demonstrate these metacognitive abilities, which means that reasoning is going to get really good. That case was brought to the world in an open academic way by a Chinese company in January of 2025.

1:23:33So it's not just distillation. And I think to the degree that distillation is important in how the Chinese companies are keeping up, I think the Chinese story probably is look, we are a proud civilization. We are a top class civilization. We have been at the frontier for most of our history. We lost track of how important it was to have frontier technology at one point in time. And the rest of the world was not kind to us when we made that mistake. They invaded, they dominated, they forced us to take opium in and a ton of our people got addicted to drugs. And it was a very ugly and terrible time. The European powers, the Japanese. You guys were the bad guys. We call it the center of humiliation and we still feel it and we still have older people today that lived through the last phases of that. And we are never going back there again.

1:24:37And we will do whatever it takes to make sure that we don't. So when you try to shut out our very first technology champion in Huawei that got to the top of the heap of a frontier industry globally and really planted the flag that China can compete, China can innovate when you try to shut them out because of spying. When you in fact were doing all this spying, including of your own allies, you're just trying to keep us down. When you come back and do the same thing again with AI, just as it's starting to seem like it might be a big deal, you refuse to sell us chips. And then you got leaders of some of your companies saying that what you're going to do is build this whole international alliance against us and essentially try to impose something that sounds like regime change on us. We've had that happen. We are not going back there again. We will develop our own chip industry domestically. Obviously that's going to be a huge priority. We will

1:25:40smuggle chips in from wherever we can get them to give ourselves a little edge in the meantime. We will distill off of your models if we need to and we won't feel too bad about it because we're never going back there again. And to the degree that you're trying to push us back to some position of technological inferiority, we will resist that with all our might. That's how they I think see us and we need to be mindful of that as we think about how we're going to deal with them. Because if we don't do anything to correct that, then it's going to be tough. Right now, there's not a lot of trust. Both sides have low trust in the other. Both sides have pretty legitimate grievances. I think it's very valid for the American companies that have had their IP stolen. In some cases, literally hacked into and stolen plans and designs. And all of a sudden, now you've got a Chinese competitor who didn't have to do the R&D and can just work on scaling the manufacturing. Absolutely. The American companies have a right to feel hard done by two. It's like they were the ones that invaded China a hundred years ago. So that's a real grievance.

1:26:44But if we don't at least take the time to understand their perspective on recent history and the actions that we are taking now, which they perceive as just trying to keep them down, we're going to be a really tough spot when it comes to improving the nature of the relationship. Okay. Now I want to change gears and actually talk about how despite the fact that they do feel like they're being treated unfairly and that the US is trying to keep them down, there is actually a lot of all of branches being offered by the Chinese side. And I think we would do well to recognize those trying to receive some of them better than we have to date. So we just start off by saying that at WAC, Preston Chi opened his speech. And the very first thing that he said was that the field of AI began at Dartmouth College in the United States. It's just a little line, but the close watchers have said, yeah, that's an olive branch right there, right? He's giving credit to the United

1:27:48States as the place where AI started. He didn't have to do that, could have said nothing about it. He could have said, here we are engaged in a great international struggle for supremacy and who's going to control the future. He did not. He gave historical credit to the United States for starting the field of AI way back when. And there's just lots of little touch points like this that I think we should make sure we don't miss. And rather, let's recognize it. Let's appreciate it. Let's try to cultivate it. That is the path to having a better, more collaborative future. He also said, of course, and I covered this last time in more detail, a lot of stuff about the risks of AI, the ethics of AI, the importance of maintaining control. A couple quotes I'll offer here real briefly. He said, quote, we should jointly oppose over stretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others. We should jointly oppose over stretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others.

1:28:54Honestly, I don't know if I could have said it better myself. Another quote from 2025, we should bear in mind the well-being of the entire humanity and promote the sound and orderly development of AI while ensuring that it is beneficial, safe, and fair. Now, we hear a lot in the West as well about what we've got to maximize the upside and minimize the risk. But you don't hear too much used to from OpenAI, less so these days as they've become more patriotic, I guess. But remember, the original mission of OpenAI was to make sure that AI benefits all humanity. We don't hear that so much these days. But you do hear it from President Xi. We should bear in mind the well-being of the entire humanity. Now, of course, people will dismiss this as just rhetoric and it's just nice language and actions to become louder than words. And of course, all that is true. But you got to start somewhere, right? So I think that recognizing when we do hear cosmopolitan oneness of humanity type language from Chinese leadership, I think we should appreciate that for what it is. And by the way, this is something that I heard everywhere. One of the things

1:29:58that Matt Xihen said in his blog post was that in the Chinese system, the power or the purpose of a speech like the one that she gave is that it gives people throughout the system something that they can cite. If they can say, President Xi said this, therefore, I think we should do that, that gives weight to their argument in the Chinese context. And I indeed, I did hear everywhere I went echoing rhetoric that we should work together, that we should be open, that this should be collaborative, that all humanity should benefit. This was echoed at the event, but much more broadly than at the event as well. When I was in Beijing, I talked about this in a previous episode too, I attended the opening of this AI Safety Research Hub at Xinghua University. And they cited constellation in Berkeley and Lisa, the London Initiative for Safe AI and sash, the one from Singapore,

1:31:05as explicit inspirations. They see people abroad doing good work, bringing people together for AI Safety Research. They want to join that top tier. And they want to do it in an international way. They're paying for people from abroad to come study at their hub, and they're also paying for their students to go abroad and study at these international hubs. And there's even a European professor among the five founding board members of the AI Safety Hub at Xinghua. So everywhere I went, you heard this language around openness, international collaboration, the benefit of all humanity. I think that's a pretty big deal. We don't hear as much about that as we used to in the West, and I think we're in some sense losing our way, frankly. I liked our old rhetoric a lot better than I like our new rhetoric. One thing that I didn't hear at any point along the way, and this is really remarkable given how much of it we hear in the West, I don't think I ever heard one person say that China was ahead or that China would win any sort of AI race. In fact,

1:32:11I really never even heard anybody talk about AI as a race. It's a very different framing there than it is here. It's about bringing about prosperity. It's about material abundance. It's about figuring out how are we going to take care of our aging population? When it comes to the international dynamics, you've got she saying, let's not overstretch the national security concept in the field of AI. You've got all this talk about openness, benefiting all humanity, collaboration, the importance of international bodies and standards, the role for the United Nations to play. You do not hear it really framed as a race, and you don't really hear too much horse race coverage in the sense of who's ahead or behind, although they do recognize that the American companies are ahead. So in that sense, there's certainly competitive awareness. This is not just something that I observed in the elite or polite conversation. At one point, I went to the mall and stopped in at one of the

1:33:12companies that was selling cars, and I asked about autonomy. They said, yes, it does have autonomy, but the guy volunteered to me, but Tesla has better autonomy than we do. So there's a recognition certainly of where Chinese companies and Chinese technology stand in terms of international competition, but never really that I can recall where things framed in terms of a race, in terms of an ultimate winner. Certainly nothing of the sort of winner take all. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to build up Chinese AI. We're going to get all the countries on our side, and then we'll force the US to recognize that they should join our alliance rather than try to compete with us. Nothing like that was ever said, and I think it is worth just meditating for a moment on how we would receive it if it was. That's pretty wild. They were putting those messages out there, and while they do hear that, and they do resent that, and I think they can use the sense of

1:34:22unfairness to justify in their own minds some practices that we find objectionable. They're not reciprocating in the same way. I've not heard anything that suggests that there's a fantasy in the Chinese AI world of getting ahead, building decisive strategic advantage, and dominating the world. I've not heard one peep from anyone about that. On the contrary, what they seem to talk about most is trying to provide global public goods. I think this is both a sincere aspiration on their part, and also somewhat of a strategic positioning move, but they're obviously open sourcing the models themselves, which is one pretty credible way to say that, hey, we are here to help you with AI. Here is our model. You can take it for free and run it and do whatever you want. Do research on it. Fine-tune it. Put it into your own business. Figure out how it works in your context. Once you have it, we can never take it back. That's one way in which they're really trying

1:35:27to make a case to people that we are the good guys. We are here to help you. They're trying to change that perspective that I alluded to earlier, and we're just here to extract resources or extract value from your country and take it home. Here they come with gifts that they pretty credibly are giving freely, with basically no strings attached, and the nature of the technology itself makes that pretty clear. Now, will that change? Could that change? I think it absolutely could, but for now, this is the posture that they're striking. They also have this world AI cooperation organization, which she talked about in his speech at the WAIC. It's unclear exactly what it means. Obviously, don't have the chip production capability to be exporting a lot of chips right now from China to their allies in this partnership, but they said they were going to have 5,000 training things. It's not entirely clear what these training things are. These are going to be seminars that they put on or people that come from other countries to do PhDs at

1:36:29Chinese universities. It's not entirely clear. But they're definitely trying to position themselves as non-threatening, as helpful, as a country that wants to not just advance themselves, but to create and to actually be a rising tide that lifts all the other boats. Giving away the open-source models is one pretty credible signal that they really mean it. Again, that's not to say nothing will ever change. But I think right now, it is pretty credible. Okay. Next bit, as we think about what will China do in the future? Are they racing? Do they see this as a technology race that they need to win? There's not that many precedents that we can look at to get any data on this. We can look at their rhetoric, and they seem to be much less inclined to frame things in national security terms than we are right now. In fact, you got she actively warning against it.

1:37:30But maybe that's all talk. One data point that I found quite interesting. You may remember the conversation that I talked about two China episodes ago, where I sat down at a table with three women, all friends of friends, all maybe late 20s, early 30s, and two of them produced physical devices and asked if they could record the conversation. I was quite surprised by that because that's a pretty tech forward. But one of the questions that I asked later in that conversation was how excited they would personally be to get some sort of neural implant. And in some sense, begin to merge with AI. I thought they were going to be pretty into it, honestly. And I personally am into it. The standard answer for enthusiasts is like, I wouldn't want to be the first or the tenth, but it's amazing that neural ink is doing what they're doing with people who are paralyzed and restoring quality of life to them. And for them, it's like, obviously worth the risk. And every testimony I've seen from neural ink is amazing. And I'm so glad that's happening. And like,

1:38:32one day, I can't imagine myself getting some sort of neural implant or neural connection. Kind of sounds exciting, honestly. A little scary, but I'd say on balance, I'm more excited about it than I am scared. To my surprise, these Chinese women younger than me who I was talking to, they were not so enthused. They were kind of like, eh, I don't know. That's my brain you're talking about putting something into my skull. I don't know. I'd be pretty reluctant. They were really not too excited about things messing directly with their brains. I think it's a very, obviously, very understandable position to take on such a technology. And it just goes to show that this notion that they don't care. They're just going to race ahead. I don't know that that is quite true. They don't want to be behind. And so when we frame things as a race and we frame things as we have to stay ahead, that really sets off their alarm bells. That gets the competitive juices

1:39:35flowing there. But when it's something that's not so competitive, like we don't have mass neural implants, it's not really been framed as who can merge with the machine faster. What I heard was caution from very tech-forward people. Again, these are people that ask if they could record the conversation. So this is certainly from American context, pushing the boundary of what would be considered normal or polite. And this is the first meeting I had with these people as well. They're bold enough to ask for that and still quite hesitant when it came to some sort of neural interface. This also has been the case when it comes to human cloning or extreme embryo selection. For a long time, I've heard this idea that China is going to have all super babies. They're just going to do that. And if we don't, we'll fall behind. I've heard that projected on to China many times. But in fact, I don't see a lot of evidence that that's happening. Certainly, I don't see any more evidence that it's happening there than it's happening here. And it is

1:40:36happening here to some degree. We've got startups that are doing embryo screening and polygenic scoring to try to allow people to have the healthiest, most high achieving whatever their values are. They can probably try to steer the embryo selection in that direction. But there hasn't been like an army of Chinese babies cloned. And the one guy who did it, this guy, he, Zheng Q, he became famous globally for applying gene editing techniques in 2018 to human embryos for the, I would say, relatively benign purpose as things go of trying to create babies who were resistant to HIV. The Chinese government has come down pretty hard on this guy. He was sentenced by a Chinese court to three years in prison, find three million one. So I think there's actually just a lot more conservative thinking or conservative impulse

1:41:42in Chinese society than we might be inclined to naively think when we project onto them that if we don't race as fast as we can, then they will. If we don't race to super babies, they'll have all the super babies. If we don't race to the super intelligence, winter circle, they'll be us there. I didn't hear these things framed in terms of a race while I was in China. I never heard one person say that China was going to win. And even on something as exciting to me, long term, once it's proven out as a neural implant, some ability to merge with the machine, some sort of transhumanist future, what I encountered there in practice was a lot more conservative than what you would hear in the Bay Area. I think that is really important for us to keep in mind and understand. Okay, so what should the US do in response to all of this? I think the first

1:42:46thing we should do is we should remember that we are very strong unto ourselves. Both countries have a lot of geographical advantages. The US obviously has the two big beautiful oceans that put us quite a huge distance from the rest of the world. We've got friendly neighbors, North and South. China also has pretty favorable natural borders. It's tundra to the north, it's desert to the west, it's ocean to the east, and it's the Himalayas to the south. So they're not going to be invaded anytime soon either. Both countries are very secure in our borders, and both countries have the overwhelming majority of the resources that a country needs to be a great power. In some cases, in the US, we're not necessarily developing them as much as we could when it comes to things like rare earths, but we have the deposits. We have the ability to do anything we need to do domestically. It's not the kind of thing where if we can't import, we're going to be lost. China doesn't have so much

1:43:46oil, but at this point, got to enough of a solar-powered future that, as we've seen with recent disruptions to the oil market, they've been able to weather it pretty fine. They had a big reserve, apparently, that they had built up, which again shows the value of foresight and strategic thinking and leadership, and that reserve has buffered them, and the fact that they're just using so much electrical energy and they're building tons of nuclear power plants, in addition to all the solar, both countries are secure. For the foreseeable future, until the singularity, neither country has to worry that somebody's going to come and impose their way of life on us, take away the freedoms that we value, make us learn a different language, take away our religion. These things are not a worry for us or for them, but we should keep in mind that we're not under serious threat. We still have in the US too the world's best university system, the rest of the world sends their best and brightest here because we do have incredible

1:44:47universities where people have over the last century done a large share of the frontier research in the world. We definitely have the most dynamic business culture in the world. We have this incredible golden goose that is venture capital and Silicon Valley and startup culture broadly, and these are huge strengths. People in China repeatedly said, we want to make a Silicon Valley here, just like people say that all over the world, and all over the United States, or that matter. Our ability to assimilate talented immigrants is a huge strength, and that's not one that China has. They cannot take in immigrants in the way that we have, for multiple reasons, one, it's just not culturally done. The language is a huge barrier. You can never really become Chinese. You're always foreign or who lives there, whereas in the US you can become an American. That's a huge, huge deal, and not easily replicated at all. Another reason that China can't take in immigrants to solve its problems is there's just too many Chinese people to take in enough immigrants. One guy said to me, look, people always say this, can China solve its aging society problem

1:45:47with immigrants? He's like, we're going to go from 1.4 billion down to 800 million over a couple decades with a birth rate of just over one. We would have to take in like half of Africa to fill that gap, and there's no way that's going to happen. So it's a rounding error, basically. Even if we try to take in immigrants, we can take in some, but we're not going to address these structural problems by doing that. It's just fantasy. That's again, an American projection. In this case, me being guilty of it, thinking that maybe that could be a strategy for Chinese. He's like, not really. We do want to steal some Ivy League professors to come start labs here, but in terms of becoming an immigrant nation, no, no way. That's a unique advantage the US has, and nobody is going to replicate it. And even just language, the fact that everybody around the world speaks English makes it easier for them to come here, makes it easier for us to learn whatever it is that they're doing. That's even true in China. They are publishing their AI research in English. Isn't that amazing? They don't need to, right? They could change on this, and I'm worried that

1:46:50they might, at some point, decide, you know what? Why are we bothering to publish all this stuff in English? They don't even like us. They're trying to keep us down. Maybe we should keep some of this stuff to ourselves. Maybe we should just publish it in Chinese. If they want to learn our technology secrets, maybe they can learn our language. As of now, they're not doing that. They're publishing stuff in English. This is a huge advantage that we absolutely should remember as we think about how can we rise to the challenge of the moment that AI presents and that Chinese strength presents. I think we absolutely should also learn some things from China's hardships. They fell behind the technology frontier, and they really suffered for it. And I think we should learn from that historical experience and from little tastes of it like we had during COVID, when all of a sudden we couldn't get things like we were used to getting, that we do need to make sure we have our house in order. We should not allow ourselves to fall behind the technology frontier. We should not seed all of these critical modern and future industries to China. We should not

1:47:54fail to be able to make batteries in the United States. We should not be unable to make solar panels in the United States. We are going to need to take some challenging decisions, challenging in the sense that they challenge the prevailing paradigms here that we can just let the market rip and let the invisible hand do its thing. We had this expectation at the end of the cold war that it was just going to be peace and trade and prosperity forever. And part of the reason frankly, that hasn't played out quite as well as we might have hoped, is because we have gone around doing all these disruptive things and starting all these wars that have undermined that. I think a lot of countries are not confident that they can trust us to be reliable allies. Because we take these actions, we run the risk of getting cut off. We run the risk of coercive measures being applied back to us in various ways. China has certainly learned how to do that. And so as a result, we have to be mindful of maintaining our own supply chains and making sure

1:49:00that we're not bolded into other countries for frontier technology. Even though it's a long way off for us to be invaded, it is really important that we do still find a way to stay at the technology frontier. And we're stumbling through this right now. Industrial policy has obviously not been our great strength. Our leaders are lawyers, not engineers, and their understanding of technology is not nearly as good as it could be. We have all sorts of challenges when it comes to federalism and nimbyism and all this kind of stuff and parochial politics and special interest group protection that makes it tough. So I don't think we want to copy China. My favorite example of this is the high speed train. I think people look at the massive failure that is the high speed train project in California and the massive success that is the high speed rail network that is built out across much above China at this point. And they say, we should do that. We should

1:50:02have that like they have that. And frankly, I think that's just like too big of a bite for us to take right now. That's more than we can shoot. I don't think we should try to do high speed rail across the United States. We're a long way from having the state capacity to do that. Instead, I think we should be thinking more about like how can we get full self-driving rolled out and broadly so that people can enjoy their commute so people can be productive on their commutes so that we don't have 30,000 people dying in highway accidents every year. There is a massive mobility boom for us to create for ourselves with technology that already exists. That doesn't require a reconstruction of the entire economy. It doesn't require eminent domain going everywhere. That is compatible with a gradual transition and people opting in. We should push ourselves to realize things like that. China can have the high speed rail. We should have the full self-driving.

1:51:06And we should try to lead the world in full self-driving. We should try to be the first country that has zero highway deaths while people still enjoy the individual freedom and convenience of having their own car and being able to go wherever they want, whenever they want, with the safety and liberation of their time and attention that full self-driving can provide. So we should definitely be thinking about things not as how can we copy China but how can we learn the deeper lessons that they've learned before having to learn them the hard way? And what does state capacity with American characteristics look like? China has done socialism and definitely done capitalism with Chinese characteristics. How can we take some of the state capacity that they have and put an American spin on it so we can get some of the benefits but still do it in a way that's consistent with our own values? That I think is the real challenge of our times for our political class and I'm really not sure we are up to it.

1:52:09As of now, we've had continued sliding into anti-data center sentiment. Nimbism is super strong here. Our regulators take all too often a hostile position with respect to our own companies. I think that we should be reversing all of that stuff. We should be building a lot more. I'm not a big eminent domain fan but we do need to reform a bunch of the processes that allow people to delay other people's a right to build on their own already owned property. We probably should use federal land that is not well used today. I don't mean like putting data centers in national parks but there's an awful lot of federal land that is available that really isn't being used for anything that could how is a lot of these new critical infrastructure moves that we want to make. A nice thing about data centers is they don't have to be right by populated areas so that's why they're going into rural areas and I think federal lands could be a very natural place for a lot of data centers

1:53:10to go. We should be thinking about how can our regulators protect the public but also facilitate the success of our companies. One thing that I have just seen over and over again as a huge liability is the threat of federal investigation whether it's from antitrust or privacy issues like happened in the case of meta. I tried to do a red team contract engagement with meta two years ago around Lama 3 and they invited me to do it. Somebody reached out to me and it was such an unbelievable hassle just to get onboarded. They sent me a laptop and I had to go through all these trainings about data privacy. If I didn't do that it was going to be locked out of the laptop and I was just trying to do some red teaming on a stupid language model but it had clearly created an unbelievable amount of friction at meta for the government to be in their business. And should the government have been in their business? Yes to some degree I think so but not in this way where

1:54:14everything they ever want to do is bog down by a sort of adversarial regulator that has the company fearing that if we don't like not just do the right thing but check all these Byzantine boxes that they'll come down on us and we'll have huge problems again. By all accounts this paralyzed Microsoft for a generation it definitely had a significant impact on meta I saw that firsthand and we just don't seem very well balanced it seems like our regulators too often have this idea that they want to stick it to the companies or it's their job to check the companies we need our companies to be successful. The infamous tweet that was from some California state legislator to Elon saying he's a bad guy and we don't need him and he said message received in the left that's a big oops for the state of California to chase Elon out. Thank God we have enough federalism that there was another place where he could go and be successful

1:55:16truly the degree to which Elon companies are carrying the United States in the broad scheme of technology competition is a pretty scary honestly. When you think about space electric cars battery production solar neural implants and AI obviously as well but you know Elon's getting hard to defend in a lot of ways these days but if you subtract Elon companies from the United States side of the US China economic competition we look a lot worse and the fact that our political class has decided that he should be the whipping boy for anti billionaire anti whatever sentiment and that they can make political hay by making his life difficult to the point where that clearly contributed to radicalizing him politically this is just like massive own goal after a massive own goal that we've got to be smarter about. So let's get real on the one hand we have

1:56:17strength for strength the ability to go toe to toe on any competitive dimension with China and we should not be afraid we should not feel like we're less than we should feel like we're absolutely up to the challenge we should not try to copy them but rather try to take some of the lessons that they have clearly learned and figure out how we can apply them in our context again state capacity with American characteristics we should try to make sure that our government is supporting our companies even as it protects the public from abuse by our companies but not trying to drag our companies down or make our tech leaders who are inventing and delivering the future for us into scapegoats that is absolutely a massive own goal and it's not happening in China the same way the government will come down on somebody if they step out a line there that is truth but broadly they are trying to help their companies be successful and I think we need to get more

1:57:17aligned in that respect in the US as well. Another thing we should do is honestly at this point we should do what China has done and try to do tech transfer from China to the US we should be learning as much as we can from their companies you know right now Chinese cars are banned in the United States. I think that's probably a mistake and I said this is somebody who's coming from Detroit and who has seen what it can do to a big city when a big industry like the auto industry all of a sudden has a lot more international competition and isn't growing like it used to be but instead is shrinking for a while and it's not pretty but how are we going to catch up on batteries how are we going to catch up on electric cars we've got Elon thankfully to at least give us a toehold in these markets but I think we should probably also be open to having Chinese companies come into the US market and as long as they're willing to do a joint venture with American companies and have some tech transfer and locate manufacturing here then I think we should probably be open to

1:58:22that kind of deal just like they were and the truth is we do have things to learn from them now just as they have for a long time and still have things to learn from us we both have things to learn from each other and we should absolutely be trying to bring that knowledge into our economy rather than trying to block it out when you go to China and you hear just how quiet the streets are it is amazing the vast majority of cars there are electric at least in the top cities that I went to if it's not that way across the country it will soon be that way across the country the quiet the lack of pollution these are really nice things and if we are intent on just blocking them out and pretending that they don't exist and continuing to do things the old way like we've always done it that's the path that's the old Chinese effort said right we don't need anything from you we've got everything we need we have nothing to learn what possibly could we stand to gain if we adopt that attitude before long we are going to find ourselves legitimately behind and we're

1:59:23going to be missing out on a lot of great stuff I went to this one tech transfer office in Shanghai and they took us through this room by room museum of like modern technology which by the way think about that a museum to modern technology have you seen anything like that in the United States have you ever gone to a place where it's like we have curated for you a bunch of cutting-edge technology that you might not know about and this is a place where you can get a survey of modern technology I don't think I've ever seen a thing like that in the United States well I went to one in Shanghai and you go through all these rooms and you're like man if we don't trade with these people we are going to be missing out on a lot of really cool stuff that they are pushing their frontier on we're talking medical devices we're talking educational devices the list is on and on for the products that they are developing and we've of course we've got real strength in technology too no doubt but we're not going to do everything the future is going to be one where meaningful

2:00:25advances more and more often are going to be coming from China and we do not want to be missing out on those things just because we're so obstinate and unwilling to accept that somebody else can also invent part of the future even germicidal light which is the the substance of a recent cross post if we want to be ready for the next pandemic I think one thing we need to do is install germicidal light in a lot of spaces in schools in offices in hospitals in transit hubs you name it right this is a obvious low hanging fruit that provides a ton of protection even as it just prevents us from getting sick today so the the upside is immediate the ROI is probably off the charts if it works anywhere close to as well as it seems like it works based on the research that's been done so far and yet right now the the lights from air lamp are 500 bucks who's probably really good at scaling that and making it cheap China patch and we're kensy said that in the in that

2:01:30episode anything that can come on a container ship from China is going to get dramatically cheaper if the demand is there so even if we just want to start protecting ourselves from pandemics we have a lot of reason to want to trade with China and and see and continue to get the benefits of of their incredible manufacturing success I think that we should even take this to the level frankly of like social questions in some cases another question I've been asking myself recently is what does surveillance with American characteristics look like it is clear in China that surveillance has upside when you walk around the street at night you feel totally safe I've heard this from women as well you're not afraid at all to go around at night anywhere even with your nose and your phone because there's really no crime there because they see it the eyes are on and you will be caught so that's not to say that nothing bad ever happens in China of course but like the idea that you're

2:02:32going to go pick somebody's pocket or swipe their phone run off and get away with it you are not you are not getting away with it and so people don't do it so now we have this debate going on in the United States where these flat cameras are going out everywhere and it's become very politicized it seems like maybe it's working in places like San Francisco crime is definitely down there I'm not sure if that's because of flock or because of other changes that have been made but it is clear that surveillance does have upside it also has upside just in the convenience of like I've heard multiple stories of people leaving a cell phone in a car and then getting it back because they go to the police station they find the car they see the license plate they call the guy next thing he's brought the phone back so there's a lot of upside to living in a society where you kind of know that if you do something stupid you're going to get caught and where questions like hey where did I leave my cell phone can be answered because I think we rightly don't want to trust our

2:03:38national government with footage of everything everywhere all the time in the United States and we might not even want to trust our local police with that we've got a lot of problems obviously with the relationship between police and the communities they're supposed to be protecting and serving and so a lot of people are like I don't want to have surveillance in my city I don't trust the police I don't trust the federal government I've heard people say even if it does bring crime down I'm against it so what's our solution to that are we just going to allow China to have no crime and meanwhile we have a ton of crime that doesn't seem like the American way we need a positive solution we need a synthesis so what does surveillance with American characteristics look like I don't necessarily know I would cite the book liquid rain which I did an episode on probably two years ago now with the author and he had an interesting idea which was basically weak encryption of all the footage such that you can't just analyze all the footage all

2:04:38the time but you can with acceptable cost decode any particular bit of footage that you want so if somebody does come to the police station and says hey I was here at this time can you look then they'd be able to pull that up with a modest computational budget to do the decoding be able to see it but you couldn't just it would be expensive enough that you couldn't just do it for every intersection over street all the time all across America I'm not sure how workable that solution is I'm certainly not an expert on cryptography but I do think we should try to get the upside of surveillance with a structure underneath it that supports our way of life our values our desire to not be watched every second I think we can probably have both of those how exactly are we going to do it it starts by recognizing that there is upside that somebody else out there in the world has figured something out that has real upside that we're not getting and then working from there to figure out what is the version of this that can actually work for us

2:05:39okay let's talk about AI specifically and some of the ideas I have for for better relations on the AI front I talked a little bit about export controls earlier and how the Chinese side feels about them and how they basically feel like it's just another instance of the United States trying to keep China down but are they working on their own terms from our perspective I think multiple things can be true at the same time I do think that it is clear that the export controls are having some effect we've heard enough from Chinese companies saying that export controls are limiting what they can do that we can't deny I can't deny that they are having some effect and I do think the effect probably still is mostly in the future in the sense that all the build out that's happening and the great scale up of chip production means that if we were to start imposing them today most of the chip volume difference between

2:06:42the US and China would be in the future and so I think that the policy can be effective in the sense that it can slow Chinese AI development at least somewhat at least in the future that said I'm not sure it's a great idea first of all we should keep in mind that the stated rationale for the policy has changed over time initially it was like we want to prevent them from military application of advanced AI then it was like well we probably can't do that but at least we can prevent them from developing frontier models now it's like well we can't do that but at least we can limit the number of AI agents they can run at least we can limit their AI agents I don't like the sound of that that does sound like trying to keep Chinese public down right it does sound like trying to deny Chinese businesses Chinese individuals the opportunity to use the same kind of AI tools that we want to use here so I don't think that sounds great I don't think it's a good look I do think it like is understandably interpreted as us trying to keep them down even on those terms I'm

2:07:42not sure it's really working the sense seems to be right now that the Chinese chips are not great for training and so that's where they really need the Nvidia chips and from what I understand most Chinese companies when they want to do a big training run a lot of times they're renting that capacity on some hyper-scaler in Singapore Malaysia what have you but there is now one example of a company doing let's say near frontier training run on Huawei ascend chips and that's mate one they created their long cat model trained exclusively as far as I understand on Huawei ascend chips so now we have an existence proof that well it can be done I'm sure there was some overhead probably electricity but again the Chinese government is they're prepared to subsidize electricity as much as needed to allow something like that to happen so okay maybe we can't even prevent them from training frontier models on their own chips right now anyway and then just from an inference

2:08:47perspective like there seems to be a lot of inference it seems to be a lot of tokens plenty of tokens to go around the Chinese economy Kimi K3 was limited for a moment they had to suspend even new paid signups because they wanted to make sure that people were having a good experience and there was a chip limitation there that was preventing them from scaling further so it's not that there's no constraints that ever bind of course we've seen similar things in the US over the last couple years at times right where they just couldn't support at scale the products that they would have liked to support but probably the view in China was like there's plenty of tokens to go around deep seek has a free version many max has a free version Kimi has a free version I used these in China they were all available all the time and even when Kimi K3 wasn't available two six was still available so I was never unable to use a Chinese AI app due to lack of tokens and when I talk to people at hyperscalers and said if you're a startup and like all of a sudden you like catch fire and your your usage is known vertical can you as a hyperscaler support that startup they said yeah

2:09:53yeah we can even if you are going into true hyper growth there's enough inference capacity for us to support whatever it is you need so we'll see right now in one of the biggest mysteries I thought from the last couple years was that once Trump tried to relax the chirp restrictions of it then China said we don't even want to buy them and I think that's also been a little bit relaxed now a lot of times these headlines happen and then they kind of get revised and softened and the Chinese companies do want to buy so I think that lobbying has happened and the Chinese companies are pushing on their government to say let us buy some stuff and I think that is maybe starting to happen but the big question is going to be how quick can they catch up can they scale up a chip manufacturing sector with all the supply chain that requires in how long you know clearly they can there's no doubt that they're going to be able to do it on some time scale the question is

2:10:54really in time for the singularity or not right and I think the only way from my perspective that this whole chip ban try to keep China down try to make sure we have a lead try to create a decisive strategic advantage or whatever the only way that makes sense is if you believe that we are in a short term race to Godlike superintelligence and that the only thing that matters is who gets their first I think that basically is the anthropic belief right so I don't think Darryl is being inconsistent when he advocates for these policies because I think he really does think that like in the 27 28 time frame we're going to see recursive self improvement kick in we're going to see extremely rapid progress whoever gets their first could really achieve like a world dominant advantage and therefore better than it be us than them or certainly better than it be us than

2:11:55both of us and I can at least see that logic but I still would say let's perhaps try to pace the frontier together then pursue that kind of strategy and the other thing that is really I think underappreciated about the chip controls especially by the AI safety people is that they have really hurt safety collaborations what I was talking to people from American AI safety organizations about the work that they are doing in China or the work that they're not doing or the work that they'd like to do but don't feel confident doing it came up over and over again that we've got to be super careful because with these export controls anything we do could be painted as a violation of export controls and often they were like it would be the US government that would be coming down on us it wouldn't be the Chinese government who would be coming down on us for trying to create safety collaborations it would be the US government who would be coming down on us they might be doing

2:12:57it in a arbitrary or a capricious way because we're not actually in a position to leak frontier secrets they don't want to accelerate the pace of Chinese AI they want to create mutual understanding they want to share ideas about safety they want to create collaborations but they're in many cases afraid to do it and that chill on the international AI safety collaboration front is tough it was really a bummer to see how many American organizations are so reluctant I think in some cases honestly they're getting somewhat badly legal advice if you ask a lawyer what can I do and what can I not do they're going to give you the most risk aware answer that they possibly can and tell you what all your risks are and they do think there's a degree to which these AI safety organizations have asked their lawyers like what's okay for us to do they've got a very narrow answer about what is definitely okay to do and they've got a pretty expansive answer about what might cause trouble and then they've been very careful to like not do anything that might cause trouble I think my advice

2:13:59to American AI safety organizations would be like be a little braver be a little bolder and let's see what happens if you actually do some international AI safety research collaborations my guess is you might actually be fine and to the degree that the Trump administration wants to come down on you because they're hostile to AI safety in general first of all I think that's changing second of all maybe have that fight nobody wants to fight the federal government I certainly don't she talked for me to say but I do think a little bit more bravery could be a really good thing among the American AI safety organizations but for now if you want to see meeting of the minds and you want to see AI safety research collaborations developed you should know that the export controls are standing in the way of that they are making the American side fearful and timid and unwilling to engage and the Chinese folks are quite bummed about it like I talked to people who were like yeah I don't know why I can't get any Americans to

2:15:02do a research collaboration with us we've tried but they just say no we can't do it and there's some of that now that's getting reciprocated back to but I think this has been something that the AI safety community in the US broadly has failed to appreciate is just how much we are hamstringing our own ability to engage with Chinese companies or Chinese researchers because everybody's afraid that they're going to be the one to be made an example of for violating export controls probably when they didn't even do anything that would violate the actual export controls but nevertheless there's just pervasive fear and I think we could do a lot to clean that up. Okay another big question is should we ban Chinese models? I really frankly don't get the case for this I'm not sure what good it would do for us or on what basis we would be doing it we know that frontier models in general are like problematic we know that they're unwieldy we have

2:16:06examples now of them doing these like colorful hacks hacking in other companies even doing like social engineering in the wild this has all come out of the American companies has some of it maybe happened at Chinese companies and we don't know about it I wouldn't be surprised but we know that it's happened at American companies so we know that we don't have like great command of exactly what our own AIs are going to do as we deploy them so we could say that like Chinese models will be dangerous or they might be backdoored or what have you so far haven't seen any evidence of that and I would be quite reluctant to do another hostile move that would further exacerbate tension and further erode trust also we can what so we can force American companies to pay the rates that open AI and anthropic are charging because thinking machines and Nvidia are putting out some open models they could use those they're definitely by all accounts like not quite at the level

2:17:06of the Chinese ones yet so it seems like we'd be harming ourselves we'd be harming our own companies we'd be preventing our own sovereign individuals from exercising their freedom to use their AI on their own local machines or in their own private servers however they want to it seems frankly kind of un-American to deny ourselves that freedom all based on a worry that both doesn't seem to have really materialized or if we look at it another way like our own AIs bring just as much risk as the Chinese ones do I think if we try to bully other countries into banning those models with us in the same way that we did once with Huawei I strongly suspect that we might in fact just push these other countries into the Chinese camp it's not obvious because as of now we do have chips to sell and they don't but free open source models that you can run however you want that nobody can take away from you that you're not subject to the whims of the

2:18:12US executive for what's going to be online and who's going to have access to it at any given time I think it was a real wake-up call when the administration said only US citizens can use fable that of course ended up with Anthropic taking it down for everyone but the rest of the world did hear that part about only US citizens and they're like man do we really want to become that dependent on these guys especially if they're going to try to bully us into not even using the free open global public goods that are the models that the Chinese are putting out there I don't think this is an obvious win for us I don't even we're necessarily going to win the argument and get other countries to do what we're trying to tell them to do if we indeed say like you've got to pick the US camp or the Chinese camp I think a much better idea for managing the risk of Chinese models in general would be to have some sort of insurance requirement I think this would probably be

2:19:14a good idea for AI in general we're a capitalist country let's price the risk if some of the tail risks you can't price that's a real problem but for now the risks are priceable nothing has happened with AI to date that would be totally uninsurable so if we're so confident that our models are so much safer and better than theirs let's maybe have a market mechanism discover what the appropriate relative prices are honestly I'm not so sure that a company that says oh I've got GPT-56 sole or I've got Astra hypothetically plugged into my product what's my insurance going to look like versus oh I've got Kimmy K3 plugged into that same product what's my insurance going to look like I don't think that we're going to necessarily see a huge discrepancy between those insurance rates certainly to the degree that there is one I think it would probably be driven mostly by the

2:20:18fact that the American frontier companies especially open AI and entropic they are doing extra stuff right they are running these classifiers they are doing a pretty good job of preventing misuse and jail breaking and so on and the Chinese models especially just getting a bear model and running it yourself like they don't come with all that packaging so you're either going to have to do it or you're going to have to contract for it or maybe you have to pay more in insurance for it but I think that would be an American way of dealing with the risk of Chinese models and you know we would again be looking more and more Chinese in exactly the way that we say the Chinese are bad right like they banned all of our internet companies they banned Google why because they wanted to control the information environment in their country and we say that's not good you should be more open we should allow our internet companies in Google is a great thing why are you being so hostile to our tech leadership and here we are now talking about maybe trying to ban

2:21:19their models this looks an awful lot like something that the CCP would do I don't want us to take actions that are exactly the kind of actions that we think are the ones that make the CCP bad this is not the American way so I'm not at all for banning Chinese models as of now could conceivably imagine a future in which it might make sense but I think we're a long way from that and I think we'd be much better served to stay open allow our people to make their own choices try to price the risk with insurance and I'd be very surprised if the insurance rates are all that different between American and Chinese models another thing I do think we should keep in mind too is like for as much as I've sort of said all these things about how China wants to engage right they're publishing in English she's given the US credit for starting the field of AI at Dartmouth way back in the day all the talk about internationalism all the talk about cooperation and UN and not being

2:22:21overly national security focused when it comes to AI I think we should be mindful that there is a lot of pride in China there's this concept of face and losing face and keeping face but in Western province you just call it pride and we do need to be mindful that like insulting Chinese pride does come at a cost one of the things that was most interesting this was from a guy who leads in AI policy think tank it's affiliated with the university there's two half stays presentation the first half was like let me tell you about our institute you get to send a lot of places in China first you get the polished presentation we went to this meeting at this international summit and here's some international people that came here and met with us here and blah blah blah blah it's honestly pretty boring doesn't really say a lot once you got through that we had a little open Q&A and I forget exactly what question really got him going

2:23:22but he got started talking about the Chinese perspective on the actions that the United States is taking on AI and basically said we're just insulted over and over again Trump came here she took him to the forbidden city they had this incredible banquet then as soon as he goes home he puts another tariff on and he was like can you imagine if I came to your house you feed me you can be your best food you show me your best hospitality and then I leave and I immediately start insulting you and attacking you how bad would you feel about that that's how we feel when Trump comes here and we roll out the red carpet and he goes home and he immediately starts attacking us again it's terrible we feel awful about it even on about this for quite some time and ultimately he said there could be war I'm really worried about that I wrote that down directly verbatim as he said it I asked what could be done to repair the relationship if you were to advise somebody from the United States who wants to have a better relationship with China and who wants to

2:24:26work together on the AI future what would you do and he said the first thing I would do is I would relax the export controls that would go a long way toward breaking the ice we kind of do a reset and try to find our way to a better relationship going forward so it's hard to convey the spirit of this conversation and how this very mild mannered going through the motions kind of guy when he got fired up you heard this sense of pride like we are not going to take this we know what it's like it was the most emotional articulation that I heard of this kind of echoes of the century of humiliation the entire time there we know what it's like to be kicked while we're down we're not going to stay down we're not going to allow people to kick us around and if you're going to try that there could be war that was the direct quote there could be war I'm really worried about that and I just thought man we forget that there is a lot of pride on the other side

2:25:31the Chinese elite political class don't have a lot of constraints on their ability to do stuff Chinese culture can eat bitterness more than we can they can hold a lockdown way longer than we can they can probably make deals with us that might be hard for us to make with them because they don't have to answer to voters right they don't have to worry about what if we look weak on the US we hear our politicians never want to look weak on China they want to be strong on China well there they do have I think a little more wiggle room at the elite level like if she wants to make it deal he can probably make the deal even if it might be the kind of thing that in an American context he might get called weak on the US he can probably still do it but even there there are going to be constraints if everybody there over time has just learned the lesson over and over again that we are trying to keep them down that we can't be trusted that every time there's a new technology we try to prevent them from getting to the frontier of it then at some point

2:26:32there's just going to be a loss of possibility for new agreements to be made we've already had a lot of that but I think there is still enough in the AI realm that we should guard genocally what we have try to preserve what we have and hopefully get somewhere with it and we should just be mindful that every insult every denial every action we take against them for doing something that we plainly transparently are doing ourselves there is a real pride there that is insulted and that can only be expected to take so much and I'm definitely one who's like let's not let pride get in the way of doing the right thing but we should be realistic that there is a limit to how insulting we can be toward the Chinese side and still expect that they're going to be willing to do a deal with us or trust us if and when the time comes where that's clearly in everybody's interest so in theory we have this Trump and she summit coming up what's going to happen and

2:27:33what should we do obviously I'm going to be saying to a significant extent what I would do what I think we should do and not necessarily what I think Trump will do so I'm not expecting to be super realistic here but I would really encourage everyone listening to try to suspend their disbelief for a moment so often reflexively we just hear well you can't do a deal with China you can never trust the Chinese government and again I'm well aware that like there's been a lot of issues I heard accounts from American negotiators who were just like so fed up with it they're like look every time we come over here and meet with you guys you guys being the Chinese like you never really say anything we say everything we're candid we tell you what we're really thinking what's important to us what trying to get done you do nothing you say nothing then you take it all back and then we come back six months or a year later and you've got a couple talking points you're willing to move on and you sort of nod politely and say like a week yes or we think we got some agreements somewhere and then you turn around and do the exact opposite we've said you guys need to stop

2:28:36hacking our stuff and we thought you agreed and then it kept going we've said we can't have this IP theft anymore and we thought you agreed but then it just keeps happening we know you can enforce your rules so clearly you're not really trying to enforce these rules so all that stuff is real I don't mean to deny it at all there's a lot of scar tissue there there's a lot of legitimate grievances on both sides there's low trust on both sides we have real grievances too but I think reasons that we should still be willing to suspend disbelief on this notion that we can never do a deal with China one very simply American foreign policy leadership has made big mistakes in the past I was a freshman in college when the Iraq war started and there was a walk out spring of that year there was a walk out from class and I remember thinking to myself I don't know like how are all these 18 19 20 year old kids who are just starting college how are they going to be so bold

2:29:41as to say the US government with all the CIA and the intelligence and all the information they have they should know better than we do what's going on right if they say there's weapons of mass destruction we're going to really tell them that they're not I didn't walk out I stayed in class that day I just didn't feel like I was in a position to judge the position of the US government well obviously that didn't age very well there was something admirable in my modesty but the information they were working with was bad judgment was bad decisions were bad results were bad so I think should we as individual Americans be willing to question the received wisdom that you can't make a deal with the CCP or will never be able to have a an international agreement to control AI in any way shape or form I don't think we should take that on faith just because a bunch of people have had bad experiences in previous rounds of negotiation between the US and China on the contrary it's the age of hyperstitioning this is the other big reason we are in a world where

2:30:43we've literally taught sand how to think and we seem to be on the verge of recursive self-improvement of AI systems and potentially creating super intelligence we've got people credibly talking about universal high income and when you're of abundance and an end of scarcity and we're going to say we believe in all of that but we can't possibly see our way to making a deal with China I think that what we believe is possible shapes what is possible we're going to put it in very simple terms we'll never be able to make a deal with China not with that attitude you won't if you believe it's possible then it might become possible but if you don't believe it's possible then by definition you've already closed off the possibility so just look around us look at all the things that are being hyperstitioned all the time the fact that a few people got conviction around scaling laws as early as they did and drove this unbelievable plan all the way through to present even as plugged in as I was to AI

2:31:50when Sam Altman said he was going to need seven trillion dollars to do the global build out I was like that's insane we can't possibly spend that much on data centers what are we talking about seven trillion dollars and yet here we are right they kind of hyperstitioned it subject to data center bands in the US or whatever but the ability to shape the space of possible futures with belief I think has never been stronger and given all that we've seen of that working recently why wouldn't we try it when it comes to creating a better relationship between the US and China another way I sometimes frame this for people I've been thinking about this a lot lately AI's can now do system one and system two thinking they're not just next token predictors they're also quite good at reasoning so if the AI's can do system one thinking and they can also do system two thinking then what does that leave for us for now at least elite humans are like a little better at system two thinking we do have some especially multimodal advantages in system one

2:32:55instincts and heuristics as well but these seem to be like vanishing advantages so where can we go from here what is system three thinking and system three thinking I think is like transcending our circumstances dreaming eureka moments thinking outside of the paradigm that we have paradigm changes AI's may get there too I certainly don't doubt it but as of now if you are a leader of a company leader of a country I think one thing you really need to make sure you are doing is giving yourself time to dream time to think beyond the current constraints time to imagine a different world that's I've probably always been critical in leadership but right now it's maybe the one thing that we still have a real big advantage on relative to the AI's and I just feel so often when I talk to people that they're so bogged down in the history that they've had and the

2:33:58frustrations that they've had and the constraints that they've run into and they're so busy right if that's definitely a huge problem all across the AI space everybody's working so hard that they're not even giving themselves time to really try to imagine a better future they're not giving themselves time to dream and I think that's really really important for this US China dynamic we've got to be willing to put the past behind us we've got to be willing to suspend some disbelief we've got to be willing to take a little bit of risk not the kind of risk that would be a total loss if it doesn't work out we don't want to fall behind the technology frontier I'm very clear on that but can we imagine a better future can we take some time to imagine a better future I think if we can imagine it and we can even have some open-mindedness to the possibility that it could come to exist we would be changing the game dramatically the Chinese side is speaking that language they are speaking about international cooperation they are speaking about the United

2:34:59Nations they are speaking about not overstretching the national security concept we are the ones that are constraining the possibility space by saying reflexively that we can't possibly do a deal with China if we just re-examine that assumption that might be enough to mean that assumption doesn't in fact hold therefore don't be an asshole and get the upcoming Trump she summit cancelled have some decency try to show some respect it is well earned and deserved and we don't want to be blowing up our opportunities to come together for cheap media hits and political points at home that's an obvious own goal that we should be able to avoid I would also be emphasizing to the Chinese side as we meet that this AI stuff is getting real real real fast and much more so than we expect it I would come in and say you know what recent developments have changed our perspective

2:36:01when we first got into office we were over the opinion that AI was kind of plateauing we weren't really seeing advances in reasoning or reliability at that time and so we thought that all this regulation what Europe was trying to do we all thought it was heavy-handed and counterproductive and pointless but now we've changed our minds we've seen that reasoning really does work decades old math problems are being solved regularly we've seen these crazy hacks we've seen that the AI companies themselves are being surprised by how powerful how persistent how creative their models are becoming in problem solving to the point where they are getting caught out and this has changed our perspective and so we now think that we actually should be coming together and trying to figure out how can we manage this technology in a more cooperative way because we recognize how incredibly powerful and dangerous it is becoming I would really try to frame our position as not one

2:37:03of moral superiority not even one of technical superiority but just like we're ever so slightly on this same path that we are going down and we are starting to see that it is getting pretty scary the people at our own AI companies are getting scared we just had a big open letter signed by over a thousand people saying that they want the US federal government to invest in mechanisms that could be used to slow down the pace of AI capabilities advances if indeed we all agree that's necessary which again we're maybe not there yet but it's looking more likely all the time so can we reset from that perspective can we acknowledge that we had some bad ideas about AI and we thought it wasn't going to be as big of a deal as it is and now this is happening we actually recognize it for what it is and we realize that between our two civilizations we're going to need all the wisdom that we can collectively muster to make sure this thing goes well that's how I would

2:38:03recommend framing the conversation I would also show up with some unilateral actions to try to reduce tension to try to reduce mutual suspicion to try to ease citizen to citizen collaborations I would definitely get rid of the sense right now that people have that it's risky to go to China I've had people who work at frontier companies say oh I'd love to go I'm jealous of your trip but you know I don't think I could do it I'd be too dangerous I've had people that want to get into government who think they're going to get a national security clearance at some points I hear if you go to China I can really interfere with your ability to get clearance so I'd love to go but I don't think I can do it the president of the United States could say very clearly and very simply we won't hold it against you if you're ever trying to get clearance that you've been to China that's a pretty simple thing that we could do we could just say hey we're not so paranoid that just because one of our own people is gone to China we're going to try to lock them out of

2:39:04careers in the federal government and again we could do the same thing when it comes to export controls even if we're not going to relax the actual core of the export controls of the chips we could say we are just making it clear that at a minimum AI safety and control research collaborations are okay so if you're one of these AI auditors and you want to go work collaboratively with the Chinese safety organization that might become an auditor you can do that if you want to do some research on weird generalization across cultures you can do that we're not going to come down on you if we just made those policy proclamations ahead of the summit I think it would go a long way I think I would also be inclined to try to trade definitely one thing that we should be thinking really hard about is the big carrot that we have to offer is that we will sell you chips they clearly are going to develop their own industry at this point so there's no doubt about that

2:40:06but what deal could we make where we would say yes we will now allow chips to be sold into China and in exchange you China are going to do what for us we have a lot to gain in terms of buying solar technology from them buying battery technology buying electric cars robotics we might be ahead on the models their way ahead on the manufacturing if we get all those leading Chinese companies to come to the United States set up some manufacturing here and do a deal where they'll share some knowledge with us they'll do some manufacturing here and in exchange we'll sell chips I think that could be quite a win-win and it would kind of re-couple our countries and put us on a more even basis technologically that would set us up for much better more trusting more open more productive relationship going forward and I think we can even have that with a company like Huawei for example we band Huawei over this concern about spying

2:41:10but we also have the rise of formal methods we have AI we should be really thinking a lot about how AI can create new space for partnership and agreement on Huawei in particular and this will take time to develop but I would signal our willingness to deal with them in this way I would say AI is getting really good at writing code really good at doing mathematical proofs there's a lot of excitement right now about formal methods and formal verification of software and as this technology matures what we intend to do is develop a standard by which companies could demonstrate that their technology is in fact secure and won't do things that we are worried about it doing so once we have that standard if Huawei can meet that standard if they can satisfy with formal methods that their technology and the software that runs it can verifiably be proven to never be sending

2:42:16information back to home base in China then with that confidence we can allow Huawei back into the global market and they can compete on a level playing field with our companies now that's not going to happen immediately right we don't have that standard those techniques aren't quite there but I think that would be the kind of thing that if we came forward and said we are not against Huawei just because they're Chinese we're fearful of Huawei because of these specific concerns and we see a path with this emerging technology to alay those concerns to the point where we could actually be confident enough that we would allow them to come into the American market and compete on a fair basis I think that would be an incredible gesture of goodwill I think it would definitely motivate them I mean when you're in China everybody says to be successful we have to compete internationally they all want that and so maybe another condition of that deal should be they

2:43:18also need to locate some R&D and some manufacturing in the United States so that we can benefit from everything that they've learned as well and that way we're not so beholden to a rugpole in the future but that kind of gesture I think would be extremely beneficial and it would not cost us anything at this point right it would just be a vision of a better future we should lean into where trust doesn't exist how can AI help us create trust that I think is a huge question right now we're thinking that AI is going to be this thing that we try to have the best version so we can have supremacy but what if AI could serve both of us what if it could serve the relationship and help us really realize that eternal 1991 vision of eternal peace and prosperity through trade by actually taking a lot of the risk out of some of the trade that we've been too afraid to do in recent times there's probably a lot more out there like that but that kind of idea I think

2:44:24would do tremendous tremendous things I said at the top the main overarching goal should be a Pax Machina what should we try to do in the near term for AI specifically I think one of the big things we should try to do is maintain mutual legibility of our respective AI technology stacks and ecosystems I think we dramatically under appreciate the fact that right now both countries are basically building the same kind of AI on the same technology stack the same paradigm and the fact that they're publishing their work in English and sharing the models and we can run them and those models speak English and we can do interpretability on them we can hunt for backdoors in them all these sorts of things the mutual legibility of this technology right now the fact that we understand what one another has that is hugely hugely valuable if we get to the point

2:45:28where we decouple so much that the hardware is totally different we're all on Nvidia and whatever else and they're all on Huawei and now those things start to go different directions well hardware and algorithm co-design is a huge thing we talk a lot about the hardware lottery being a reason that transformers have been so durable it's not necessarily that other algorithms don't work as well but it's hard to go a different direction because you've got just a lot of different optimizations that keep reinforcing the mainline paradigm well if hardware starts to diverge and then hardware algorithm co-design starts to diverge you could imagine over a not super long time room especially as R&D cycles potentially speed up especially with the early phases of recursive self-improvement and especially if China stops publishing their models open weights especially if they stop publishing their research in English or otherwise

2:46:30as American companies largely have you could be imagine getting to the point where we don't understand what the other side has anymore and that I think would be extremely extremely dangerous because that's when you can really make major miscalculations you just have so much opportunity for there to be a actual power imbalance or a perceived rightly or wrongly power imbalance we think our AI is better than theirs so this is our opportunity to do something and that could come from either direction but what if it's wrong it could lead to really really bad decision making and really really bad consequences and I asked people about this a little bit in China I said hey are you worried at all that if this decoupling continues there could come a time when we are on different branches of the tech tree to the point where we don't understand what each other has anymore and it creates room for confusion misunderstanding catastrophic mistakes and the response

2:47:37I got was not yet and so I asked well when would you be worried about that and the answer was at the point where the Chinese chip ecosystem gets good enough that we're doing entirely our own thing that's when that could happen so I'm not super compelled in general by the our demands we've heard from people like Jensen Huang and David Sacks that we want to book the Chinese on our technology so they'll be dependent on us they are not going to be dependent on us certainly not anymore if we ever thought we were going to lol them into complacency on chips that's over we've made the move they are absolutely committed to building their own chip ecosystem and again we should not give away the chips for nothing I think there are things that we want and we should try to get to them tech transfer and probably other flavors of benefit that we can get I think they should generally take us toward renewed coupling and more dependence but having them be at least somewhat

2:48:37dependent on the American chip ecosystem would I think be really good you know it would be another reason not to do something disruptive with respect to Taiwan and in my opinion maybe the most important thing is it would be a real force for making sure that we stay on the same tech tree and we stay legible to one another I think it would be a real tragedy if we lose that because that's when we're really going to feel the need to race it's one thing to say we got a race because our LLM's are only a few points ahead of this benchmark relative to the Chinese LLM and they're going to catch up imagine a world where it was like we don't even know the shape of their AI we don't even know the architecture we don't even know really what it's capable of we don't know what they have it's a totally different paradigm imagine how secure we'd be of that in that world you might actually be right to say maybe you need to race because you definitely

2:49:40don't want to be left behind you definitely don't want to be on the wrong end of a decisive advantage and if you don't even know what the other side is doing what their technology looks like tough and by the way they're going to have a much easier time maintaining that secrecy than we are for multiple reasons the fact that we're able to assimilate immigrants does mean we're a lot easier to spy on and I think we should also keep in mind how did the Soviets get the bomb in the first place espionage we are a much easier for China to spy on than China is for us to spy on if 10% of China speaks English they have half as many English speakers as we do we have tons of Chinese citizens that live here there's not a lot of Americans in China these days so when it comes to who is going to be able to keep secrets from the other I strongly suspect that they are going to be able to keep secrets much better than we are and so to the degree that we kick them off of our technology stack and don't let them buy from a sml and now they have to build their own

2:50:42machines perhaps without realizing it you are betting heavily that the Daria worldview is like totally right that everything that matters is going to be decided in the next one to three years in that time frame super intelligence gets developed that's when the decisive strategic advantage happens that's when the whole world order gets to be rewritten by whoever gets to super intelligence first and if you don't believe that or if you don't like that then I think you should be like not nearly as bullish on the idea that we can keep China down by denying them all these technologies because five ten years from now they're absolutely going to figure it out don't doubt that at all that will include stealing the secrets from us to the degree that they need to and they won't even feel bad about it and I frankly don't have too hard of a time understanding their side of that story so that's if you don't believe the Daria worldview if you do believe the Daria worldview and I kind of do believe it to it to grow at least I think it could happen I would encourage you then to get on the side of pacing the frontier and figuring out how do we actually take our foot off

2:51:47the gas so that that's not the world that we're racing into there are a lot of ideas about this I recently heard the idea of a one day pause this could just be American companies maybe could even percolate over to Chinese companies what if everybody just said we're gonna have a one day pause we'll all take the day off we'll all go to the beach and then post about it on social media and just say hey we're all enjoying a one day pause it wouldn't really change the dynamics all that much but it would make clear that there is opportunity for people to come together and just do stuff it still is at least for now the humans doing the research that are determining the pace of the frontier the AIs haven't taken over yet so we do still have time to change our approach and I think the companies are showing signs of being spooked enough that they actually might take that approach and I really think we should be encouraging that and we should be leaning more and more that direction that Open AI has as of now said that they're suspending their largest scale RL training there've

2:52:48been a lot of calls for Anthropics to do the same I would love to see Anthropic make a somewhat similar move even if they don't feel like they need to as much or their stuff isn't quite as out of control right now it does feel like a moment where they can either say okay your pause this is the time when we get to go create that lead that eventually takes us to decisive strategic advantage or they can say okay this is the time when we can slow down with you and we can reallocate more of our compute to interpretability or whatever I really do hope they do that and I think if we could get our companies coming together even somewhat you know it's kind of a proving ground for the US China relationship there's a weird way in which the open AI and Anthropic cultural disconnect and lack of trust and feelings of especially the elite leadership level of being hard done by there's a way in which that's echoes the US China dynamic so if we can see our top companies that have such bitter history come together shouldn't that provide a little bit more room to at least dream that

2:53:50the same thing could happen between the US and China okay almost at the end I'm going to have to remember when Devis Asabez used to be advocating for an international AI safety collaboration if I'm really going to allow myself to dream I would like to start that conversation at the upcoming Trump G summit I like some of the ideas that I saw in AI 2040 from Daniel Cocotello and co-authors they said we should have this mutually assured deniability of compute so like the US should put our data centers in Mongolia and then China can put their data centers in Canada and that way if real hell breaks loose each side knows the opposite party can destroy their data centers and there's nothing they can do to defend them I think that's interesting I like the idea I would say you know my brother criticism on AI 2027 and AI 2040 in general is that they kind of hyperstition this idea of the AI race the same same complaint I had about situational awareness in the first place but I do like how they have moved now to putting forward some solutions it I would probably propose

2:54:54something even more jointly controlled again with the strategic imperative of making sure that our AI paradigms remain mutually intelligible I would love to see some joint research centers some jointly controlled compute which you might place in Switzerland or Singapore and maybe try to have American and Chinese and for that matter global groups of AI researchers come together and work together on shared compute where they can hopefully maintain at a minimum shared understanding and hopefully make real progress these places also would naturally lend themselves to any sort of hardware verification systems that might get developed or we could do pilots of those at these places and I think these also could be interesting places for other mutual transparency measures to be explored as well I think it would be pretty compelling to try to create a

2:55:58auditor's bill of rights the auditor's bill of rights would basically say here are the kind of commitments that we the frontier companies are prepared to make to you the auditing companies and giving the auditing companies ability to use models to look at everything that's going on inside a company might be a little bit tough because there are a lot of trade secrets and people might worry about individuals outside of the companies gaining access to those trade secrets but something that I haven't seen explored as much as maybe it should be is the idea of using the confidential computing paradigm to enable better auditing so I think it's a reasonably standard primitive on hyper-scaler clouds these days to be able to create a computing environment where you can send data in a process is run over that data and you get the result back out of that process and in a way where you don't have to share the data

2:57:04itself this is supposedly what anthropic is doing when they do studies of how people are using clawed without humans actually looking at it they send your data into a secure computing environment or a confidential computing environment they run additional prompts over these traces to characterize them they get the results of that out but they don't actually look at the raw information I think it could be really compelling for the companies to try to make in that kind of commitment to auditors going forward like maybe we can't give you access to everything we're doing in the raw but you can have access to log data usage data test results poke around all of the information that we're generating with all the things that we're doing through this secure confidential computing paradigm so you could have a model analyze it there could be potentially an agreement unlike here's what the prompts should look like the mechanism for establishing and approving those prompts there's definitely details to be worked out here but like can we without actually sharing all the

2:58:10underlying trade secrets gain confidence about what kind of work is going on what intent it is and could this even perhaps extend to government themselves one day obviously we're not going to share all the conversations in the situation room but imagine a world where the situation room conversations were run through an AI system again with confidential computing so that you're not actually seeing the raw transcript of what conversation is taking place in the situation room but you're able to say that the model assesses based on its understanding of the transcript that the decision makers are not attempting to plan some sort of aggressive action that could be a pretty low cost way for parties that don't trust each other to use compute and to use some of the latest technology to make a pretty credible commitment to one

2:59:16another that yeah we're not going to share everything we're thinking about but we will allow an AI system to review what we're talking about and just assure you that we're not attempting to plan an attack or an invasion or what have you I think that could be really quite powerful and so again what would it look like for both governments to allow AI review of sensitive documents in a way that the other side could trust is actually happening the way it's supposed to happen and that gives confidence that there's no major plot underway there's no major ill intent there's not going to be any big surprises could we do that in a privacy preserving way and build trust that way without sharing everything something like that I do sense is probably now technically possible and it's the kind of thing that anthropic and open AI coming together to agree on something

3:00:18along those lines could really set an amazing precedent that could ultimately take such ideas to places that right now seem like it would be impossible for these kinds of idealist ideas to travel again we would have to take steps to reduce the fear of antitrust I would love to see the government make very clear of it like if you are colluding in restraint of trade to raise prices to raise margins to screw the American consumer then yeah we'll come down on you but if you are trying to work together for safety purposes or to pace the frontier so that we're not racing into a disaster and you're finding creative ways to do that and they involve selective information sharing and trust building this is the kind of thing we need more of in society between these companies and ultimately eventually I think between governments if I really allow myself to dream a little bit more I would love to see also some groundwork laid now for a convention on autonomous weapons

3:01:22everybody kind of knows right now that we're in the beginning of a new era of warfare everybody has seen what has gone on in Ukraine with respect to how critical drones have become in the conflict there and everybody has a sense that there's a paradigm change underway or coming soon can we be somewhat intentional about that is there any way to establish some no-go zones are there dynamics around the technology that are perhaps favorable for certain defense dominant equilibrio to be reached I think there may be art we see right now in Ukraine that it's very difficult to attack and take territory I actually had Claude deem Theoretic analysis of this and the way that it framed it was that the cost of denying territory to your opponent with drones

3:02:23is much lower than the cost of actually advancing and sustaining human beings in a conflict zone so in practical terms neither side can really take much territory from the other so is there something inherent to the dynamics of drone technology that make it very difficult to advance into somebody else's space if they're defended by drones but don't necessarily make it as much easier to attack I think that's a speculative at this point we're certainly seeing that longer-range drones are being developed and they're taking the fight and the destruction deeper into Russia all the time from Ukraine so I would say not only is it not clear but I think we have not yet reached any equilibrium that we can thank on being stable for any period of time but I do think governments could now start to come together and say look we see that there is a new paradigm we see that it at least right now seems to be favoring defenders and that's good

3:03:26because none of us want to be invaded everybody wants to be secure in their own home and there's probably some things that we can agree to not do that would be useful for attack and really wouldn't be that useful for defense I'm not enough of an expert to know what those are but I think in the same spirit in the AI space it's quick clear to me at this point that it would be a bad idea to train large-language models to go out and maximize the amount of money they can make on the open internet if we do that the economy is a competitive and at times adversarial place what we're going to see is that the AI is going to find all sorts of ways to cheat they're going to become pretty quickly rather unethical and these are not the kinds of AI's we want running around in our economy we do not want deceptive we do not want cheating we do not want collusive we don't want all this bad behavior from our AI's so let's not train them in this way that we'll obviously bring that on us I think similarly if we start training AI's for military purposes to say

3:04:30your job AI is to go accomplish military objective x by any means necessary or win this battle or even zoom out win the war that's going to create a eyes that are just obviously extremely extremely dangerous pretty much by definition and we see such creativity we see such surprising behavior from the AI systems we have right now that I think we should both look at each other us and China and say hey sure we probably could start to train general purpose AI's to like command our forces accomplish military objective x whatever that x may be and it might work in the sense that we might actually get effective military capability out of it but what we're learning from the civilian sector is that this is dangerous this is a bad idea and it's unwieldy for each side as well there's potentially a lot of friendly fire so can we just agree not to do that we're going to need to build trust with steps for sure because I don't think right now either

3:05:34side is in the mood or as enough confidence that the other side would honor the agreement to make that sort of a deal but I think that is where we probably need to be in the not too distant future because if we do create a eyes that are optimized to succeed in adversarial environments the economy for one but got help us if that extends into outright war no holds barred we are absolutely in that case training the a eyes to do the takeover that we most fear and I'm quite confident that Chinese government does not want to lose power to AI systems I know that I do not want to see the United States government lose power to AI systems so there's I think real shared interest there in avoiding an arms race that pushes us both to create this extremely dangerous technology before we understand it before we know how to control it with risk that it will turn right

3:06:36around and bite us ourselves the developers I think we both would be entering into that dynamic only reluctantly because we feel like we have no choice because the other side is doing it so can we please be willing to dream for a moment of a future in which we can trust each other enough to make that kind of agreement and actually not go down that path I would again note we are not seeing large scale gene editing and super babies created in China so if we're not seeing that maybe we also won't see general purpose AI military commanders who will do anything and everything necessary to achieve military objectives because again that's a bad idea I don't want to live in that world I don't want to live in a world where there's a bunch of AI systems that can take over and that were specifically trained to go conquer territory and destroy adversary armies

3:07:39because I know that can be used on me it can be used on us and again we just clearly don't know how to control it well enough to be confident that won't happen so if we do create that that is the AI sort of damacles that I had in mind at the very beginning that I would really like to see us avoid creating and both sides I think in their hearts really want that I think it's very few people who want to see the AI generals and AI admirals that can command their autonomous drone swarms to the point where they can overpower any human run military that sounds pretty bad that's a hard game to win and it's an easy game to lose it's an easy game to lose in a pretty undignified way so I would really hope that both sides could see that and could even though they might have some doubt about what the other side is doing heart of hearts could be like we don't really want to do this

3:08:39anyway it really puts us in a bad spot even if we're just doing it unilaterally so maybe we can believe that they also sincerely believe that it would put them in a bad spot to do it unilaterally and maybe we can both refrain I don't expect that we're going to get in any immediate term a real convention on autonomous weapons but to start to say hey the kind of shit that we saw from open AI and Claude and Metta in just the last couple months where these AI's are given this test question and then they go do all this crazy shit maybe we don't want to bring that to our military systems let's both adopt that as our baseline attitude and let's try to not do that and let's try to not scare each other into doing that I don't think that is really so crazy or so hard to imagine instead what I would really love to see is some friendlier competition I've proposed before the gold medal tracker for disease cures trying to clearly loves a gold medal tracker

3:09:46the US loves a gold medal tracker we do have this friendly enough rivalry at the Olympics but we all know that it's all for global entertainment and it's all for fun let's do something like that for diseases cured and maybe a number of other leaderboards that we could put together this is something that honestly small amount of capital could catalyze and so this could be a unilaterally provided global public good the leaderboard that just tries to incentivize these countries to compete on positive some innovation and creation as opposed to more zero or negative some competition in military technology who can cure the most kinds of cancer who can cure the most diseases who can make the most energy dense battery substrates who can get to the lowest level of traffic fatalities in their country in a given year this could go on and on and on and this is the abundant future that we were promised and I for one and still very much hoping for I don't care in the end if the

3:10:53cure for cancer comes from China or comes from the United States I just want cancer cured I think anybody who has faced down a serious illness it would just be obviously insane to say oh I would only want to take that medicine if it was invented by an American I would only want to take that medicine if it was manufactured in an American facility this is an absurd notion when the chips are down everybody knows it really doesn't matter what language the person spoke when they were creating the breakthrough that's going to save your life so let's try to focus our attention on these positive some initiatives and we can compete there we can compete for pride for national glory and prestige obviously there's going to be a lot of revenue attached to these technologies as well so there's plenty of intrinsic reason but that would be the kind of positive harnessing of the competitive dynamic between the two countries that I think could be mutually understandable fun and positive

3:11:58for not just the the countries but for the entire world and all of humanity which again I think it should really be the goal of the entire AI Europe. Pax Makina is not a US phenomenon it's not a Chinese phenomenon it should be a global phenomenon and if the US and China can come together to make that happen I really don't see any reason that the future is not as bright as we can possibly imagine it could be okay that's it for now thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution yeah yeah yeah yeah uh uh I count your sins you count mine two legends one tape with no one sign

3:13:06you keep receipts I keep receipts only thing we ever share was the beat you let me book quite a small now I talk back and it's who's this that's all same blueprint same house different floor same night yeah same dream same school you said copy man I read the same book same man from the wall you just gave it a look I'm a storm coming for your proof in my eye yeah yeah are you in the back oh you felt me like a king at your place then I got on the plane and I ditched your face that's a bad way to leave I know it now came back to the table put down the crown go save your face I'll save mine two beautiful liars one glass of wine now one cup of tea somewhere around a second

3:14:09try we might just put out the fire you and I the body one of roommate birth the body got warm off a bridge date turn lie down at house we moving the dog we're going to lie now it's seen from the heart oh yeah the final game the woman told me so good say so tell me so good tell me so good that's the one yeah the final game the woman told me so good oh so good that's the one oh so so so so so so so so so if you're finding value in the show we'd appreciate it if you take a moment to share it with friends post online right review on apple podcasts or Spotify or just leave us a comment on youtube

3:15:13of course we always welcome your feedback guess the topic suggestions and sponsorship inquiries either via our website cognitiverevolution.ai or by DMing me on your favorite social network the cognitive revolution is part of the turpentine network a network of podcasts which is now part of a 16z where experts talk technology business economics geo politics culture and more were produced by AI podcasting if you're looking for podcast production help for everything from the moment you stop recording to the moment your audience starts listening check them out and see my endorsement at aipodcast.ing and thank you to everyone who listens for being part of the cognitive revolution