Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
May 14, 2025 · 49 min · 11 segments
Lennart Heim, a researcher and information scientist at RAND Corporation, joins Azeem Azhar to unpack a provocative claim: China is catching up with US AI capabilities, but it doesn't matter…
Lennart HeimGuest
Azeem AzharHost
So the argument which I'm putting forward in this essay is basically inspired what happened with DeepSeek.
Some people were just expecting there's like this really big lead and it's like really, really hard to build competitive AI.
But I think like actually more actors than many people assume can build competitive models.
In particular, being like running behind is actually easier than many people expected.
And I'm just always asking, well, there's these many data centers, there are millions of GPUs out there.
How are they being used? Sure, tens of thousands of them are being used for training systems.
And what I took, what I'm trying to put forward to cheese is just like, to some degree, like, guys, actually, it's more complex.
We cannot only look at model benchmarks and say, this is the country which is winning, this is the country which is losing, or we only have a three-month skip.
In particular, if you think about like, how do export controls bite? So what I'm putting forward there is just like, actually, you use compute for training.
They will probably build competitive models in China this year, particularly with test time computing on there.
But given the compute might be more important in the future, or you want to deploy it at scale to get your AI agents or whatever the future holds, this is eventually where I think export controls will hold.
So the argument which I'm putting forward in this essay is basically inspired what happened with DeepSeek.
Some people were just expecting there's like this really big lead and it's like really, really hard to build competitive AI.
But I think like actually more actors than many people assume can build competitive models.
In particular, being like running behind is actually easier than many people expected.
And I'm just always asking, well, there's these many data centers, there are millions of GPUs out there.
How are they being used? Sure, tens of thousands of them are being used for training systems.
And what I took, what I'm trying to put forward to cheese is just like, to some degree, like, guys, actually, it's more complex.
We cannot only look at model benchmarks and say, this is the country which is winning, this is the country which is losing, or we only have a three-month skip.
In particular, if you think about like, how do export controls bite? So what I'm putting forward there is just like, actually, you use compute for training.
They will probably build competitive models in China this year, particularly with test time computing on there.
But given the compute might be more important in the future, or you want to deploy it at scale to get your AI agents or whatever the future holds, this is eventually where I think export controls will hold.
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