Are the US and China in an AI Race? AGI vs. Diffusion, AI Risk, Bad Actors, the Case for Cooperation

So big question up front, what is China trying to do with AI, in your view? Is there an overarching Chinese AI strategy? How should we see China's approach to the broader AI tech stack? And how does this compare with how the US is going about things?

Yeah, and this is actually probably one of the more misunderstood questions or answers that a lot of Americans have about China.

First of all, China didn't really have an AI strategy for a very long time.

And only really in the last five years or so, I think things have become a lot more clear with their AI Plus plan.

But in the past, it was really just one of many technologies that were important and should be looked at.

And that's...

it didn't really elevate to a national level.

But I think right now what's happening is that China looks at AI as a technology that, just like other technologies in the past, that has helped to increase the productivity of its population, of its industries, and to improve its competitiveness on an economic basis.

Whereas I feel like A lot of the labs themselves actually are not directly integrated into a China national plan.

I think a lot of people used to think or thought that there was a grand national strategy around AI and particularly around open source.

I feel like a lot of that actually happened on a more emergent basis where success then brought more attention, which then made the open source strategy more, I guess... essentially approved strategy.

In fact, until a few months ago when the World AI Conference happened, Xi Jinping was never really that involved in having a public opinion about AI.

And this was when he went and did his opening talk at the WAIC, he started to talk about open source, about AI as a public good, and about AI safety.

These were really not part of any major national plan in the past.

The AI plus plan has been around for about four or five years, and I think that's probably where the current flow of resources has come from this to say, hey, the goal is for the country to get to 70% adoption of AI in its industries across 10 different industries over the next five years, and then about 90% over the next 10 years.

And I think in a lot of ways, that's really the focus.

It's all about the fusion.

How do we get AI into healthcare, education, manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, so that we can grow the industry, we can grow the GDP? Because for China, that's really been the long-term kind of social contract is that the government will provide economic growth and quality of life growth.

In exchange for more social stability and kind of, I guess, following the rules of the party.

So that's, I think, how the Chinese model has worked.

I feel like the American interpretation has been a little bit more looking at it as an adversarial relationship.

whereas I actually don't necessarily see a lot of adversarial perspective when I talk to the labs in China or even the government in China.

Where you hear in the U.S. is that the Chinese are creating open source so they can then destroy the American economy by turning our trillion-dollar companies into less valuable companies or they're trying to steal data from our labs.

You know, I feel like if you look at the real relationship that's happening across the world on this industry is that open source is definitely gaining a lot of momentum, right? If you...

Look at the open router type data over the last year and a half.