Hogue-Spears, who wrote a book on how AI is built and deployed in China, was asked what the world would look like if China led in large language models. He opened by refusing the US-versus-China framing, then contrasted what he sees as China's application-first focus with the American preoccupation with AGI. Khan pushed back in the next turn with a more sympathetic reading of the US government's motives.
fear of
Chinese and Germany as Americans obviously do. But so describe what that would be like.
…So, but what would the world look like if China was dominant in LLMs? I think that is a fair question. So I believe, I don't, honestly, I don't want to get into the national security aspects. I'm more talking about from a business perspective, a market perspective, what would the world look like from a technology perspective. So I believe that China's focus on AI is different from the U.S. We have a lot of people in Silicon Valley for the last few years running around talking about basically AGI, AGI. It's like they want, it's like they're looking for AI Jesus or something to save the world or destroy the world. I don't know. It depends on who you talk to that day, right? Sam Altman writes stuff like my model is really fast. It's scary. I don't know how to feel about it. You know, all these type of quotes strange. We just can't stop doing it, but we know it's dangerous, this kind of stuff. Nobody talks like that in China. I've never heard anybody talk like this who is Chinese in China. And I think their…
yeah, I feel like China made intentional. The Chinese government is very intentional. Whereas America, I mean, I think our main intention, our main hope, I see the American government's hope is to increase productivity and get us out of our fiscal crisis issues.
No, you're absolutely right. If we can increase, let's say, GDP by 20X or something like that, or whatever, you know, the crazy numbers that float around, well, that makes the deficit not very important, right? So, I just see a world where if China's dominant, what you will have is a lot more…
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.