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Start free trial →Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Nilay Patel contrasts China's near-term goal of spreading AI through manufacturing with the American labs' push for AGI.
…se. They're really much more focused on diffusing the technology. And they think they can win, quote unquote, win the AI race by just having AI used much more broadly, integrated throughout the economy, especially in areas like manufacturing, where they are already sort of like the behemoth. And I
…trying to not fall too far behind the U.S., but really focus a lot more on trying to get, especially these open source models out there across the Chinese economy and globally as well. And to that extent, on that metric, they seem to be doing pretty well. That to me always has seemed like the real
fight, right? Anthropic and OpenAI are furious that the Chinese companies are constantly distilling their models. They're trying to build some technology to keep them from stop distilling their models. But if you believe in the promise of AI and what it can do to the economy, your emphasis should be on diffusing good enough models, not. AGI, whereas our emphasis, due to the way our market works, is a bunch of guys who think they're going to build digital Jesus. Like, whatever is going to happen, that's the thing they want. And Dario Medei has to pretend that he cares about Salesforce, but we know what his real priority is. How do the United States and China compete in that dynamic, right? Where you have one very managed economy that has set a much more near-term and potentially achievable goal. And then, you know, our market system, where the incentives of the leading market players have nothing to do with the economic incentives of the rest of us.
There's even a sort of ideological foundation to all this because the vision of AGI is one that is like so deeply embedded right now in the American AI community and sort of Silicon Valley culture that I think there's a risk of potential disconnect, not just between the US and China on this issue…
Bringing that all back to the context of NVIDIA, Jensen Wang, Alice Wang, Megaspeed, Megaspeed is a data center provider in Southeast Asia. That's theoretically their business. They're building data centers, they're buying these chips. Shouldn't market forces just end this, right? Like the United…
an interesting question because there is ultimately market demand in China still for these NVIDIA chips. And there is a divergence here between the companies in China who still want NVIDIA chips, who still want access to them, and the government who is like, no, no, no, why don't you try Chinese…