Tyler Cowen
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
DeepSeek is more cool. And keep in mind, O1 Pro costs $200 a month. And it writes in a very objective style, which is good for scholarship, good for objectivity, but it's not as fun to play with for most people as DeepSeq. And so many of the advantages of O1 Pro, they're so sophisticated. Like, say, you could beat me in an economics test, but most people don't even see that difference.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
So it doesn't appear smarter for most uses, even though it's clearly the better product.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think a lot of it is a tone thing. The reinforcement learning, less was applied to it, so it slips more easily into different persona and characters. That's what most people want from their large language models, not better expertise than Tyler Cowen at economics.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, here's a simple example of how open source matters. The AI service, perplexity.ai, which many, many millions of Americans are using, just today, Monday, they put on their website access to a modified version of the R1 model. So they took or borrowed the model and made their own version of it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The model they have up on their website, it will tell you the truth about the Uyghurs and Tiananmen Square. So they were able to modify it. And it's simply theirs. There's no infringement of property rights. It's truly open source.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I was not happy with the congressional decision on TikTok. I agree with Jeff that it might be a national security threat, but we live in a nation that is governed by the rule of law, and I much would have preferred an agency process, a legal process, actual fact-finding by experts, not just a one-sided congressional vote.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And if TikTok has broken American laws, by all means, take appropriate action. And if those... Disruptions of the law are so extreme that it dictates banning the service. I would consider that. But we had a politically motivated congressional vote. I think it's a terrible precedent. We will live to regret that day.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And the real security threat in America right now is how many Americans are asleep at the wheel in the midst of the AI revolution. And DeepSeek actually is waking us up. So it's improving American national security from my point of view. It doesn't mean it will be doing that forever. But we need to actually listen to China more than what we're doing now.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Most people do not understand how good current AI systems are and how rapidly they have the potential to improve. That will change over time our entire society. It also has major implications for national security. When GPT-4 came out, it was days and days until it was mentioned in the New York Times. Journalists are wary of AI. They don't understand it very well.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, they're wary of all new technology. Correct. And I think we're simply at a point where most people, they enjoy their chat GPT. It's fun to talk to it. You can help it name your dog or something. But they don't actually understand what the stakes are. And DeepSeek, by being so popular, you know, it was the number one download in the App Store last week. It's at least helping spread awareness.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And in an open society, you know, if we have higher awareness and we're still the country that by far attracts the immigrants who are going to do a lot of the creative work on future AI, I think we can win this battle, but we need to not be asleep.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, I think of both Americans and Chinese as somewhat provincial, inward-looking, large countries that are relatively poor at dealing with the rest of the world. We're seeing this now in both places. And China is a country we could learn a lot from. They can still learn a great deal from us. They may or may not do that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But we have the option of waking up and learning an incredible amount from them, not just on deep seek and infrastructure, but in many, many different areas of life, including the incredible number of first-rate students they produce. A lot of American AI is built by ethnic Chinese, right? Well, how'd that come to pass? What can we learn from that? So we need to prepare and be ready.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And that does not mean closing off to China.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
DeepSeek is online. It is free. It is a very fast model. I would say it's the most fun model to speak with. It is more arbitrary and subjective and personality-rich than the other AI models. It's also open source, which means anyone can copy it. So there's no way of stopping it from spreading, even if you shut down that original website somehow.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
a lot of adjectives in that statement. I would make a few points. First, there's plenty of propaganda here. I'm completely opposed to what the Chinese government has done to suppress free speech, but to think that we here are the ones who see the unvarnished truth, I think is very far from reality. For all the terrible things China has done, they are our only peer country.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
They do many things better than we do, and we just have to learn from them. Many, many more Americans should visit China, should try to learn Chinese, should preoccupy themselves with China, but in an open way. China entering the World Trade Organization, I don't think that was nearly as significant a fact as people like to portray.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The chance that a cure from cancer comes from China is as high than the chance that it comes from the United States. Economically speaking, the two countries really cannot do without each other. We need to find a way to live with them.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And I think only having this negative attitude up front is a sure sign that we will create voter sentiment that doesn't actually allow for some possibility of peaceful coexistence.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think that's largely true. I think our attitudes toward them are not entirely different. The United States does want to, quote unquote, hold China down. I don't think that's an unreasonable view. But at the end of the day, it's a lot of talk on both sides, and we need to learn to live together for military reasons, trade reasons, tech reasons. The whole future of the world relies on that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, what we actually did was built a much better system. We didn't attack them. We pursued detente. We tried to reach some kind of understanding. We sent them cultural exchanges. We sent them rock and roll and the Beatles. And over time, yeah, people in those systems ceased to believe in them. And that's how we won really remarkably peacefully.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I'm not saying we'll have a copy of that history with China, but we have the better system. Most of the world knows that. And we have the possibility of winning this next Cold War.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
So it's not as good as the best open AI products, but it is changing the world. And it's probably what a lot of the world is going to use.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
It didn't turn out to be true in Russia either. It was a mistake that people ever thought that. We don't know what the future holds for China, but I think it is likely that the more interaction they have with the West and the United States, it's likely to go better rather than worse.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
No, I was using it before the R1 update came out. But I'm in a lot of chat groups. And if there's something new in the world of AI, odds are I'm going to hear about it. So I was just playing around with it. And it was so much fun. I kept on going.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think it's great that China has AI. AI is radical. It's the opposite of small C conservative. It will overturn status relationships and every society it enters. The CCP is terrified of AI, and they should be. It could disrupt their entire power, their hold on Chinese society. DeepSeek in particular is super easy to jailbreak, get it to tell you what you want it to tell you.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The notion that there are already entities out there in China smarter than the Chinese Communist Party is probably the single greatest threat to CCP rule. We have done it with this Trojan horse. We will see how it develops. But the fact that, oh, they're not reciprocal and it's been done through a Chinese company rather than an American. You know, fine. Things like that are going to happen.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And I think they're the ones who have a lot to worry about, not us.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And we should spend more on defense. Strong agree.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
We're not losing it. You know, what we're hoping for is an ongoing perpetual stalemate of sorts. If we can win it and China becomes a mature democracy, a more populous Canada, that would be wonderful. But I'm not expecting it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I don't think you ever win. We don't know the space race is over. It's possible that either Russia or China develop space weapons that we have trouble countering, or that they're able to use space, say, to blow up our satellites, which our military is too dependent on. And the nuclear weapons race, well, Russia has more of them than we do.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And arguably, they have a greater willingness to actually use a tactical nuclear weapon. So at the moment, at least arguably, they're winning that one. So no, I don't think it ever ends. It's tough. I mean, you have to be vigilant forever. It's a very hard problem for free societies to do that and also to stay free.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, it will take on any personality you tell it to, which is part of the fun. But the default is simply that it's charming. It's more poetic. It writes better fiction, probably, than the American models. It's just a whole different vibe, you could say.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think you're far too pessimistic. The stronger China gets, the more small-c conservative it will become. I can quite readily imagine a future where the US and China have like two-thirds overlapping common interests, and we to some extent work together
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
to put down lower-scale AI mischief-makers in other parts of the world, because the US and China both will have a strong stake in stability, stable oil supplies, things working out a particular way. Yes, China does want to take Taiwan. They are not, in general, an expansionist power that wants to take over the whole world. So I'm much more optimistic about the prospects for future cooperation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Of course. They're more dependent on foreign energy, for one thing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
On their own people. They would say we're much more willing to be interventionist in other countries to the detriment of other citizenries to get what we want. That's somewhat of an unfair criticism, but it's also not entirely untrue.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Now, if you try to ask it questions about Chinese politics, Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs, it either A, won't answer, or sometimes it starts to answer A, And then the cursor starts moving backwards and it erases whatever it wrote down. And a very literal act of Orwellian censorship.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I say don't ban them. But if they break the law, throw the book at them.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
China already hacks into many, many of our systems, whether it's OPM or email systems through cloud computing. So it's a myth to think that all this data to begin with is secure.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
You should assume China has access to everything. I hate that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Yes, it should bother us, but it's not going to change most likely.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The real risk to America mostly is American stupidity. If you look at defense spending, in real terms, it's remarkably low right now and we just let it fall. And we should raise that significantly and also make our defense procurement much better, make our science policy much better. Not doing that, those are the real risks on my list of worries that China has data about me, other Americans.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I really don't like that fact, but it's just not that huge a problem compared to these other issues.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The best parts of our education system are better than the best parts of their education system. And you can see that by comparing the performance of ethnic Chinese in America to ethnic Chinese in China. That said, we have a significant problem for the bottom half of our system. I don't have any quick fixes on how to make it all better.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But the major AI advances have, in fact, come in this country. And they've come largely through immigrants, individuals who really did not ever want to go to China.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
It's smarter than me, and it knows more than I do. So I have a near infinite demand to use it. I just keep on asking it questions all day long. I hardly use Google anymore, except like to buy tickets. And just yesterday, I started using Deep Research.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Deep research can write, say, a 10-page paper for you in five or six minutes, where the quality of the paper is what a PhD-level assistant would give you if that person had a week to work on it. And you get this in five or six minutes. I just started this yesterday. That is amazing. Most people don't know this. It's incredible. It's going to change our whole world.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
We'll do it bit by bit, piece by piece. I think we need to radically reorganize higher education and what a PhD is and means. I don't think it will be done in top-down, centralized fashion. It should not be. We need a higher education system with a lot more diversity, true experimentation. You can fail. You can go out of business. and set that process in motion.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And I'm confident the United States can do this, but right now it's a kludged cartel, and it operates terribly, and it's super conservative, and we're hardly making progress on this at all. I think it's one of the great national scandals.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I don't think we know yet. A lot of people who think they're so smart and know so much and write so well, their skills are not so unique anymore. I do think they will have future roles in guiding the AIs, verifying the outputs, judging what is relevant, deciding which questions to ask. But I think, again, it will be a radically different setup once we allow competition to operate.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
With big losers, those big losers are people with very influential voices. They will hate it. They will go down screaming. Part of me may enjoy that a bit. I just think we need to start experimenting and get the competitive process going. I don't think you can predict the exact outcomes. What will you enjoy the most?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Just waking up every morning and knowing that whatever question I have, I now have a smarter entity to ask than I ever had before in my entire life. That thrills me every day.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Oh, Gary Marcus. I mean, seeing Gary Marcus eat crow, that's like the single thing that will give me the greatest pleasure. Because he's been saying for so many years, none of this stuff works. He's so obviously wrong. He doubles down in such a convoluted way each time. It's a standing joke with many of the people I know. And just to see the final comeuppance for Gary Marcus, that will be amazing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Forgive me for being petty, but that's the true, sincere answer.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Yes. That's the announcement. What it really means, who knows.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I wouldn't do it. Look, it's not going to matter much. The Chinese will let their exchange rate depreciate. That will counteract the effect of the tariff. What we actually need to do is look at a few key sectors. Maybe it's components of drones. Make sure we're much less dependent on China. And if we use targeted tariffs to help us do that, that could make sense if we do it wisely.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But this general 10%, whatever they're going to end up making the number, it's all for show. It's Trumpian bluster. It's not really going to matter or help much of anything.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Trump likes to dominate the discourse, be the center of attention. And he also genuinely believes that trade deficits are bad. Economists pretty much universally have rejected that view. So he's bad at economics and he loves being the center of attention.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But that's Mexican bluster. They already have 15,000 troops on the border. I mean, both sides do this. Don't think the Mexican leaders are any more honest or straightforward than Trump. With Canada, the thing we actually ought to demand is more spending on Arctic defense against Russia and possibly China.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
For us to get that to happen, we're in a better position if publicly we act nicer to Canada than what we're doing right now. I think from Trump, it's a huge mistake.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think we've always bullied smaller, weaker countries. The big difference is now we're doing it more openly. I don't endorse that. I actually think the world, to some extent, will get used to it, and it may matter somewhat less than Trump's critics think. But I don't see the upside. With Greenland, I see the upside. It would be great to have Greenland. It wouldn't be great to have Canada.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But other than that, we should mostly play nice to people and do hardball behind the scenes.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Anti-wokeness is going to lose the quality of its reputation because people will see more of it. When the woke dominate and the anti-woke are the opposition, everyone loves the anti-woke. Now I think everyone will end up upset at both of them. So in that sense, it's peaked.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think the entire terms of the debate will change. There'll be cultural chaos. The major issue will shift to AI and how we're going to deal with it and who will gain and lose in status. And we'll forget about all that nonsense, mostly for the better.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Seconded, by the way. And Jordan Schneider and Peter Hessler is a book writer. But it's hard to know what's going on in China. I'm hoping to go back there this year. That's the best thing to do.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Western China, Yunnan province. It has perfect weather for the entire year, arguably China's best food, incredible ham, amazing mushrooms. About half of the population is non-Chinese ethnic groups. And it's just mind-blowing, one of the very best places in the world to see.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Twitter. You just have to follow Twitter. Don't click on Trump-related links. Click on AI-related links, and the algorithm driven by AI will take care of the rest. It's really the only way to do it other than being in private chat groups.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, on AI, you can figure out what's going on just by reading lots and lots and lots. And also, if you can, get to know some of the people. Have two separate Twitter accounts, one for politics, one for AI. There's plenty of incorrect information about AI, but it's not like American politics where it's all just or mostly just lies and misinformation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
A significant chunk of it is smart people trying to figure out what's going on. I'm not saying any of us get to the truth, but it's a great place to try.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Tyler? I think we'll get to a world where people who take good care of themselves live to 97 years old and die of old age, and that will be amazing. But people want to work, and there will always be work and paid work.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think in the short run, it will raise people at the bottom who can't even write a decent essay. Longer run, you'll have lone individuals or groups of two and three people start what become rather quickly billion-dollar companies, and most of the staff will be AIs.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
So people at the very top, I think, will be much richer, but the actual gains will be to people who are fairly poor, cannot currently get or afford a good medical diagnosis or good legal advice, and AI is going to give them all of that for either free or nearly free.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I don't know what these terms mean anymore. To me, Trump in some, but not always, is very much in the center. He's pledged he doesn't want to cut the big government programs. He claims he wants to keep America out of war. He probably means that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Yet there's something about the tone and the vibe that is so weird and sometimes so unkind and so unpleasant that it's hard to feel comfortable with it or want to endorse it. So I think we just need to keep our cool, try to be smarter, ask the AI when you need to, and not be taken in too much by movements or labels or ideologies, and actually figure things out.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
America is seeing a religious revival, at least amongst its intelligentsia. We need this badly. I hope it spreads further.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think we'll have religions that emphasize AIs as oracles. They will nominally be the same as the major current religions, but they will feel quite different. I don't know how to stop that. I also don't know if it's good or bad. It may reach more people. It may be more persuasive. It may be more versatile. We'll see how it works out.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
That's mostly not true. So it may be the case that the final training cost was very, very low. But you incur a lot of other costs in building the model. For instance, the company had 150 people working full time trying to develop the model. And their salaries and all of the fixed costs of the enterprise are not included in that sum.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Now, it's still probably the case that their model is considerably cheaper. And some of that is that wages in China are lower. But they also had a number of innovations that just enabled the model to be done for a lower cost. So it is a breakthrough. But we will borrow from what they did, just as they have been borrowing from what we've done.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And keep in mind, the best products today are still the OpenAI products. and anthropics clawed, and those probably have what you would call a clearer path to the basket of making yet further improvements. So it has not surpassed us, no.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
I think it's a bigger breakthrough than that. They had numerous algorithmic improvements. One estimate is that the cost of what they did is about 30x lower. Now, we don't know as to what chips they had, but we do know that before chip restrictions were placed on China, the company bought some very high-quality chips that are almost as good as the ones that are now banned from China.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
So I think they certainly could have done what they did without illegally acquiring chips. But whether or not they did, I would just say we don't know.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
The word never makes me nervous, especially from a historian, but I mostly agree. This technology is going to spread. All the, oh, we need a six-month pause, do this, do that. It's not going to work. I'm not opposed to the chip restrictions on China. If I were President Biden, I would have done the same.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
But I think we need to be realistic and understand they're only going to hold back China for a short period of time. And we need to be ready for the fact that they will likely be our peer in AI technology. And we'll move into a new world state where there's a kind of mutually assured destruction with these AIs. And it will be us and China.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
And the key question is, what will the rest of the world use? I hope it's our products. Right now, DeepSeek is entirely accessible, totally free, open source. How the company will manage to fund that is a huge question. And we will see. But I think it's important that, say, as we go to Africa three years from now, I would strongly prefer they're using American AI.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
There's some chance this is all good news for America. So if the game is simply who can throw up the most energy infrastructure as quickly as possible, I would predict we're likely to lose to China. And all this talk about big deals with UAE, with the Saudis, is an attempt to cope with the fact that we don't build energy supply quickly enough in our own country.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
To the extent it's about algorithmic advances and you don't need as much brute force compute, that at least possibly is a plus for the United States.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Keep in mind, scale may still win out in China. So the major Chinese tech companies, say ByteDance, they all have their own AI models. No one's talking about them because of the Matthew effect.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Well, once people start talking about something, everyone keeps on talking about it, right? It's like the Barry Weiss effect, we could call it. It's so crazy. But it's true. So the other Chinese models could win out. Keep in mind, the deep-seek people, they're not in with the Chinese state. It seems the CCP was as surprised as anyone. They're not part of the crony capitalist machine.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Can America Win the AI War with China?
Politically, they could be the result of a clampdown. So I wouldn't necessarily bet against the larger Chinese companies because the communist system is set up to favor insiders.