Azeem Azhar

speaker

7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.

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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View · Inside the US–China decoupling: What’s really at stake (AI, rare earths, Taiwan, trade) · 23 Oct 2025 podcast

So the received wisdom is that the US leads in the frontier, that the US foundation model labs are brilliant.

by and large chasing after the machine god that is AGI or ASI, and that the US is highly constrained by some of its physical infrastructure, so the power systems and so on.

And on the other hand, China is doing really well with open source models.

It has abundant power capacity, and the open source models are getting better and better.

But critically, the Chinese state-civil enterprise fusion is all about

deployment and that these are two entirely different approaches to AI.

I think that's the received wisdom.

Is that right?

Is that wrong?

But, you know, what started to change, I think, was in the mid-2010s when the strategic importance and national importance of data

particularly data about citizens, started to emerge amongst policymakers.

And you get to the stage that by 2020, more than 100 countries have got their own data privacy frameworks.

We always think about GDPR, but Kenya had one and Brazil had one.

They were expressing some desire of classic Westphalian sovereignty in this new domain against the backdrop of essentially having been happy for the Americans to do the running for 30 years.

Yeah.

I just returned from Abu Dhabi this morning, and of course, the UAE has gone all in on AI as a technology for the nation, as a technology for its industry and economy.

It's building huge data centers.

But critically, to your point about new model providers, they have released in the last two or three weeks a really performant open source reasoning model that is extremely light, measured by billions of parameters.

And, you know, it is interesting to see that, to your point, nothing's yet locked down.

There are certain things that feel rather more locked down.

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