Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Explain what the Matthew effect is, Tyler.
Tyler, the speed of these innovations from companies like OpenAI is astonishing. I was just about to say that O1 was OpenAI's latest model, but you've corrected me and said that actually deep research came out yesterday. And by the time this drops on Thursday, who knows what will be out. But about O1, you wrote it was the smartest publicly issued knowledge entity that the human race has created.
Pretty unbelievable. Why haven't we been talking about that? Why is the thing that everyone's been talking about for the past week DeepSeek?
Why is DeepSeq so much more fun?
Well, I want to talk a little bit about whether or not we're going to need PhDs at all in the future, including economists. But one thing that's really come out into sharp relief with the advent of DeepSeek is this question about open sourcing. Despite OpenAI's name and despite the way it began, which was the intention was for it to be open sourced, it is now closed source.
And Sam Altman has since said that he regrets deciding to make OpenAI closed source. I want you guys to think about a listener, for example, like Amy Weiss, my mom, who has no idea what open and closed source is, even though she's extremely smart. She just doesn't pay attention to these issues.
Lay out for us, Tyler, if you would, what is the difference between open and closed and what's actually the, like what's at stake existentially in the debate between open and closed?
Let's talk about the national security threat that DeepSeek and all of these other technologies or apps or AI models from China create. We know that Congress passed a law with overwhelming bipartisan support saying that TikTok presents a national security threat and it needs to be not banned.
I know that that language isn't correct, but needs to be sold just as Grindr was once sold to an American owner because of that threat. The Supreme Court went to the federal court, then the Supreme Court unanimously upheld that decision. If TikTok presents a national security threat, doesn't it follow that DeepSeek is also one, Jeff?
The thing that I'm fascinated by is let's just take TikTok because deep seek, I don't think is on ordinary Americans radar in the same way yet. Maybe it will be in the next few weeks, given the speed of everything right now. But 170 million Americans know basically what you've said, right? They know China does bad stuff. They might not know all the details.
They know that by using TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party has access to important, maybe sensitive data, and 170 million Americans decided we don't really care. Tyler, what do you make of that? Like, people like Jeff spend a lot of their time writing important op-eds and books about why this should matter, and most people are just saying, but I want to watch my 10-second videos.
How do you square those things?
Say more about that, Tyler. What do you mean a sleep at the wheel? And how do you figure that it's waking people up?
Jeff, I'd love for you to respond to a thing Tyler said that I suspect you disagree with and would love to hear your take on it about The idea of listening to China more. And Tyler, maybe you want to put a little bit more meat on the bones there so Jeff can respond to it. But that sentence stuck out to me. What do you mean by that?
Tyler, I suspect there's a lot there that you do not agree with.
They may be our only peer country. I think that that's probably objectively – I think we would all agree with that. But the thing is they perceive themselves or at least the CCP perceives themselves to be in a kind of war with us and they want us to lose and they want to win. Do you agree that that's true?
Well, the big comparison that many historians make is that we're in a new Cold War. Neil Ferguson has called it Cold War II. And that in the same way that the first Cold War was about sort of the nuclear arms race, this one is about the AI technological race. Tyler, do you buy that as a comparison?
So— Let's draw that analogy out. The way the Cold War was won was not by saying to our adversaries, let's find a way to live together. It was by beating them, wasn't it?
But the thing is, I guess, you know, I remember the days that I was at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and they very much believed in this analogy. And therefore, they believed that by opening up trade with China and by liberalizing China's economy, political liberalism or some kind of thing akin to democracy would necessarily follow in the same way that it did with the former Soviet Union.
But that didn't turn out to be true.
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