Ben Buchanan
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ben Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
coordination and not rushing ahead, including, again, potential coordination with the Chinese, while not exacerbating this arms race dynamic. I would not say that we tried to race ahead in applications to national security.
So part of the national security memorandum is a pretty lengthy kind of description of what we're not going to do with AI systems and a whole list of prohibited use cases and then high impact use cases. And there's a governance and you're not in power anymore.
That's a fair question. Now, they haven't repealed this. The Trump administration has not repealed this. But I do think it's fair to say that for the period while we had power, the foundation we were trying to build with AI, we were very cognizant to the dynamic you were talking about, a race to the bottom on safety.
And we were trying to guard against it, even as we tried to assure a position of U.S. preeminence.
I don't know that it's pretty antagonistic to say we are not going to sell you the most advanced technology in the world. That does not in itself, that's not a declaration of war. That is not even itself a declaration of a Cold War. I think it is just saying this technology is incredibly important. Do you think that's how they understood it?
This is more academic than you want, but my academic research when I started as a professor was based on the society's trap, or what in academia we call a security dilemma, of how nations misunderstand each other. So I'm sure the Chinese and the United States misunderstand each other at some level in this area. But I don't think they do.
The plain reading of the facts is that not selling chips to them I don't think is a declaration of war.
To some degree. I don't want to trigger this. I'm sure they do see it that way. On the other hand, we set up an AI dialogue with them. And, you know, I flew to Geneva and met them. And we tried to talk to them about AI safety and the like. So I do think in an area as complex as AI, you can have multiple things be true at the same time. I don't regret for a second the export controls.
And I think... Frankly, we are proud to have done them when we did them because it has helped ensure that here we are a couple of years later, we retain the edge in AI for as good as our talent as DeepSeek is.
Yeah, let's just take one step back so we're tracking the history of DeepSeq here. So we'd been watching DeepSeq in the White House since November of 23, or thereabouts, when they put out their first coding system. And there's no doubt that the DeepSeq engineers are extremely talented. And they got better and better at their systems throughout 2024.
We were heartened when their CEO said, I think that the biggest impediment to what DeepSeek was doing was not their inability to get money or talent, but their inability to get advanced chips. Clearly, they still did get some chips that they some they bought legally, some they smuggled. So it seems.
And then in December of 24, they came out with a system called version three DeepSeek version three, which actually I think is one that should have gotten the attention. It didn't get a ton of attention, but it did show they were making strong algorithmic progress and basically making systems more efficient. And then in January of 25, they came out with a system called R1.
R1 is actually not that unusual. No one would expect that to take a lot of computing power just as a reasoning system that extends the underlying V3 system. That's a lot of nerd speak. The key thing here is when you look at what DeepSeek has done, I don't think the media hype around it was warranted. And I don't think it changes the fundamental analysis of what we were doing.
They still are constrained by computing power. We should tighten the screws and continue to constrain them. They're smart. Their algorithms are getting better. But so are the algorithms of U.S. companies. And this, I think, should be a reminder that the chip controls are important. China is a worthy competitor here. And we shouldn't take anything for granted.
But I don't think this is a time to say the sky is falling or the fundamental scaling laws have broken. Where do you think they got their performance increases from? They have smart people. There's no doubt about that. We read their papers. They're smart people who are doing exactly the same kind of algorithmic efficiency work that companies like Google and Anthropic and OpenAI are doing.
I think two things are true here. The first is there will always be a frontier, or at least for the foreseeable future, there'll be a frontier that is computationally and energy intensive. And our companies, we want to be at that frontier. Those companies have very strong incentive to look for efficiencies and they all do.
They all want to get every single last juice of insight from each squeeze of computation, but they will continue to need to push the frontier. And then in addition to that, there'll be a kind of slower diffusion that lags the frontier, where algorithms get more efficient, fewer computer chips are required, less energy is required. We need, as America, to win both those competitions.
Every AI chip, every advanced AI chip that gets made will get sold. The market for these chips is extraordinary right now, I think, for the foreseeable future. So I think our view was we put the export controls on.
We put the export controls on the first ones in October 2022. NVIDIA stock has 10x'd since then.
Sure. I think the dynamic is right. I'm not suggesting they're, you know, if they had a bigger market, they could charge on the margins more. That's obviously the supply and demand here. I think our analysis was considering the importance of these chips and the AI systems they make to U.S. national security. This is a trade-off that's worth it.
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