Dan Wang

He fired two of his handpicked successors and almost fired his third one, Jiang Zemin, who ended up running the country.

But he was someone who was also...

really famous for ordering tanks into Beijing.

For a while, throughout the 1990s, people labeled him, as well as a few other Communist Party members, the butchers of Beijing because they ordered in the tanks.

And so Deng Xiaoping did not permit substantial political reform.

He promoted tremendous economic reform, but he did not figure out this problem of succession.

And so we can maybe situate Xi Jinping in a direct analog of Deng Xiaoping,

Because he is also grappling with questions of succession, what comes after him.

And he has been pretty ruthless towards people he has purged.

And so this is where I'm skeptical.

that there are deep pluralist genes in China.

I think that China, throughout its imperial history, has substantially lacked a liberal tradition.

A liberal tradition meaning one that is interested in restraining the power of the emperor and promoting the power of the individual or the family or the corporation.

And so I think that the future of China, my bet would be that it looks politically much more similar in the future as it does today.

Yeah, I think AI, for me, what is most important is going to be in the next five years.

Today, I think that the US still has a decisive lead on most aspects of artificial intelligence, mostly because it has the compute resources here.

It has the leading NVIDIA chips and China does not.

But if we are going to have much more AI in our lives, I think the competition is much more of a toss-up.

Again, looking forward in the next five years, which is a lifetime by the standards of a lot of AI, maybe a shorter time span for the rest of us.

And here is where I think China actually does have a lot of advantages in AI relative to the U.S.