Nathan Lambert
speaker
1,814 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Feb
Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
decide that scaling laws are what matters, right, just like the U.S. executives like Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar and all these U.S.
executives of the biggest, most powerful tech companies have decided they're scale-pilled and they're building multi-gigawatt data centers, right, whether it's in Texas or Louisiana or Wisconsin, wherever it is, they're building these massive things that cost millions of dollars. as much as their entire budget for spending on data centers globally in one spot, right?
This is what they've committed to for next year, year after, et cetera. And so they're so convinced that this is the way, that this is what they're doing. But if China decided to, they could do it faster than us. But this is where the restrictions come in. It is not clear that China as a whole has decided, you know, from the highest levels that this is a priority. The U.S. sort of has, right?
You know, you see Trump talking about DeepSeek and Stargate within the same week, right? And the Biden admin as well had a lot of discussions about AI and such. It's clear that they think about it. Only just last week did DeepSeek meet the second in command of China, right? Like they have not even met the top, right? They haven't met Xi. Xi hasn't sat down.
And they only just released a subsidy of a trillion RMB, you know, roughly $160 billion, which is closer to the spending of like Microsoft and Meta and Google combined, right, for this year. So it's like they're realizing it just now, but... But that's where these export restrictions come in and say, hey, you can't ship the most powerful US chips to China. You can ship a cut down version.
You can't ship the most powerful chips to all these countries who we know are just going to rent it to China. You have to limit the numbers, right?
And same with manufacturing equipment, tools, all these different aspects. But it all stems from AI and then what downstream can slow them down in AI. And so the entire semiconductor restrictions, you read them, they are very clear. It's about AI and military civil fusion of technology. Right. It's very clear.
And then from there it goes, oh, well, we're banning them from buying like lithography tools and etch tools and deposition tools. And, oh, this random like, you know, subsystem from a random company that's like tiny. Right. Like, why are we banning this? Because all of it, the U.S. government has decided is critical to AI systems.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography. To set context on the chips, right, what Nathan's referring to is in 2020, Huawei released their Ascend 910 chip, which was an AI chip, first one on 7 nanometer before Google did, before NVIDIA did. And they submitted it to the MLPerf benchmark, which is sort of a industry standard for machine learning performance benchmark. And it did quite well.
And it was the best chip at the submission, right? This was a huge deal. The Trump admin, of course, banned the Huawei from getting 7 nanometer chips from TSMC. And so then they had to switch to using internal domestically produced chips, which was a multi-year setback.
I mean, he may have woken up last week, right? Leon Feng met the second command guy and they had a meeting. And then the next day they announced the AI subsidies, which are a trillion RMB.
And the US government realized in October 7th, 2022, before ChatGPT released, that restriction on October 7th, which dropped and shocked everyone. And it was very clearly aimed at AI. Everyone was like, what the heck are you doing? Stable diffusion was out then, but not ChatGPT. Yeah, but not ChatGPT. So it was like starting to be rumblings. Of what Gen AI can do to society.
But it was very clear, I think, to at least like National Security Council and those sort of folks that this was where the world is headed, this Cold War that's happening. Yeah.
This is the big risk, right? The further you push China away from having access to cutting edge American and global technologies, the more likely they are to say, well, because I can't access it, I might as well... No one should access it, right? And there's a few interesting aspects of that, right? China has a urban-rural divide like no other.
They have a male-female birth ratio like no other, to the point where if you look in Most of China, it's like the ratio is not that bad. But when you look at single dudes in rural China, it's like a 30 to 1 ratio. And those are disenfranchised dudes, right? Like, quote unquote, like the US has an incel problem like China does too. It's just they're placated in some way or cut, crushed down. What
you do with these people? And at the same time, you're not allowed to access the most important technology. At least the US thinks so. China's maybe starting to think this is the most important technology by starting to dump subsidies in it, right? They thought EVs and renewables were the most important technology. They dominate that now, right?
Now they started thinking about semiconductors in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and now they've been dumping money and they're catching up rapidly. And And they're going to do the same with AI, right? Because they're very talented, right? So the question is like, when does this hit a breaking point, right?
And if China sees this as, hey, they can continue... If not having access and starting a true hot war, right? Taking over Taiwan or trying to subvert its democracy in some way or blockading it hurts the rest of the world far more than it hurts them, this is something they could potentially do, right? And And so is this pushing them towards that? Potentially, right?
I'm not quite a geopolitical person, but it's obvious that the world regime of peace and trade is super awesome for economics. But at some point it could break, right?
raw materials from all over the world. The US would just shut down the Strait of Malacca. At the same time, the US entire... You could argue almost all the GDP growth in America since the 70s has been either population growth or tech. Right. Because, you know, your life today is not that much better than someone from the 80s outside of tech. Right.
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