Noah Smith

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437 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Prof G Markets · America’s Economy Is Entering a New Era — ft. Noah Smith · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

So with Chinese models so far, the pattern has been that they test very well on benchmarks and then that their capabilities are very brittle.

uh when you go beyond just uh sort of teaching to the test if you will that's one issue this has been a very consistent thing so when we've seen um

you know, more sort of more comprehensive tests of Chinese models' abilities.

They've been increasing more slowly than the American models.

There's also a question of, you know, to what degree this Chinese model is simply, you know, an American model that was copied.

You know, so in terms of whether export controls are working, the overall story has been again and again that export controls do work.

In addition, China has far less compute available for inference.

So, you know, most of what differentiates these models right now on their performance is how much compute you can use for inference.

You know, not how much you use to train the thing, it's how much, you know, you can let them think.

really.

And so China has a lot less compute there and AI and export controls have been very important in limiting China's compute on inference on the capabilities, despite, so, you know, even if you exactly steal the weights for Claude, which maybe they did, who knows,

I'm not a technical expert, so I can't say how likely that is.

Or maybe you use a distillation thing, so it's very similar to Claude.

So even if you do that, you can't run at Claude's capability most of the time if you don't have the inference compute.

So export controls have been extremely effective in terms of, and that's not even counting the export controls on chip making equipment, which have been very effective in keeping

the Chinese chip making industry well behind the, you know, the Taiwanese, Korean, et cetera, and U.S.

industry.

And so I think export controls are still quite effective.

And this may turn out to be another deep seek moment where we find out that the, you know, reports of extremely advanced, you know, like world beating capabilities turn out to be very exaggerated.

Well, I mean, obviously, biosecurity, like humans are vulnerable to viruses.

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