Steve Hsu

So we should just keep climbing it, right?

And that's really where China is.

China is much, much more optimistic.

Like if you talk to some random Chinese person, you say like, oh, we're going to have AI at the hospital, but the AI is first going to talk to you before you talk to the doctor and it's going to like do some triage.

The average Chinese person is not thinking like, oh, what about my privacy?

Or what if the AI makes a mistake?

Or what if Microsoft gets all this data?

Those are things which a typical American might think right away, but the Chinese people are more like, this is awesome, man.

This AI is going to like, you know.

So just that vibe difference is a huge factor.

Well, a lot of this depends on what you think about fast takeoff for AI.

And not just, as I was saying earlier in our conversation, not just fast takeoff in the capabilities of the AI, but also the diffusion of it.

Because you can have a situation where the AI can really do good stuff, but no one's letting it do good stuff.

That's actually the situation in customer service or agentic.

It's like there is this lag, right?

So it's also true that I think there will be a long period of time where a skilled engineer who's trying to figure out how to do injection molding more efficiently or something to make like a car body, that kind of physical stuff is still going to be done by human engineers.

It's going to be a while before AI takes over that kind of very spatially oriented physical stuff.

So I think some of the people in Silicon Valley who believe in

fast takeoff and are very hawkish about the China AI competition, what they are thinking is, oh, all of these advantages that Steve mentions that the Chinese have, those are all going to be irrelevant once we have AGI, which is sort of the scenario that you mentioned.

I think that timescale is going to be somewhat longer than what they think.