Tristan Harris

And so when you have fictional characters that are talking to people back and forth about everything all day, that's giving you a whole new, it's like you open up a whole new critical minerals goldmine of training data.

And what is that in service of?

It's in service of their belief that the more data we have, the faster we can get to artificial general intelligence.

So it does bring back to, it's not just the race to build AI companions, it's the race to get training data and to build towards this bigger vision.

We'll be right back.

Well, just to be fair, I think there's a little bit of both going on, but I'm sort of citing here the work of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and his co-author Selina Zhu in the New York Times wrote a big piece about how, you know, even Eric is admitting, you know, I, as someone, Eric, as someone who was sort of saying that there's this global arms race, like the nuclear arms race for AGI, and someone who's promoting that idea.

Based on recent visits to China, what you notice is that as a country and as a government, the CCP is most interested right now in applying AI in very practical ways.

How do we boost manufacturing?

How do we boost agriculture?

How do we have self-driving cars that just improve transportation?

How do we boost healthcare and government services?

And that is what they're focused on, is practical applications that boost GDP, boost productivity across all those domains.

And you compare that to the US, where the founding of these AI companies was based on being what's called AGI-pilled, meaning you take the blue pill, the red pill.

These companies were all about building to artificial general intelligence.

So they're building...

these massive data centers that are as big as the size of Manhattan.

They're trying to train a god in a box.

The idea is if we just build this crazy god and if we can accomplish that goal, again, we can use that to dominate everything else.

Rather than race towards these narrow AIs, we're going to race towards this general intelligence.

But it's also true that recently, first of all, the founder of DeepSeek has been AGI-pilled for a long time.