Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hi, Rory here. This week, Matt Clifford and I are back with another episode in our AI series. We're going to ask in this episode, who's really winning the AI race?
Is it the United States? Is it China? Is the UK even in the running? We also explore what technological rivalry could mean for global politics in the years ahead. We're joined by Tino Quella, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, someone right at the heart of how governments are trying to grapple with fast-moving technology and global power shifts.
Tino's a former justice on the California Supreme Court, one of the most respected voices on international cooperation, and he's really well-placed to talk about how AI is reshaping the world. Here's a taster. If you like what you hear, you can listen to the full episode by signing up at therestispolitics.com.
If I look at the world between 1950 and 2023, one of the most dramatic and important changes is life expectancy went from 46 years to 73 years. Literacy has gone from like less, like 55% to closer to 80%. Infant mortality has gone down. This is all a function to my mind of science and international cooperation.
Chapter 2: Who are the key players in the AI race between China and the USA?
And right now, those kinds of questions are channeled into What does this technology do? How does it work? How can people benefit from it? So my point is simply like, those are hard questions. How do you get India on board, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the US, Mexico, all these disparate countries to figure out how to use the technology smartly, but at the same time deal with the risks?
And my point is simply that all the tumult in the world right now, whether domestic or global, like the invasion of Ukraine, is taking up a lot of oxygen and making it a little harder to focus on these questions. I think you can... One thing I'm learning as we do this podcast series is my job is to sort of be the anti-Rory.
So let me give a very different framing, which I'm not sure I fully believe, but I'm going to try. I think if we all try and channel our inner Xi Jinping, I think you could tell a story that we really see over the last two years, extraordinary continuity.
Chapter 3: How is AI reshaping global politics and international cooperation?
You know, like the idea that there's been this like sea change in US policy on AI, I don't think would register in Beijing.
I think that at least people around Xi would say something like, you know, the US looks at the inevitable rise of China and it says, we need to find some way to decouple the economic growth of this much larger country, that if it gets even close to our level of prosperity on a GDP per capita basis, we'll dwarf our GDP. We have to decouple that GDP from real-world power.
What the successive US administrations of both stripes have done very successfully is say, AI is one of the core ways that we can achieve this historically unprecedented hoarding of power despite demographic destiny. Therefore, we're going to have export controls. You will not be allowed to build powerful AI, and we will accelerate our companies, and we will make sure that we win.
What do you think? I think there's a lot to that. And actually, I'm not sure you're the anti-Rory. You're the kind of like Rory compliment. That's a nicer way of saying it. If I reconcile the two perspectives for you, I think this is the foundation that does peace.
Chapter 4: What challenges do governments face in regulating AI technology?
Right. But here's what I mean by that. You're right that at a high level of generality, at the end of the day, Does the U.S. want to be the best at frontier AI? Absolutely. That has not changed from Biden to Trump. And that highlights that even with all these partisan changes and changes in style and leadership, there's like a geopolitical logic at work here.
I will say just briefly on that, having negotiated with both administrations on this topic, I would say the similarities are more striking than the differences. Okay. That I want to explore even more. But I think you were rightly, Rory, pointing out like, I'm bringing in this perspective of like, oh, this technology can have a big impact on people's lives.
It can be positive, like it should be shared. In a way, the hard question from my perspective is if we're intellectually honest, how can we reconcile the reality of competition at the company level and at the geopolitical level
with the idea that those who are doing the competing will often, and I think in an authentic way, they believe what they say when they say, I want to find some way to bring this technology to many, many people and to have it be positive in their lives. I didn't think that's what America First is about at all. I didn't think that's what Trump thinks about.
I didn't think they get out of bed in the morning thinking, how can I share this wonderful technology with Africa? How can I make sure that our European elephants- I'm talking more about the entrepreneurs that are trying to develop the technology. I'm thinking more about the people who say, so let's take the CEO of a major tech company.
What message does that person deliver if that person were on your podcast? That person would say, look, we're in this because we think it'd be good for humanity. And I think they mean it at some level, but how to reconcile that notion of diffusing it broadly with the fact that at the company level, obviously they want to hold tight some of their commercial advantage.
And at the geopolitical level, sharing doesn't necessarily mean let's let everybody copy our technology. Well, not just copy. I mean, at the national level, Trump has demonstrated in Ukraine that he can instruct private companies to switch off their satellites and intelligence sharing. So these companies are not sovereign.
If Trump said, you cannot share the frontier large language model outside the United States, they would not be able to share the frontier large language model outside the United States. They may themselves have fantasized that their whole game was helping poor children in Africa. But if you have an administration that wants to say, for the first time, right?
Remember what we're seeing is that so many things that we took for granted that America know, its nuclear umbrella was an umbrella not just for the US, it was for other people. Its amazing currency, being the world's reserve currency, was supposed to be part of a global system.
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Chapter 5: How do export controls impact the development of AI in China?
You can sell them old chips, but you can't sell them new chips, crudely. I think this has been very successful, by the way. I think lots of people disagree with this, but it's very interesting. In January, February of this year, there was this big moment, the deep-seek moment, which I think we really need to talk about. It's really important for this topic. What is deep-seek?
Deep-seek basically was the first Chinese model that was released that I think captured the imagination of the Western public, partly because it was one of the first reasoning models, these models where you actually see the chain of thought and what it's doing, and partly because it fell almost as good as the top American models. And they also claimed that it was cheaper, required less energy.
Some reports very strongly and plausibly argue that part of what let the deep-seek model get trained so cheaply is to exfiltrate capabilities to distill knowledge from American models and to incorporate that into the training of the deep-seek model. So that means that if you just look at how much deep-seek tells you it costs to train the model, it doesn't tell you the whole story.
Tino being much more diplomatic than me is basically and might be implying that they stole some of this stuff. They're credible reports to that effect. But they continue to insist that actually running the prompts is cheaper and less energy intensive than their American competitors. So there were two things that I think caused a sort of panic here.
One was Nvidia stock temporarily took a nosedive because people said, well, maybe compute is not as important as we thought. If these guys didn't have the chips and they were able to do this, then do we really need Nvidia as much? It's interesting that Nvidia is worth a lot more today than it was then.
But the other thing that I think is really interesting is that it cast doubt on whether the whole policy of export controls was the right one. A lot of people, including very prominent people in the Trump administration, said, what we should have been doing is not stopping China getting these chips, but actually getting them dependent on these chips.
We should have had Nvidia basically build out dependence from DeepSeek and others on these chips. This is called the NATO model. This is make everybody else dependent on you and then leverage that. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of people, people like David Sachs, who's the AI czar in the White House, said, look, we just made a mistake here.
Now, it's actually settled into this slightly weird Frankenstein's monster. What is the policy now? Well, the policy now is to still have some restrictions on certain kinds of memory chips that work with the semiconductors. but to be more flexible and not have these tiers that restrict chip exports as much. Now, some of the valuation of NVIDIA is endogenous to that.
Like it reflects the reality that if you're able to not only make the most advanced chips, but to sell them pretty much anywhere in the world, that's worth even more, right? But I think to your point about what it's settled into is like, I don't think we've seen the last of these debates because at the end of the day, In the U.S.
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