Arthur Kroeber: belief

Transcript context

…To the extent that China's advantages lie in its ability—in situations where centralization is important—to do it… Ironically, this might be a case where centralization might be helpful and they might not do it because there are these tremendous economies of scale in AI training. You have to keep increasing the training cost by 4x every single year. Especially given that the availability of these advanced chips is lower in China, it would be even more helpful to have one person who can use them all for training. This might be the situation where it would make more sense for the government to say, Huawei and ByteDance, you have to give all your chips to High-Flyer. I think we can say with high confidence that that's not going to happen. As powerful as the Chinese government is, they do not have the ability to force everyone into one room for this. Huawei's got its own thing going. Bytedance is going to have its own thing going. Xiaomi is going to have its own thing going. Alibaba is going to have its own thing going. All of these have sufficiently large revenue streams and access to capital that they can move independently. They will also be able to leverage their connections within the system, both at the central level and the local government level where they get a lot of their support to do their own thing. You will not have a national monopoly solution to this. That almost never occurs in China. Interesting. That's a significant statement and maybe updates me downwards on the probability of China winning in AI. I think one of their key advantages would have been—…

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