Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think? I’m just saying, it would be good if we just at least ask the right sorts of questions. I don’t have answers to all these. The pro-China argument is they will not hesitate to use the AI and train it on all their people, and so it’ll be more quickly implemented. The pro-US argument is that we are probably ahead of China. Maybe the large language models are not really communist. Maybe if you can’t ask the large language model who Winnie the Pooh is, you have to nerf it so badly that it doesn’t even work or something like that. I think there’s an intuition that the effective altruists are not just fifth columnists on the part of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] where they’re trying to sabotage us, but where they actually, simply are doing what the CCP wants, which is actually to stop the LLMs and that’s very disruptive. Then, to the extent that the second one, that it probably helps the US more than China, is that actually massively destabilizing, where China was this low-volatility plan to victory where they were just going to slowly beat the Western world. If you now have this volatility-increasing technology that China cannot match, does that just accelerate China’s timetable? And does China become like Russia, where you’re ultimately going to lose, and maybe you have to invade Taiwan in the next year or two, and you can’t wait for another decade? Final question — what is the next thing you will choose to learn about?…

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