Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…urse we want the United States to have as much computing as possible. We’re limited by energy, but we’ve got a lot of people working on that. We’ve got to not make energy a bottleneck for our country. But what we also want is to make sure that all the AI developers in the world are developing on the American tech stack, and making the contributions, the advancements of AI—especially when it’s open source—available to the American ecosystem. It would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystems: the open source ecosystem, and it only runs on a foreign tech stack, and a closed ecosystem that runs on the American tech stack. I think that would be a horrible outcome for the United States. Since there are a lot of things, let me just triage the response. I think the concern, going back to the flop difference in the hacking, is yes, they have compute, but there’s some estimates that because they’re at 7nm—they don’t have EUVs because of chip-making export controls—the amount of flops they’re able to actually produce, they have one tenth the amount of flops that the US has. So with that, could they eventually train a model like Mythos? Yes. But the question is, because we have more flops, American labs are able to get to these levels of capabilities first. Because Anthropic got to it first, they say, “Okay, we’re going to hold onto it for a month while all these American companies, we’ll give them access to it. They’re going to patch up all their vulnerabilities, and now we release it.” Furthermore, even if they train a model like this, the ability to deploy it at scale… If you had a cyber hacker, it’s much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them. So that inference compute really matters a lot. In fact, the fact that they have so many AI researchers who are so good is the thing that makes it so scary, because what is it that makes those engineer researchers more productive? It’s compute. If you talk to any AI lab in America, they say the thing that’s bottlenecking them is compute. There are quotes from the DeepSeek founder, or Qwen leadership or whatever. They say the thing they’re bottlenecked on is compute. So then the question is, isn’t it better that we get American companies, because they have more compute, to get to the Mythos-level capabilities first, prepare our society for it, before China can get to it because, they have less compute? We should always be first and we should always have more. But in order for that outcome you described to be true, you have to take it to the extremes. They have to have no compute. If they have some compute, the question is how much is needed? The amount of compute they have in China is enormous. You’re talking about the country that is the second largest computing market in the world. If they want to aggregate their compute, they’ve got plenty of compute to aggregate.…

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