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Dwarkesh Patel interviews Jensen Huang.
I'm no tech expert, and I'm pretty much a single-issue poster on China here, so I pay attention only from the 57th minute. It's worth a listen.
Here's my interpretation of the case laid out by Dwarkesh, although he didn't spell it all out. Some in the US, especially the Silicon Valley tech bros (exactly the kind of attitude Dwarkesh puts on display, and also Dario Amodei and his cult followers, and some here), believe that in the brief window before we hit the technological singularity, America can and will ride its computing power advantage to total dominance over AI and, by extension, the future of humanity. Under this logic, any computing power exported to China during this window is a direct blow to American national interests. The goal is very focused: sprint past the finish line, and everything else will sort itself out afterward, China included. If you want to solve the energy crisis? Invest in AI. If you want to end world hunger? Invest in AI. If you want to make sure the yellow vermin stay in their place? Invest in AI, told you already.
But 1) how far away that singularity actually is remains unclear (I'm not sure, again I am no expert on AI or anything this forum is familiar with, so feel free to lay out your thoughts on why the tech singularity is in sight). 2) US-China competition is a long game. Both countries are formidable, and in different ways. Both countries largest threat is from the inside, not the outside. There is no silver bullet that delivers a knockout blow. It's naive to think that restrictions on computing power, rare earths, or the like can permanently lock the other side out. What it will for sure do is generate animosity and bellicosity, with intensity up to a scale never seen before on this planet. This is probably partly why rare earth controls, effective as they are, haven't been deployed on a permanent basis. 3) There is a profound deficit of goodwill between the US and China, and that poses an enormous security risk to both nations and the world at large. This risk is far more real than the doomsday anxieties peddled by those types who love to brand themselves as "effective altruism" advocates, wringing their hands over alignment and the specter of a superintelligent AI annihilating the world. Export controls and measures of that sort are therefore much harm and dubious gain. At their core, they reflect a desire by certain people to take a shortcut, convinced that this one move alone can defeat China and "secure the light cone." I think this is pure fantasy, likely just another manifestation of a weird complex.
Which brings me to something more personal, because I realize I can't talk about this purely in the abstract. I love my country (contrary to what some seem to believe, people in China do love China, not all, but still. I can't believe this needs to be spelled out but apparently so). But I also like the Americans, in fact more so than most other peoples. I like power and I like a country that is strong and powerful, and I think that is a virtue in its own right. It demonstrates the vitality of the culture that country is founded on, which I think provide a lot for Chinese to learn from. I think for the most part the Americans I've met and know have treated me well, and respected me, and I think it is my duty to return that. But something has been puzzling me for some time, maybe because of my apparent inability to understand conflict. I do not understand why China and America have to be in conflict. I don't think the current situation is only any particular country's fault; it's complex and in many ways an extension of domestic issues; it's fueled by mutual misunderstanding which I think is somewhat lopsided given the lack of American in China but not vice versa; it's also because China for a long time until recently was not a functional society and ran by either corrupt (physically and/or spiritually) or megalomaniac people, and that itself creates all sorts of troubles that overflow beyond the border; it's also because of the growing anxiety among Americans due to societal rot, and the impulse to seek a simple explanation and target to avoid facing the real issues. But I do not understand it. To use what Xi said, the Pacific seems wide enough to contain two powers, and I think the years of collaboration and positive competition between China and the US have benefited both, tremendously so. I also believe that the right position on a wide variety of social and economic issues is somewhere in between those of China and the US, and that losing either one is like losing a mirror to reflect upon, which hastens the decadence of each. I can't think of "rational" reasons why this has to be confrontational.
Maybe this is all motivated reasoning, but all reasoning is motivated. Anyways, thoughts?
Firstly, power is zero sum. With regards to conflict, power is the lens to use, not wealth or positive-sum dynamics.
It's idiotic for the US to sell China AI chips. China is already trying hard to make their own AI chips and chips generally. Any big power would want to secure such critical industrial, economic, military resources with domestic production. They're not going to stop if Nvidia sells a few billion more in GPUs. Nor is China going to accept a subordinate position in the US tech stack, they're not stupid and have been playing their well-honed playbook of imitation, innovation, espionage and absorption of foreign IP. Jensen Huang must think the audience are stupid with this rubbish:
'We need open source', no, Nvidia needs open source to increase competition amongst its clients.
And this is just bullshit. They don't have anywhere near '4x or 10x' as many chips because of export controls and a shortage of HBM too, because of export controls and sanctions. Amazon has more compute than all of China. Jensen is just nakedly grasping for any advantage, any line of reasoning that gets him where he wants to go, which is selling more.
Maybe Jensen should head off and try to convince China to stop hacking every drop of IP they can get their hands on, see how that works out for him. It's just a profoundly unserious way to look at the world. Jensen's abilities have made me lots of money, so I'm not opposed to him totally. But there's this shameless inability to accept that Nvidia and US interests might not be the same. He weaves around good faith argumentation like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix, just constantly attacking and pressing and cajoling and bullshitting. I'm not American either. But the nakedness of the duplicity is just staggering.
Even if the singularity were not imminent, it'd still be dumb to sell these chips from an American strategic point of view. AI is useful for chip development, Google has been using AI for chip design for many years now. AI would be helpful for squeezing out more yield on their inferior processes. Selling China chips accelerates their chip development. Selling China chips also accelerates lots of other research, AI cyberwarfare capabilities, military ISR and economic competitiveness generally... And he's just going on about how they need to be open source developers on the US stack, like that matters at all? It doesn't matter at all. The notion that huge companies are going to spend tens of billions of dollars training massive AI models and then open sourcing them so they won't make any money from them is absolutely retarded. Open source can only lose, in the long run. I like open source and use open source but I'm realistic about it. Nvidia doesn't open source anything if they can actually make money from it: they patent CUDA architecture, tensor cores, NVLink architecture. They're not retarded. Facebook has switched to proprietary with Muse. Even Facebook has cottoned on here.
In the Cold War the US was loathe to sell the Soviet Union advanced machine tools. It was obviously stupid to sell tools that could make stealthy submarine propellors, C&C tools with high tolerances for advanced engines. Fortunately the Soviets could mostly only copy and not innovate like China can.
Secondly, the US government and elite as a class does not accept the legitimacy of any non-liberal democracy. They might decide that it's too hard to overthrow any given power at a given point in time, that the costs aren't worth the gains at any given point. But if they have the power, they'll give it a shot. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Russia are all to some extent considered targets. So is China. The US leadership class is not going to change its mind about this.
Even if China was a liberal democracy it'd still be very threatening because of how big and rich China is. If you read Colby's book on strategy he lays this out. If China reaches a certain level of strength, China becomes the lynchpin of Asia and the rest of Asia falls into China's orbit. If Asia falls into China's orbit, Chinese standards, Chinese technology, Chinese markets, so too does much of the rest of the world. Then China can start interfering in the Americas and undermine US national interests. The US will not have sufficient power to resist this, since it's a fundamentally smaller country. Colby makes all the song and dance about how they're only really opposed to the Chinese government... but at the end of the day we know the Chinese government has the support of the people, they're nationalistic and quite reasonably so. They want the best for their country and that means expansion overseas, in one form or another.
It doesn't matter if current Chinese leaders say they have no such interests, or even if they're being sincere. Leaders change. The US used to be isolationist and changed. Power corrupts. Huge powers have global interests, especially today. They get drawn into conflicts, they feel immense pride in their power, glory in their victories. China is no different from any other country in potential for rapacity and aggression.
Furthermore, America does not have a chance in competing with China on an even playing field. Chinese people are smart and very hard working. The Chinese system is very capable. They don't have a construction sector that squanders billions building imaginary railways. They don't have a fent zombie infestation in their biggest cities. They don't have a political class behoven to Israel. They don't have people like Jensen running around undermining export controls with their lobbying, China's economic elites obey instructions. China's internal problems pale in comparison to America's.
America would have to be 4-5x more capable per person to compete with China just based on pure population. That's incredibly difficult! Without AI, without its ever-diminishing time-based advantages in technology, America cannot compete with China. The great hope seems to be that Chinese demography falls off ... in an age of automation where China already has a huge industrial and robotics base. In an age of AI. In an age where everyone has growing youth unemployment. The demographics cope is just cope. China is huge, has enormous cohorts of highly educated young people. Demographics will not avail America.
China's optimal strategy is 'lets be friends, win-win cooperation, surely you'd never attack a peaceful country like ours, lets trade and cooperate and especially share technology'. Then once they have the technology and a giant fleet, a military budget 2-3x America's, all-domain technological superiority, then comes revenge for past humiliations, real and imagined. That's the privilege of size and intellect.
America's optimal strategy is looking for some kind of force-multiplier, a wonder-weapon that can be used to lock in its advantages. AI fits perfectly. Frankly, America has been ridiculously, impossibly generous to China, as generous to China as it has been destructive in the Middle East. America opened up domestic and world markets to China, China systematically grabbed every strategic market it could with aggressive state-backed industrial expansion. And exported inordinate amounts of fentanyl precursors and toxic social media like tiktok to America. They're playing the game. The US can also play the game and take steps to cripple and constrain China.
Maybe I'm just geopolitics ignorant, but what does it actually mean for countries to be in China's orbit. Does it mean they frequently make major policy concessions to Chinese whims? Is that currently what places like UK/France/Germany/Japan/SK in the "US orbit" do? Or do you mean a different kind of relationship?
Yes, the UK and France send ships to help with US wars at times, UK aircraft help defend Israel, UK bases are used for US bombers. Australian AWACs planes are helping the US and gang out in the Middle East.
Or how the US instructs the Netherlands not to sell ASML chip equipment to China. They're squarely in the US camp.
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To me, it means they decide cultural practices. Cultural practices decide labor practices. Labor practices establish the lowest common denominator lifestyle that every country gets gravitationally drawn towards.
Eg: Working weekends is frowned upon in the US. China works 996. If all Chinese orbit countries work 996, then Americans will be forced to work those same hours to compete in an open market.
Eg: American businesses usually operate in a grind-chill-grind-chill cycle. The early years require grinding. But once you've established yourself, you can breathe easy and the $$$ keep flowing in. It allows Americans to enter lower stress periods in life, where they can have families and self actualize. This is a pl cultural practice of the US. Chinese companies operate in a grind-grind-grind pattern of ruthless eternal competition. You never get to rest. IMO, China's low birthrates (which were plummetting even before the 1 child policy) are a direct result of an all consuming work-life.
Separately, Cultural monopolization also affects aspirational and luxury spending. The west dominates luxury because global elites everywhere are cultural descendents of ivies-oxcam (nyc-london-paris) culture. If luxury and aspirational experiences take a Chinese shape, then people stop paying 100k for patek phillipe. People stop flying to see NYC and Niagara falls. People stop paying $100k/yr at ivies. A lot of money dries up.
Ofc, it won't be a wholesale shift. But a steady erosion of western cultural capital is a sufficient setback. The west has turned entitled, obese (mentally) and wasteful. There is no appetite for austerity driven pain. Much like Iran has proven in 2026, it only takes a few bruises to trigger domestic turmoil in the west.
I've worked in China. I married a Chinese woman. I've visited a lot including within the past year. I have posted to the Motte from China. I have somehow never noticed anyone working 996. My Chinese coworkers certainly didn't. My inlaws don't.
I think some miniscule portion of Chinese people work 996. Like stories of American Wall Street workers working insane hours and sleeping under their desks. That's real to some degree. But not the typical experience.
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Have the American orbit countries in West Europe/Canada/Latin America developed more of a grind mentality to reflect American culture? Have Japan and South Korea developed less of a grind? I think these things have far too much domestic cultural inertia to drift more than marginally.
All of these sound like good things to me. Is there any real loss to society if the bottom falls out of the market for Western luxury goods or the prestige laundering at private universities? If Patek Phillipe disappeared today no one but the negligibly few who are directly employed/invested would appreciably suffer.
No, but the US had to adopt strong protectionate policies to stop that from happening. America's outsourcing phase was intended at moving the now necessary exploitative practices to 3rd world countries to keep competing with the east asian grind. ofc, outsourcing only works as long as you hold the leverage. Once those nations upskill, they bite the hand that feeds them. In industries that are free for all (like tech), the culture is indeed becoming a 996.
Europe's economic decline is what happens when nations stop trying to keep up. You either enter a slow decline or suck it up and join the grind.
It starts slowly at first, followed by a transition all at once. China has been kind of historically incompetent at producing novel art or aesthetics....so they may fail because of their pathetic marketing. But, that's more the west winning by default than them valiantly resisting a cultural transition.
Btw, Patek Philipe was an example, the tip of a much larger iceberg. I mean every luxury boutique band that creates aspiration, every fast fashion brand that copies it and every indie artists who creates quirky renditions of those same designs.
We loved your aesthetics. Your people do seem to be better at imagining the unimaginable.
I'd like to know what an Indian, diaspora or not, thinks of India. There was someone (mrvanillasky?) who posted something before, but I think he's nuts and I didn't take it seriously. If you have time to write something, that would be great.
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