Today on Moment of Zen, we're sharing a conversation from the 2024 Hill and Valley Forum with the founders of Scale AI, Anthropic, and AI Fund on the urgent race between the US and China in AI innovation. Moderated by Senator Cory Booker and featuring Alexandr Wang, Jack Clark, and Andrew Ng, the panel covers why American AI leadership is at risk and how smarter policy and faster deployment are critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Note that this conversation took place before the DeepSeek breakthrough. Keep an eye out for the 2025 Hill and Valley Forum on Wednesday, April 30th, and subscribe to the Hill and Valley Podcast in the episode description to listen to every panel.
There's been lots of talk of how China can do fast following and China copies. In AI, it's actually different. China has great inventors and great researchers. In response to things like the export controls, it's doing really fantastic work on distributed training to get around that, on all kinds of low-level things to make training more efficient. And it would be a chronically stupid thing to underestimate their capacity for inventiveness here.
I think that you all know the folks that are up here. I'm going to introduce them in a second. But for the purposes of this panel, AI stands for awesome individuals with amazing insight. And this is the best I got. It's the best I got. But it truly is an excellent panel that I'm really excited about. And we have Jack Clark, the co-founder of Anthropic. Please, more than a smattering of applause. Thank you very much. That's beginning to smack. Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI. Don't applaud him. He's appallingly young for crying out loud and has a great head of hair, too. That makes me very jealous. And then of course, Andrew Ng, who I love because he's from my alma mater, the managing general partner of the AI Fund.
So I want to roll right in if I can to get to the conversation. People hear enough from politicians, but you all are on the front lines of what I really believe is the greatest frontier in human innovation that we may ever see. It's an exciting dawn of a whole new era for humanity as a whole. But there are a lot of people who bring up concerns, and one of them that I'm almost sort of tired of is the fear predictions for AGI, for artificial general intelligence. And I'm wondering if you all think that the talk is overblown or if it's something that those who want to have sci-fi movie-like dystopic futures should have a right to be somewhat concerned. And this is a jump ball, gentlemen.
I'm happy to start by answering. I mean, I think the key to this conversation is, you know, there's some truth to the fear that we'll develop very powerful AI systems, but there's also a lot of truth that the AI systems we have today are extremely beneficial, can have a lot of positive impacts on humanity, positive impacts on society. And I think the key is for us to develop a very grounded and scientific conversation around what are the capabilities of these algorithms, how are those capabilities developing, and when do we need to start having the conversations around, you know, do we need to start putting controls around this? And I think that there have been a number of places that I think have really led the policy conversation around, you know, the development of this kind of scientific framework and the development of the right testing procedures to be able to do so. So the United States, we have our AI safety institute as a part of NIST, which I think is a key part of this conversation. The UK has an AI safety institute that they started as well. Japan is starting an AI safety institute, Korea starting an AI safety institute. And so I think we're seeing a very global effort around developing a much more precise and grounded sort of scientific research into exactly how to adjudicate whether or not the models are, you know, going to be worthy of concern or not worthy of concern. And I think that's the right way to have the conversation, not to make it so emotional.
Thanks, Alex. Well, just to tag on to what Alex said, it's kind of like if AI is the new electricity, we're sitting here wondering about how we regulate everything that gets plugged into an electric outlet, which would drive you completely crazy. So what we need to do is have standard like product safety testing measures, figure out a shared global framework, and figure out if there's anything different about this technology. And we can only do that if we build a testing regime and figure out stuff that seems sensible and avoid doing things that would restrict competition or like crush an ecosystem that's just getting going. Now, over the last year, I think many of you have seen, I was surprised by the intensity of the lobbying efforts from a number of parties that invested billions of dollars in training foundation models to crush open source and shut down innovation, often on kind of safety concerns that keep on shifting. I think a year ago AI was supposed to take over and cause all, then it was bio weapons risk, then it's defense risk. AI does have risk, but to take the electricity analogy further, today it feels like we're trying to make home appliances safe, the applications, electric home appliances safe by regulating the solar panel makers. We're going to the solar panel maker and saying, guarantee to me that electron you're generating is safe for the application, and that's just impossible. So I think the mistake that a lot of regulatory agencies in the US and abroad and in the EU, Europe for example, are making is trying to regulate the technology. That's like saying solar panels, make sure your electricity is safe, can't do that, versus the applications. I want to say self-driving cars, visible underwriting software, medical devices, got to regulate the application layer, not the technology layer.
And so I'm one of these folks that has been frustrated with unnecessary regulations since the time I was mayor. But when I got to be a United States senator, I was blown away that I found that the government, federal government, was not moving at the speed of innovation and trying to regulate things. They were really undermining that innovation. And I had a lot of worries very vocally. I used to be on the Commerce Committee, and I remember the head of the FAA came in, and there was this incredible industry that was booming for drones. Europe was using them to survey mines, to fix poles. We weren't issuing any licenses except for the movie industry, of course. And I said to the head of the FAA, if you were around during the time of Orville and Wilbur Wright, they would have never gotten the airplane off the ground. And so I'm wondering for the three of you, there's got to be some fears about the innovators, the regulators here, and things they might do. Specifically, I'm wondering from you that you're really worried that they might do to choke the innovation. But there's got to be on the flip side of that some areas where you say, wait a minute, we need regulation. And I'll give one more example just for the sake of just sort of setting you all up. Social media was something I was an early innovator in when I was mayor of the city of New York, one of the first politicians to really use it as a management tool, transparency tool, engagement tool for my city. But now I look at social media and I'm like, dear God, we need to regulate there. Really bad things are happening. So I'm wondering if you can give me, for this next era of human innovation, where you think is good regulation and where you're like, dear God, Booker, you're in your position in the Senate, please don't get this wrong.
So I'll give one example, which is I think when you start an AI company, you may not be interested in national security, but national security is interested in you, and you end up building these very powerful systems that may have national security uses or misuses. And for that, I think we do need to come up with tests that make sure that we don't, you know, put technologies into the market which could unwittingly to us like advantage someone or allow some non-state actor to commit something harmful. Beyond that, I think we can mostly rely on existing regulations and law and existing testing procedures that exist, like the FDA or the FAA or other things, and we don't need to create some entirely new infrastructure.
I think, I know that in even earlier sessions people use the term dual use to refer to AI. I think that's the wrong framework to think about it. There are some technologies like nuclear or maybe rockets with some civilian use cases and some military use cases, and we can contain the military use cases without crushing civilian innovation. AI is a general-purpose technology like electricity. Electricity can be used for warfare but could be used for tons of other beneficial things. So that term dual use is not like there are two users, one military, one civilian. Yes, there are military use cases, but there's so many civilian use cases that we don't want to crush. So I think having a carefully scoped way to contain the military applications without limiting the dramatic... I think of AI as multi-use, not dual use, way more civilian than military use cases.
Okay, they didn't really cover, though, not to be critical of my new friends, the regulation that we desperately need. Are there things that you're standing up here and saying, I want to get back to you guys and say, please do this? But you have such a great experience with the cases that they both went to, which is defense and national security. So I'm wondering if you can give some maybe another layer of insights there.
Yeah, I mean, I think what we actually have in defense and national security, if anything, is the opposite problem, which is not enough use of AI to modernize our national security apparatus. And this is, you know, I think this is somewhat the purpose of this forum. But in general, you know, the DoD is hamstrung by a lot of process, a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of stuff that just doesn't serve an era when technology is moving extremely quickly. And you have near-peer adversaries that are moving super quickly as well. You know, I think if you look at, you know, China or Russia, their willingness and speed in integrating new frontier technologies into every component of how they operate vastly outpaces what we're able to do if we continue operating in the same confines and bureaucracy that we've been operating to date. I think this is a known problem within the DoD. It's, you know, a lot of people are working very hard to try to solve this, both from a, you know, in legislation, in appropriations, as well as just how the DoD itself operates. But, you know, my greatest fear is not that, you know, we don't build the right regulation to prevent AI from being used in national security. It's that we as a national security apparatus, the DoD, the US DoD, and the US, you know, intelligence community don't use it enough to ensure that we remain competitive in this next era.
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Senator Clark, you've got to put a piece of legislation on the floor to regulate this space. And I'm happy to change places with you as long as our net worths go together with us. Yeah. Senator Clark, what are you doing?
I think you'd want to find ways to aggressively field like experimental technology. And to Alex's point, get departments to actually use it. Because at Anthropic, we discover that the more we find ways to use this technology, the more ways we find it could help us. And you also need a testing and measurement regime that closely looks at whether the technology is working and if it's not, how you fix it from a technological level. And if it continues to not work, whether you need some additional regulation. But to Alex's point, I think the greatest risk is us not using it. Private industry is making itself faster and smarter by experimenting with this technology. We do ourselves, and I think if we fail to do that at the level of the nation, some other entrepreneurial nation will succeed here.
Isn't that great? I really expected you to give me something that would create parameters, but both of you seem to be expressing the fear that if we aren't on the cutting edge of this, we open up a whole world of vulnerability. So if I was a legislator, I'd be telling them to start trying to regulate oversight over the administration to push them into doing it more. But I'm wondering, you're on the left. I'm wondering if on the right here of the divide, Senator Ng, what are you... us politicians always trying to create partisanship and tribalism. Do you agree? What legislation are you putting to the floor of the Senate now?
No, if you're in a foot race with one or more competitors, I think there may be two ways to win. One is you can try to trip up the other guy. Maybe we should do a little bit of that in some cases. And the other is you could run faster and harder. I think here in the US there's a lot we could do to run faster and harder ourselves. Invest much more in training, education, upskilling, invest in computer infrastructure. As Alex mentioned, improve the appropriations process. I think that I see lots of wins we could do there rather than constraining ourselves in the hope that by constraining ourselves we can trip up the other guy. And there's actually one other risk. So today we see many nations buy surveillance software from other nations, from some of our adversaries, and it limits our ability to influence other nations' respect for human rights and privacy because it's not our software they're using anymore. I worry that a lot of the stifling regulations being proposed in DC will shut American companies out of the supply chain, cause other companies to use alternatives, and then someday, you know, when a large language model is asked a question, what do you think of democracy? I would quite like that AI to give an answer that reflects our values rather than someone else's values. And I worry about those stifling things shutting ourselves out. It'd be like an own goal of shutting ourselves out of the supply chain.
Well, let's be more direct and hit it on the head. We're competing globally with China. And there is a lot of concern. Some people though write off that concern. Here's Rand Corporation recently suggested that China is unlikely to produce major new advances in AI because of US's superiority in empowering private sector innovation. Is that true?
That's not true. I strongly disagree. Strongly disagree. Some of the best open source models in the world have been built by Chinese companies. So that's one indication of their very fast ability to catch up to our technology. And I think one point just on this entire topic that it's very important to make is the urgency of the current moment. We kind of have a triple whammy situation right now, which is that one, the technology is moving faster than it ever has before. I mean, the increase in investment as well as the raw scientific progress in AI is faster than any technology we've seen in recent decades for sure. Then number two, we are in a geopolitical environment and geopolitical atmosphere where there's continually increasing levels of conflict. We're just seeing, you know, over the past few years, the amount of global conflict has increased dramatically, and it's not clear if, how, you know, what are the off-ramps for this conflict to decrease. You know, it's not looking, it doesn't make me feel great. And then the third whammy is that you have dictatorial leaders, you have President Xi Jinping, you have Putin, who are nearing, you know, in the late stages of their times of rule, in which case they're going to be more aggressive, more risk-seeking, and make bolder moves. And so, you know, you look at this powder keg of ingredients, and we're just in a moment where we have to act really quickly. And I'd like to make just one point. I think it's really important at this event. There's been lots of talk of how China can do fast following and China copies. In AI, it's actually different. China has great inventors and great researchers. In response to things like the export controls, it's doing really fantastic work on distributed training to get around that, on all kinds of low-level things to make training more efficient. And it would be a chronically stupid thing to underestimate their capacity for inventiveness here. And I think it's important we keep that in mind, that we're not dealing with someone that's not creative. We're dealing with a competitor that's going to be just as creative as us and is even more motivated.
So here they're putting brakes on. One might argue the United States talking about putting parameters. You mentioned very rightfully that from Europe to some of our Asian allies are all putting these kind of lanes in which this can operate. China doesn't have those rules. Is this sort of creating a competitive advantage for them or maybe a race to the bottom when it comes to human rights? I'm wondering if this is something we should really be concerned with, that somehow we're advantaging them.
