AI: Boom or Doom? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

**Anthony Vinci** (0:00)
Look, I'd rather live in the United States, where we have control over the technology and information that affects Americans.
And when you have, that used to be fine for basically a century, because America made the best technology and most of the technology. Now we're entering a world where China makes a lot of technology, and in some cases may make better technology, but they don't want to abide by our use, our constitution, our rules around this. So I would just say, fine, like you can do whatever you want in your country, but we are not going to use your technology then.

**David Parke** (0:45)
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Eyes On Geopolitics. I'm here today with Jonathan Hackett, and our guest is Anthony Vinci. He's the author of the Fourth Intelligence Revolution, the Future of Espionage and the Battle of Save America.
He's got a pretty amazing resume. He previously served as the first CTO and Associate Director of Capabilities at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Following earlier work as an Intelligence Officer in Iraq, Africa and Asia, you could actually watch an episode with Anthony on The Team House that we did probably a good six months ago now. Great episode, check that out. I'll put a link in the description, you can check it out. I'll also put a link in the description for his book.
He is now the co-founder and CEO of Vico, an AI company focused on decision making and finance and national security, and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. And to boot, he holds his PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. So I try to get somebody here that's on the level of smart as Jonathan Hackett is, because Jonathan's got a pretty good resume too. And I think I did a pretty good job with you, Anthony. So thanks for joining us today.

**Anthony Vinci** (1:56)
Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.

**David Parke** (1:59)
I want this whole talk to be about what's going on with AI. Me and Jonathan have been talking about this for like a couple months, like putting together a show and trying to find a guest that can like, you know, give us the lay of the land of what's going on. And I've joked with Jonathan, I think I joked with you on an email too, about saying like, this literally could be a three hour conversation, because it's like, there's just so many rabbit holes we can go down.
Full disclosure, I am more on the bearish side of AI, particularly when it comes to like, just all the capex that's going on and like, you know, where is it really going, how expensive the compute is compared to like how, you know, enterprises are using them. Like, it doesn't really look like there's a big, at least for the frontier models, it doesn't look like there's a big profit center right now. But anyway, let's just get into it. Oh, I mean, I don't know how you guys want to play it. Jonathan, please like, let's just, you know, improv this basically. Do we want to explain like, what the frontier models mean? Like, should we go more of a basic route for like, the layman? I'm a layman obviously too, but I just read this insensibly.

**Jonathan Hackett** (3:08)
Well, I think it's helpful to have like a more general question of, why should people care about the crossover question of China and AI?
Because there's the China national security threat that's existed for a long time, especially international security strategy all the way back to 1987 when the first one came out. Now AI has entered the chat and the question for the American listener is, why should they care about that?

**David Parke** (3:31)
Yeah, I love it. Let's go because we can go in any direction here. So, Anthony, what are you tracking basically right now with AI? I mean, I know I sent you over that Financial Times article, and that does seem like the big scary.
Yeah.

**Anthony Vinci** (3:45)
Well, look, China AI, I think that's the question. That's like the generational level question because I think about it like this.
AI is not like software. AI does what people do, right? It communicates information to you. It doesn't just show you something, but you interact with it, right? So anything, when you get on Claude, you get on Chat GPT and you ask it a question, it can ask you questions. You can continue to ask it questions. And the thing is that it can persuade you to do things, right? Like it can lean you in a direction. That's different than anything we've had before. Only people were able to do that previously. So that's one thing. The second thing is that AI, that's kind of LLMs like AI you talked to. There's another form of AI that you're using for autonomous vehicles that can drive Waymo cars around or it can fly drones around. That's also super important. There's a third kind of AI that I think is, you were going to see more and more of, and it's kind of what I do in my company at Vico, which is using AI to help run businesses or even to help run the military. It's making strategic choices. It's allowing you to play through lots of decisions. Those three kinds of AI, that's kind of how the world works.