@Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Today, I'm chatting with Dylan Patel, who runs Semianalysis, and Jon, who runs the Asianometry YouTube channel.

**Dylan Patel** (0:07)
Does he have a last name?

**Jon Y** (0:08)
No, I do not. No, I'm just kidding. Jon Y.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:10)
What's your name?

**Jon Y** (0:11)
Jon Y.

**Dylan Patel** (0:12)
Wait, why is it only one letter?

**Jon Y** (0:15)
Because Y is the best letter.

**Dylan Patel** (0:18)
Why is your face covered?

**Jon Y** (0:21)
Why not?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:23)
No, seriously, why is it covered?

**Jon Y** (0:25)
Because I'm afraid of looking myself get older and fatter over the years.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:30)
But seriously, it's like anonymity, right?

**Jon Y** (0:32)
Anonymity.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:33)
Okay. By the way, so you know what Dylan's middle name is?

**Jon Y** (0:36)
Actually, no. He told me.

**Dylan Patel** (0:38)
What's my father's name?

**Jon Y** (0:40)
I'm not going to say it, but I remember.

**Dylan Patel** (0:41)
You could say it. It's fine.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:44)
Sanjay?

**Dylan Patel** (0:45)
Yes. What's his middle name?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:46)
Sanjay? That's right. So I'm Dwarkesh Sanjay Patel. He's Dylan Sanjay Patel. It's literally my white name.

**Dylan Patel** (0:55)
It's unfortunate my parents decided between my older brother and me to give me a white name. I could have been Dwarkesh Sanjay Patel. You know how amazing it would have been if we had the same name? Like Butterfly Effect and all. We probably would have all turned out the same way.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:08)
Maybe it would have been even closer if we would have met each other sooner. Who else would have been Dwarkesh Sanjay Patel in the world? Yeah. All right. First question. If you were Xi Jinping and you're scaling-pilled, what is it that you do?

**Dylan Patel** (1:19)
Don't answer that question, Jon. That's bad for AI safety.

**Jon Y** (1:22)
I would basically be contacting every foreigner. I would be contacting every Chinese national with family back home and saying, I want information. I want to know your recipes. I want to know.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:32)
What kind of like AI lab foreigners or hardware foreigners, honey potting open AI?

**Jon Y** (1:36)
I would basically, this is totally off cycle, but this is off the reservation. But I was doing a video about Yugoslavia's nuclear program. Nuclear weapons program.
Started absolutely nothing. One guy from Paris. And then one guy in Paris, he showed up and he was like, and then he had, who knows what he did. He knows a little bit about making atomic nuclear weapons, but like he was like, okay, well, do I need help? And then the state secret police is like, I will get to everything. And then like, I shouldn't do that. I was getting you everything. And for like a span of four years, they basically, they drew up a list. What do you need? What do you want? What are you going to do? What is it going to be for? And they just, state police just got everything. If I was running a country and I needed catch up on that, that's the sort of thing that I would be doing.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:25)
So, okay, let's talk about the espionage.
So, what is the most valuable piece of, if you could have this blueprint, like this one megabyte of information, do you want it from TSMC? Do you want it from NVIDIA? Do you want it from OpenAI? What is the first thing you would try to steal?

**Dylan Patel** (2:43)
I mean, I guess you have to stack every layer, right? And I think the beautiful thing about AI is because it's growing so freaking fast, every layer is being stressed to some incredible degree. Of course, China has been hacking ASML for over five years, and ASML is kind of like, oh, it's fine, the Dutch government's really pissed off, but it's fine, right? I think they already have those files, right? In my view, it's just a very difficult thing to build, right?
I think the same applies for fab recipes, right? They can poach Taiwanese nationals very like, not that difficult, right? Because TSMC employees do not make absurd amounts of money. You can just poach them and give them a much better life, and they have, right? A lot of SMICS employees are TSMC, Taiwanese nationals, right? A lot of the really good ones, high up ones especially, right? Then you go up like the next layers of the stack, and it's like, I think, yeah, of course, there's tons of model secrets. But then, how many of those model secrets do you not already have, and you just haven't deployed or implemented, organized, right?