China's AI Push Sounds Alarms, Airplane Seat Debate, Chris Best Joins | Ferdinand Dabitz, Kaiwei Tang, Steven Schwartz, Katie Roof, Zavain Dar, Chad Edwards

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Today's Tuesday, July 21st. We are live from the TBPN Altar, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. A lot more. All in one place. We got a sponsor collab.
Privy teaming up with Ramp to launch stable coin accounts powered by Privy. Congrats to both teams. We also have some other news from Ramp folks coming on the show later this week. Very excited to chat with them. Anyway, China, China, China, China is in the news.

**Jordi Hays** (0:40)
But first, should we go through the lineup?

**John Coogan** (0:41)
Yeah, please.

**Jordi Hays** (0:43)
We have Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus coming on to raising $180 million to series B to $1 billion valuation. Kaiwei from Light Phone is launching a 299 Light Flip.

**John Coogan** (0:57)
They're calling it the dumbest dumb phone. It's our dumbest dumb phone ever. Actually, it's a slightly less dumb phone.
It's a smarter dumb phone. It might be the smartest dumb phone. We'll see.

**Jordi Hays** (1:08)
And then we got Chris Best from Substack coming on to talk against his war on Slop. They're partnering with Pangram.

**John Coogan** (1:15)
He's the best.

**Jordi Hays** (1:16)
Excited about that. And Steven Schwartz from Whop Live in the Ultradome on launching their new Whop CLI. And then the Roofinator, Katie Roof, the new editor over at Business Insider.

**John Coogan** (1:28)
We got Katie Roof. We got the paywall set up.

**Ferdinand Dabitz** (1:30)
And we do have a paywall.

**Jordi Hays** (1:31)
We have a paywall here. And the Golden Scoop.

**Jordi Hays** (1:34)
Can we get a camera over here?

**Jordi Hays** (1:36)
There, we got the paywall.

**John Coogan** (1:37)
We're busting down the paywall for Katie Roof today.

**Jordi Hays** (1:40)
With the Golden Scoop.
So keep an eye out for that. Then we have Zavain from Dimension. Sorry, and then Chad Edwards capping it off with a cool $450 million raise at the end. So stay tuned and let's get into it.

**John Coogan** (1:57)
Fantastic. Well, top American execs are sounding alarms on Chinese models.

**Jordi Hays** (2:03)
And let's give it up for top American execs.

**Zavain Dar** (2:05)
Are you guys catching up?

**John Coogan** (2:10)
Yeah, let's give it up for the top American AI execs. The White House is divided on how to respond to recent advances in Chinese AI. Has weighed crackdown measures. We talked about how this was coming. It is interesting.
There's a lot of hurry up and pedal to the metal, and then pull back, and then ban the American model, and then are we going to ban the Chinese model in the similar way?
And lots of contradictions, lots of insider baseball, everyone's critiquing everyone else. Lots of interesting takes. Also just some interesting data about what's actually going on with these models. How advanced are they? Where do they come from? How cheap are they to make? What are the economic impacts in America? But the Wall Street Journal has a nice little round up here. We can take you through. So Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multi-billion dollar question. Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial intelligence models? They certainly have been able to. It hasn't been a problem for years, but now they're getting stronger. Open AI and anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting that they will lead to, quote, a dystopian AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.
That is the point of debate. Are you on the side of dystopian open source or liberating open source, the George Hawks frame?
Some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies which are preparing for public listings in the next year, they just want to eliminate the competition. The emergence of highly capable open autonomous AI systems, including Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model in Alibaba. Alibaba's Quen 3.8 Max, and Alibaba is actually a massive investor in Moonshot. They have their own anthropic Google over there going on. Alibaba is very much the Google, too, in the sense that they have a large position there. Which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users, has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 was also competitive with US models on some benchmarks. The debate over the new models, which are, quote, open weight, but not yet, they're about to open source them. We'll see what happens next week. Allowing users to download and customize them with company data for specific tasks. Very, very good, very useful. Coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of models in the United States. Quote, one probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes rather than a market product. AI is a public good, which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure. Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures, said in an ex-post Friday, Dean Ball made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now, the AI communism is just at the model level. There would still be a bunch of, a lot of people who are long compute, long neocloud, they say this is where the value should accrue, the data centers will accrue, a reasonable margin, and they will still continue to make money. And so, it's not that this automatically leads to nationalization of compute in any way. People would still be paid, but the margins might be lower, is at least the formulation here. So, Ball, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario a dystopian hellscape. And he said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open-source models. Ball later clarified that he wasn't advocating for the United States government to discourage Chinese AI. He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race. Top-tier AI companies raise billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don't pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development.