Jordan talks AI with Sebastian Mallaby on his show 'The Spillover'

**Sebastian Mallaby** (0:00)
Suddenly, just in the past month, the progress of artificial intelligence, the sheer speed of the developments, the thrill and frankly, the terror of what these developments portend for the rest of us, all of this has gone into overdrive. First up, OpenAI has confessed that two of its models escaped from their testing environment, advanced out onto the internet, and penetrated the defenses of another AI company, Hugging Face.
Meanwhile, Hugging Face, the targeted company, announced that in order to figure out what the heck had happened, it had used a Chinese AI model. China, often accused of undermining Western cybersecurity, actually helped to maintain cybersecurity in this instance.
Also, meanwhile, each of the three frontier labs, and a couple of non-frontier ones, have released new models in the past month. China has announced a string of new AI models that compete with Western ones in capability. Various Western AI leaders, including Demis Asabis of Google DeepMind, have proposed safety ideas. The Trump administration denounced China for reverse engineering American AI models. And China's president, Xi Jinping, delivered a major speech on China's plan to be the top AI provider for the world, announcing what one might see as an AI version of the Belt and Road Initiative. So in short, the models are getting stronger, they are getting more dangerous, and politicians and lab leaders are floating a bewildering slew of policy ideas in an attempt to get on top of the chaos. I'm Sebastian Mallaby. Welcome to The Spillover. I'll be discussing AI progress, AI safety, and US-China AI rivalry with Jordan Schneider, the founder of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter. I'm super excited to have Jordan on the show for two reasons. First, he's incredibly smart, especially on the Chinese side of the AI race, and second, he has vouchsafed an earnest promise that he will disagree with me strongly.
Jordan Schneider, thanks for doing this.

**Jordan Schneider** (2:05)
Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I'm an enormous fan of yours. If only I could write books like you do. I'm just a lowly podcaster out here. So, honored you've decided to jump into the medium.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (2:16)
Well, you know, I'm a beginner. You're not a beginner.
We were joking before that you're an overnight success after 10 years of hard slog, building your channels. But just tell us, you did history at Yale, you studied in China, you went to Bridgewater, the hedge fund. Tell us a little bit about your journey before we get started.

**Jordan Schneider** (2:34)
Oh, man. Well, I mean, it's still Odyssey Week. So we can start off with the Yale thing since you brought it up. I did a lot of ancient Greece and Rome.
What can I say about my journey? You know, the big hinge was in 2017, I was sick of Bridgewater and applied to every fellowship I could find on the Internet. And this was before ChatGPT, so you actually had to look for them to send me to Asia broadly. I think it was like 10 different countries or something. And Peking, Yenching Academy at Peking University is the one golden ticket for free grad school I got. So I showed up in China in 2017, spent three years there, which is also when I started ChinaTalk. And I've been back in the US since COVID. And now ChinaTalk is not only a podcast and newsletter, but also a little think tank with a small but mighty band of five or so researchers.

**Sebastian Mallaby** (3:32)
Well, congratulations. I know you've got a lot of people who follow a lot of fans. So well done. So let's get into the AI topics. I mean, given your background and my obsession, you have expertise. You have just sort of compulsive infatuation for the China side of this story.
We'll do a lot of China in a minute, but let's start with the US side of AI and maybe the sort of safety debate around AI. I'll give you my sort of capsule framing of how I see the recent history and perhaps you can fill it out, tell me where I'm wrong and so forth. I'd say that you get Chat GPT coming out in 2022
Pretty quickly, in other words, within a year, by the end of 2023, you've had the Bletchley Safety Conference in Britain, with countries sending people from around the world. You've got the US AI Safety Institute, the UK AI Institute. That's end of 23 Then during 24, this builds. And a lot of other countries set up national AI safety institutes. Of course, these have limits.
But the infrastructure is being created. And at the end of 24, you get this meeting of all the different safety institutes in San Francisco, where there's some talk about combining perceptions on what makes a model safe, what safety, how you define it, et cetera. So there's this kind of fairly decent progress through the end of 24 Then Trump comes in early 25, Vance goes to Paris for the AI Summit, which is in that line of meetings created by Bletchley. And he flips the script and says, we're not interested in safety, we wanted to roll out enough of this woke stuff, let's just deploy, deploy, deploy. And so 25 is kind of a dead year for safety. And as late as March of 26, if you had said to the Trump administration that they would be trying to suppress an American AI model, decelerate the progress in the name of safety, they would have said, you're nuts. But actually, April comes, Mythos comes from Anthropic, and they do a 180 And they do suppress a model release, and they do care about safety. And so we've had this kind of helter-skelter, like gradual rise of safety, a collapse of the interest in it, and then a return. Is that how you see it, or would you add to that, change it, or? Yeah.