Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This is gonna be part two of the Nathan Goes to China series, and we're calling it AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics. Part one, if you haven't heard that, is up on the feed. It's been up for a few days. And in that part one of the series, I really just laid out the tech setup for going to China, what you would need to do if you wanna get a cell phone ready, the apps that you need to download. I also shared some of my experience using Chinese AIs on the ground there, and then just shared a bunch of observations based on my two weeks in China and many conversations I had. I appreciate the kind comments that I've got in response to that one, including at least one from a listener in China, which was probably the one that mattered to me the most. I think if you've been to China in the last few years, you can probably skip that one. But if you're interested in this, you might also be interested in that, though I do think they should be pretty self-contained. So part one is a little bit closer to a travel log and tech review. And this episode is going to be really focused on the Chinese AI safety ecosystem and trying to just describe it and as much as possible understand it on its own terms. As we saw last time, there are a lot of similarities. Just as there are major similarities between American Big Tech and Chinese Big Tech, there are a lot of similarities between American AI safety and Chinese AI safety communities and the work that they're producing. But there are also some differences and I think it will definitely be helpful if we have a better understanding of those. Before I really get into it, just a couple of quick disclaimers again. I will be again following a Chatham House rule for this episode. Not because I was asked to do that, but just because I want to keep things simple for myself and make sure that I'm protecting everyone that I talk to from being misrepresented by me and put in an uncomfortable position. So I won't be naming any names or attributing things to the organizations or institutions that people are affiliated with. The one exception to that for this particular episode will be when I'm citing published papers or reports, then those, I can give you the name because those are out there in the public domain. There are some good sources that I'll mention and we can link to in our notes of this episode for anybody who wants to go deeper, which of course is always recommended.
The other point of order or clarification, just in case anyone is wondering, I have no financial conflicts on this matter. I took this trip paying my own way, flights and hotels, all that stuff. The biggest thing that I did except from some of my gracious hosts were a number of meals, probably half a dozen meals over the course of the two weeks. And I think if you have listened to me this far, you can probably feel pretty confident as I do that accepting those meals has not overly colored my take on what is going on in the Chinese AI safety community.
So with that, let's get into it. I think so often, and this has faded, I think, in recent times as the situation arguably has just gotten a lot more real quick, especially with things like the recent open face incident where it's starting to become undeniable that we have some real AI safety problems on our hands. But still, you do hear from time to time, and you used to hear it, I think, more, that we could never possibly slow down our AI race, we could never regulate, we couldn't impose any duties or obligations on the frontier companies. Because why? China doesn't care about AI safety, China will never slow down. I used to call this the but-China endpoint of so many AI safety and regulatory discussions.
I think if nothing else, I hope that this episode serves to really disabuse people of that misconception. I think it should become clear by the end of everything that I'm about to take you through, that China does care about AI safety. It's not the only thing that they care about, certainly, but they do care. China has, at times, slowed down their AI companies in the name of safety, not necessarily existential safety, but safety as they understand it, domains that they care about. I think that coming out of this, we should have clarity, at least on that basic point, that there is a there there, that people in China do really care about these things, and that the Chinese government is willing to take action when it deems it necessary. So that doesn't get us all the way through to an international treaty, obviously. And that's going to be the subject of the third episode, an analysis of the US-China relationship, obviously through the lens of AI issues, and what we might ought to try to do about bringing the relationship into a more productive state than it is today. Today, we're really just going to focus on what is going on in China with respect to AI safety. But I think that this foundation is really critical, and hopefully, this will become an artifact that people can share with those who, if they're open-minded enough to listen to something, but have the misconception that China doesn't care, China will never slow down, or whatever, we'll be handing the race to China if we do anything other than just race full speed ahead into recursive self-improvement. I think that really, in plain terms, does come from a position of ignorance, and hopefully, we can eliminate at least a portion of that over the course of this episode.