US v China... The AI race

Justin Webb (0:00)

America, it is fair to say, is freaking out about AI. It's suddenly become the hottest of political topics. Silicon Valley tech bosses are calling for the development of AI., their own development of it, to be slowed down. Everyone seems to be worried. Everyone except one person, Donald Trump, who's not worried at all. He dismisses worries about AI as what he calls a sick conspiracy. Whoever wins AI wins, he says. Is he right?

And what happens if the US does fall behind China, as he warns that it might? Welcome to Americast.

SPEAKER_3 (0:37)

Americast from BBC News.

SPEAKER_4 (0:39)

Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league.

SPEAKER_5 (0:45)

The tide is coming. And this time we intend to win it all.

SPEAKER_6 (0:51)

See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

Steve Bannon (1:03)

When I'm not around, you're going to be broke. There's not going to be anybody to report on.

SPEAKER_3 (1:08)

Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

Justin Webb (1:14)

Hello, it's Justin in the Worldwide Headquarters of Americast in London, England.

Marianna Spring (1:18)

And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the Worldwide Headquarters.

Anthony Zurcher (1:21)

And it's Anthony holding down the fort here in Washington, DC, which is the American Headquarters of Americast.

Justin Webb (1:27)

And we're going to be joined later on by a fantastic guest. Chris McGuire is going to join us, who is a former senior advisor at the State Department for Donald Trump in both his first and his second terms. But really interestingly, he also served under President Biden, and he also has links with China as a US-China technology expert now at the Council of Foreign Relations. In other words, he is the ideal guest to talk about our subject today, which is artificial intelligence and specifically this suddenly looming political issue about what to do about it, basically, what to do about making it safe, what to do about controlling it, if controlling it is what we want to do, but also what the threat properly is assessed to be to all of us, whether we're in the World Wide Headquarters of Americast in England or in Washington, DC or anywhere in the world, because it is that kind of thing that we're talking about. And people are talking about it, aren't they, Anthony, in kind of worried terms, except one person who doesn't seem worried at all.

Anthony Zurcher (2:34)

Yeah, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump seems to be an AI evangelist.

He took to Truth Social earlier this week after about a week of all of these concerns bubbling around and spilling over into American politics, concerns being raised by AI executives themselves, politicians, policymakers. Well, Donald Trump, on Truth Social, said, yeah, that's all bunk. And he said that AI was actually going to be a great thing, maybe even bigger than diamonds or oil or even the internet. He said, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the USA has that in spades. That's Donald Trump, I guess, talking about. I'm definitely talking about himself there. He went on to say that there is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers. And the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. So, you know, Trump is, one, centralizing control into his own hands, which he does all the time, talking about how he's the one who should control this and we should trust his judgment. But also framing this, Justin and Marianna, as a competition with China, the idea of this is an arms race and if you don't win it, you're going to lose and if you lose and you're going to be in serious trouble.

Marianna Spring (3:49)

I guess what has felt different, aside from how vocal he's been, has been the comments been made by people within the industry who are in charge at the companies. And a lot of the big tech bosses, AI bosses have been talking about this concept of a slow down and should we sort of put the brakes on a bit, sometimes feels a bit ironic given that they are sort of the people in charge of the brakes, but nonetheless, here they are talking about their concerns. You've got Dario Amadei of Anthropix, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of XAI.

Dario Amodei (4:21)

It's a warning sign. It's a warning sign that we need to slow down. We need to make this technology carefully and we need to make sure that our safeguards, our ability to understand it, our ability to control it keeps up with the pace at which the technology is happening. I think the world is right to be afraid of this. So we have these two big challenges. We have the potential of a loss of control accident or some other serious thing that could go wrong. We have the potential of way too much power concentration and people fear that those developing AI could exert their world view.