US vs. China: Why Trust Will Win the AI Race | GPT-5.2 & Anthropic IPO w/ Emad Mostaque, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #214

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

China is accelerating its push to become independent of NVIDIA, with Cambricon planning to triple output to a half a million accelerators in 2026

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:11)

I fully expect, as I mentioned on the pod in the past, that we're just going to see.

Emad Mostaque (0:17)

Having an open-source model that you can test as you're developing it, really closes the feedback loop a lot more aggressively here. And most of the Chinese models are optimizing around this very sparse MOE-type structure with DeepSeq and similar archers with Mio on kind of acceleration. So you're getting towards one architecture that they can just engineer and output industrially. And who's the best industrial manufacturer?

Salim Ismail (0:41)

The challenge with China is people don't trust it.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:44)

I think we're going to see a Cambrian explosion, no pun intended, of architectures coming out of China, now that China has been effectively decoupled from the US tech stack.

Peter Diamandis (0:55)

So stepping up a level, is this good for humanity or not?

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:58)

I think the big question is, what does the finish line look like?

Peter Diamandis (1:03)

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, I'll get us going in a second, but what a fun day yesterday. We were all in Seattle. Salim, we missed you. You were in Brazil. Good morning. You arrived from Brazil at 6 a.m. this morning?

Salim Ismail (1:21)

Yes, and got an hour and a half of sleep in, so I'm foggy as F.

Peter Diamandis (1:26)

All right. Well, hey, that means we all have a shot at you.

Dave Blundin (1:30)

I'm just back from Rome and Emad's in London. Let's kick off with the covering the world we've got going here.

Peter Diamandis (1:36)

Yeah, fantastic.

Dave Blundin (1:37)

And Alex is just back from San Diego.

Peter Diamandis (1:40)

Yeah, and God knows.

Emad Mostaque (1:41)

Yeah, I just got back from Vietnam and Japan yesterday.

Peter Diamandis (1:45)

Look at us. Globetrotting, gentlemen. It's like, you know, no time for sleep. It really is. I mean, I feel like we're going 24-7. I don't know about you guys, but...

Salim Ismail (1:55)

Well, look, if you want to transform the world, you have to go out into the world, right? And I think that's what we're all doing.

Dave Blundin (2:01)

I think that's a good opener, too, because, Peter, you just got back late last night from Seattle, and that'll come out in a couple of days.

Peter Diamandis (2:06)

Yeah.

Dave Blundin (2:07)

If we just mention the whole world that we've covered in the last week, that's pretty good.

Peter Diamandis (2:10)

Globetrotting. But a lot going on. Shall we jump in?

Dave Blundin (2:17)

Yeah.

Peter Diamandis (2:17)

Is that enthusiastic? Yes, everybody. Yeah.

Dave Blundin (2:20)

Let's go.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (2:21)

Make it happen. Engage.

Salim Ismail (2:23)

I'm trying to find my neocortex.

Peter Diamandis (2:26)

It's there someplace. Don't worry about it. It'll show up. All right, everybody. Welcome to Moonshots. This is the conversation that's changing the world. Hopefully, we can help you get ready for the future. And this is the news that if you're not watching the Crisis News Network and you have time to watch Moonshots, we hope we'll deliver to you sort of what's going on, what's happened last week in AI robotics, data centers, energy. It's a lot. Here with all of my incredible Moonshot mates, we have a, let's see, a five-fold increase in capabilities here today because not only do we have AWG, we have Emad as well, Salim, DB2. It's going to be amazing. All right. Going to jump into our first stories. We're going to start with where AWG was last week. NeurIPS 2025 So Alex, this is you.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (3:20)

Yeah. NeurIPS this year was a bonanza. I've called it in past a Woodstock for AI, a few observations. It had more than 29,000 registrants this year, which is almost 50 percent increase over last year. It was enormous. The Alibaba, the Chinese lab, had 146 papers accepted including Best Paper Award. Anecdotally, the language that I heard the most in the hallways was Mandarin. There was a sense that the Frontier Labs have all the resources. The academic labs do not. And the Frontier Labs were at NeurIPS mostly to recruit academics. American, again, this is sort of a sense of the conference, if you will.

The Frontier Labs and the Frontier research coming out of the labs has largely gone dark. So what was being shown on the research end was largely coming from academic resources or academically resourced labs that are lacking the resources. There was, on the sidelines, even though Frontier Labs were there to recruit, the publications and the oral presentations at this point largely not coming from Frontier Labs except for Chinese Frontier Labs, which is also...