AI Could Be Dangerous, So It’s Best to Give Total Control of It to the Government or the Tech Lords

Right. So, if you can buy into that you can probably also buy this: There are terrorists in the world so the government should spy on everybody.

Anyway, that’s the narrative that Eric Schmidt is putting out. The idea is that China is developing their AI using open source—and Schmidt admits that US companies have benefited from that—and that means that the next Osama bin Laden could use AI. So we can’t let the dangerous Chinese open source model win. We need the tech lords to totally control AI, keep it super expensive, and then we’ll be safe and happy.

Dr. Eric Schmidt: The Future of Technology at 300

Chapter 3: The U.S. vs. China AI Race & DeepSeek

Schmidt: A week ago, China released Deepseek V4. When I was working on the National Security Commission for AI, we worked really hard with Trump 1.0 and Biden to implement hardware controls for chips. We were very successful, collectively, all of us, to limit hardware access to China [= limiting China’s access to hardware]. I was strongly in favor of this policy, as were many people. It looks like the policy has worked, but it’s largely beginning to not work. The Chinese are clever. They’re smart. They have now built systems that are within striking range of the top models in America, but with much, much less powerful hardware. The technical summary is that they use a chip called the Ascend chip. It uses a slower process and they’ve invented new, softer [sic? software?] ways to get around the various latency and architectural problems.

What I like about this is that we have real competitors. What I don’t like about it is, China is very focused on broad diffusion of this technology globally and it’s all open source. Which means it’s largely uncontrolled–and not controlled in any way by us. So I think a fair statement is a year ago I said I thought that they were one to two years behind. It looks like they’ve caught up enough that the most recent analysis is China’s within six months which is a nanosecond right in our world. So it gives you a sense of how committed China is to the AI leadership position, and they’re not going to stop. it makes you feel any better. In order to do this, you have to have a whole country of engineers, scientists, nerds, money, hardware, and so forth. There are not going to be many countries that can do this on their own. China’s clearly one. America’s another one–with our allies, of course. Maybe there’ll be a third or fourth.

Another way to frame this narrative is that the tech lords backed Trump in 2024 with the idea that he would shake down the world—”our allies, of course”—to fund this project. Last I heard, which was earlier today, Trump is still touting $19T in investment money flowing into “the greatest economy in the history of the world”. Call it The Trump Economy. I assume—and I think you should, too—that the lion’s share of this money will flow to the AI companies. That’s if the investment money ever actually flows in, which I personally don’t believe.

Here’s Schmidt explaining why he’d really like to follow the Chinese open source model but, well, he just cares so much for his fellow man. And, hey, that’s the consensus of everyone who stands to profit mega-ly from keeping AI proprietary. Don’t be surprised if the topic of war with China comes up in Schmidt’s musings. After all, we’re talking about saving the world from the next Osama bin Laden:

Transcript of The AI Revolution Is Underhyped: Eric Schmidt

ERIC SCHMIDT: This is one of the wickedest, or we call them wicked hard problems. Our industry, our science, everything about the world that we have built is based on academic research, open source, so forth. Much of Google’s technology was based on open source. Some of Google’s technology is open source, some of it is proprietary, perfectly legitimate. What happens when there’s an open source model that is really dangerous and it gets into the hands of the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? And we know there are more than one. Unfortunately, we don’t know.

The consensus in the industry right now is the open source models are not quite at the point of national or global danger. But you can see a pattern where they might get there. So a lot will now depend upon the key decisions made in the US and China and in the companies in both places. The reason I focus on the US and China is they’re the only two countries where people are crazy enough to spend the billions and billions of dollars are required to build this new vision. Europe, which would love to do it, doesn’t have the capital structure to do it. Most of the other countries, not even India, has the capital structure to do it all they wish to. Arabs don’t have the capital structure to do it, although they’re working on it.

So this fight, this battle will be the defining battle. I’m worried about this fight. Dr. Kissinger talked about the likely path to war with China was by accident and he was a student of World War I. Of course, World War I started with a small event and it escalated over that summer I think 1914. And it was this horrific conflagration. You can imagine a series of steps along the lines of what I’m talking about that could lead us to a horrific global outcome. That’s why we have to be paying attention.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the Israel Lobby. Good thing there’s no Tech Lord Lobby to overlap with that other lobby.

https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/ai-could-be-dangerous-so-its-best