𝗔𝗜 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗯𝗮𝘁𝗲! My conversation with China’s Victor Gao plus a hot take on new essay by Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei

[Sorry to swamp your mailboxes today, but there is a lot of important AI stuff happening.]

Victor Gao is a lawyer and former translator for Deng Xiaoping. We had a panel yesterday on UK’s Channel 4. I wish we had more time (and that I had had more time to respond), but we covered a lot of ground: censorship, the nature of intelligence, tariffs and more.

Fascinating preview of how things may start to play out. And one of the first East-West conversations I have seen, post DeepSeek.

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Meanwhile, on related topics, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, just posted a long essay also on China, DeepSeek etc.

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My hot take on his essay:

• DeepSeek definitely has him rattled. The piece is a long and articulate, but also quite defensive.

• To his credit, however, it is vastly more substantive than Altman's reply.

• Some of his points are valid, e.g. Amodei is correct that DeepSeek didn't do anything in terms of cost reductions that wouldn't have happened here before too long, anyway. (Still embarrassing to the US giants though that a leaner, hungrier startup abroad got there first.)

• That said, some of Amodei's individual arguments are much weaker than he lets on. For example he writes authoritatively (chatbot-style!) that "Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027." We don't actual KNOW this; we humans are flexible, general, resourceful thinkers but it is not at all clear that we actually need the equivalent of millions of chips to achieve what we do. (And we humans only need about 20 watts, not gigawatts).

• The real lesson of DeepSeek is that we can still make vast improvements in efficency. When all is said and done, with the right software, we might be able to build intelligence with hundreds or even dozens of GPUs. I seriously doubt that the best algorithm will require millions of high-end GPUs.

• 2026-2027 are made up dates. 𝗜 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗯𝘆 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼 𝗮 $𝟭𝟬𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗯𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 '𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀' 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳 (per criteria I laid out previously with @milesbrundage).

• Amodei's takeaway is to urge the U.S. to double down on export controls that would help his company. But the truth is that so far those controls have not been terribly successful; and may even have had paradoxical effects. China just largely caught up despite existing controls, and indeed were perhaps forced harder towards important efficiency gains precisely because necessity is the mother of invention.

My takeaway is different: the LLM race is an enormously expensive effort to win a race that can no longer be won. The country that does its best to develop a new tech that is more reliable and more difficult to replicate will win.

We should be thinking about how to sponsor innovation, and recognize that the best funded companies aren't always the most innovative. Going all in on them is a mistake.

Amodei's biggest advantage is having more chips, and I understand him wanting to prosecute that advantage, but what we really need are better ideas, and the oxygen for innovative startups to breathe.

Gary Marcus is the author of six books on natural and artificial intelligence, and founder of two AI startups, currently pondering the launch of a third.