White House AI Czar Defends Trump Approach to China

Bloomberg

Watch White House AI Czar Defends Trump Approach to China - Bloomberg on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Explain how you view yourself in this debate and what you think is strategically most important

00:05for this country. Well, first of all, I would say that I consider myself to be a China hawk.

00:10I want the U.S. to win this AI race. We understand that China is our main competition globally in

00:18this AI race and we want to do everything we can to win. And President Trump in his AI speech on

00:23July 23rd laid out some of the tent poles of that strategy. We need to be pro-innovation,

00:28we need to be pro-infrastructure and pro-energy, and we need to be pro-export so that the American

00:32technology stack dominates the world. So this is all in the service of the United States winning

00:38this AI race. We understand that it's going to have major economic and national security

00:44ramifications and we're in it to win it. There is a lot of focus on the direct to China part,

00:50but the other way that some look at it is there is a marketplace outside of America and outside

00:55of China, the Middle East being an example. What's your position on that and whether the United

01:00States wants to kind of leave the world open to China to sell its own technology?

01:07Well, there was a view in the previous administration that we shouldn't sell chips to

01:12many countries, including the resource-rich Gulf states. And I think that was a major mistake because

01:17every time you tell a country that they can't buy the American tech stack, what's their reaction

01:23going to be? They're going to turn to China and adopt the Chinese tech stack. I have a very simple

01:28metric for measuring whether we're winning the AI race, which is global market share. If we look

01:34around the world in, say, five years and we see that the American technology stack has, say, 80%

01:39market share, that means that we won. But if we look around the world in five years and we see that

01:44the Chinese technology stack, and I'm talking about Huawei chips and DeepSeq models, for example,

01:49has 80% market share, then obviously we lost. By the way, that's what happened in 5G. We don't

01:54want a repeat of that. So again, the strategy here should be for the U.S. to dominate the world

01:59and have the greatest market share. And I think this is pretty obvious to everyone in Silicon Valley

02:04because we understand that the way to win technology races is to have the biggest ecosystem. If you're

02:10a technology platform, you want to have the most developers using your API. If you're an app store,

02:14you want to have the most apps in your app store. In a similar way, we want as many users

02:19on the American technology stack as possible. And I find it hard to understand why the previous

02:27administration would exclude these rich countries from participating on our tech stack. It certainly

02:33didn't help us in the race with China. If anything, President Trump's policy boxes out China from the

02:40Middle East, whereas the previous administration's policy forced these countries into China's arms.

02:46You've reworked, therefore, the diffusion ideals set by the previous administration. But when you're

02:52allowing only less powerful chips, I mean, I think the president even called them obsolete versions of

02:59NVIDIA's chips into China, does that mean that ship of innovation in China has already sailed? Because

03:03they need to have the most sophisticated and they're going to have to build it themselves.

03:06Well, I think when you're talking about what we export to China, that's obviously going to be a

03:12very complicated question. And there's arguments on both sides. I think there's a pretty strong

03:18argument for not selling China our latest and greatest chips, because that would be too beneficial

03:23for them. However, if you don't sell them anything, then like you're saying, that will accelerate

03:28their desire to be independent of the American stack. And so I do think there is a compelling

03:34argument for selling them a, let's call it deprecated American chip, or it's a less great

03:41American chip. And by the way, this is why the Biden administration approved the H20 in unlimited

03:46quantities for export to China. Now, when President Trump came in, he said that those H20 sales have to

03:53be licensed and they're subject to a 15% surcharge. And nonetheless, all the people who approved the Biden

03:59policy started attacking President Trump. I think this is just a classic case of no one had a problem

04:04with it until President Trump agreed to do it.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended