Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

Nathan: if you were just to go to New York or San Francisco or both and then separately you were to go to Beijing and Shanghai or both and you didn't know anything about the countries or the history and probably would also have to mask the prices because the price differential is definitely significant and just spend a week in in each of these places and then ask which of these countries is the richer country. I think it would be pretty clear to most people. I think you would get honestly an overwhelming majority of people saying that China is the richer country because it does have newer stuff and more integrated lower friction experience that just feels like the future and it's ubiquitous across the at least the major cities that I've been to. But kind of a bottom line, what does it feel to be there litmus test? I think it does feel more modern and in some ways more developed than than life in the United States does, which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment

Nathan: one time I asked what's up with the man group today? Are they still around? Are they still part of China? And there you would get the kind of classic old Sydney Bing experience where the model itself would answer the question and you'd see kind of the chain of thought. You might even see the beginning of an answer and then sometimes like with this Manchu question because again you're touching on something fairly sensitive in the Chinese political context of ethnic minorities. the answer is in the process of unrolling in front of you and then you would get this pullback. You'd see the answer disappear and then you'd see, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. Ask a different question or whatever. And again, this wasn't something that I think they really even necessarily meant to censor. And not all of the apps censored it the same way. I was able to get some answers from some apps that I wasn't able to get from other apps. it goes to show that in many ways the the Chinese ecosystem has a lot of the same things going on that we do where people are trying to make sure that they're on the right side of regulators on the right side of history acting responsibly as they understand it and at times that can go a little too far and it can interfere with the user experience but this is also consistent with the reporting that I've seen in many places that the Chinese models themselves are not very censored it's the actual deployed application experiences that usually contain the censorship

Nathan: In China it's like pretty tight. The expectation is that you are being watched that you don't have digital privacy and the results is that crime is low. the potential for abuse I think is like pretty high but from what I saw as of now it seems to be working. I think there is definitely you know one way to to model what is happening there in terms of risk is that they may be putting a lot of risk into the future. One question that I asked people multiple times is like what happens when President Xi retires or what would happen if he were to suddenly die and basically as of now nobody has any idea. there's no successor that anybody can identify. There could be a real power struggle. Obviously, the the apparatus that they've created and the ability to surveil people if there was a power struggle or if there was disscent or whatever, the potential for abuse could be like extremely high. I think it's it's already you don't step out of line, right? So, as of now, things are under control and people are playing by the rules. There's not too many people that are stepping out and so there's not too much need to to abuse. It's all under control. But this does, I think, create significant risk for the future if things were to go haywire.

Nathan: it's illegal to use a VPN but everybody does it. And not only does everybody do it now everybody the people that I met with all do it right. They and you might have noticed of course there's a lot of Chinese people on Twitter a lot in the AI space like how are all these Chinese AI researchers at Chinese companies on Twitter if Twitter is blocked by the great firewall. The answer is they use VPNs even though it's technically illegal it's accepted to the point of being commonplace and companies even provide them in some cases. They have a company VPN that they can use that is official. It's officially provided by the company to them. So, it's not just random one-off people downloading apps and circumventing the rules. It's like the company is giving you a VPN and this is a fairly well-known company. So, what's up with that? People are not worried about getting busted for their VPNs. That was like they're very comfortable with it, open with it. Never heard of anybody getting into trouble. Somebody said it would be like getting struck by lightning.