China does care about AI safety and has at times slowed down its AI companies in the name of safety, so the idea that 'China doesn't care and China will never slow down' is a misconception born of ignorance.

3:09recent times as the situation arguably has just gotten a lot more real real quick especially with things like the recent openf face incident where it's starting to become undeniable that we have some real AI safety problems on our hands but still you do hear from time to time and and used to hear it I think more that we could never possibly slow down our AI race we could never regulate

3:35We couldn't impose any any duties or or obligations on the frontier companies because why? China doesn't care about AI safety. China will never slow down. I used to call this the but China end point of so many AI safety and regulatory discussions. And I think if nothing else, I hope that this episode serves to really disabuse people of that misconception. I think it should become clear by the end of everything that I'm

4:03about to take you through that China does care about AI safety. Not it's not the only thing that they care about certainly, but they do care. China has at times slowed down their AI companies in the name of safety. Not necessarily existential safety, but safety as they understand it, domains that they care about. And so I think that coming out of this we should have clarity at least on

4:30that basic point right that there is a there there that people in China do really care about these things and that the Chinese government is willing to take action when it deems it necessary. So that doesn't get us all the way through to an international treaty obviously and that's going to be the subject of the third episode an analysis of the USChina relationship obviously through the lens of AI issues and what

4:52we might ought to try to do about bringing the relationship into a more productive state than it is today. Today we're really just going to focus on what is going on in China with respect to AI safety. But I think that this foundation is really critical and hopefully this will become an artifact that people can share with those who if they're open-minded enough to listen to something but have the misconception

5:13that China doesn't care or China will never slow down or whatever. We'll be handing the race to China if we do anything other than just race full speed ahead into recursive self-improvement. I think that really in plain terms does come from a position of ignorance and hopefully we can we can eliminate at least a portion of that over the course of this episode. Okay, to start off with I wanted to just

5:39do a real quick factual rundown of like where the two ecosystems are today when it comes to the actual safeguards that they have in place on their frontier models. And I think this is important just because it is grounding and I am generally someone who comes off as a China dove and quite consiliatory and tries to find the positive in things in general, not just in China. And so

6:04people might accuse me of burying the lead or shying away from contradictory evidence. So I figured I would just lead with this upfront. I think it is fair to say that as of now, Chinese AI companies and models do not have as strong of safeguards protecting the public against the potential for misuse of the models as the American companies do have. So that I think is important to just state