Chinese AI companies do not have as strong safeguards against misuse as American ones, but the American lead is carried almost entirely by OpenAI and Anthropic; without those two, the safety differential between the US and Chinese ecosystems would largely disappear.

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

6:34very plainly and be quite direct about. It's the difference is more than we might like to admit. The difference I think really is driven by two companies in the United States. I just did an episode not long ago with Adam believe which talked a lot about jailbreaks and robustness to jailbreaks and all that kind of stuff. And what we saw in that episode was Open AI and Anthropic, which

7:00I'm maybe going to start calling Openthropic as they become the the duopoly that is leading both in capabilities and fortunately happily also in terms of their safety measures. Those two companies are really doing a lot to bring up the American average. If you were to subtract those two companies from the mix and you were to look at the rest of the American companies and how they compare to the Chinese companies,

7:27honestly, a lot of the safety differential that gets reported would disappear and I think the story would look a lot more muddled. I do think the US companies would still have a bit of an edge, but it would be a pretty slim edge and we it certainly would not give the American ecosystem some sort of obvious moral high ground from which to proclaim that the Chinese are not doing

7:48a good job. So that I think is again really important to understand. There are in each country depending on where you want to draw the line on frontier. If you draw a permissive line on what it means to be a a frontier model maker, there's something like 10 to 12 in each country. And again, that is quite permissive, right? That's most close watchers of the American AI ecosystem

8:12would not count 12 companies as being at the true frontier. But if kind of say near frontier, there's like 10 to 12 in each country and it really is the top two companies in the US that are doing a lot of work of bringing up the average, especially the weighted average in terms of what it is that people actually use on an ongoing day-to-day basis in their

8:32lives. And Google with Gemini is like not doing as much or as well to implement safeguards as OpenAI and Enthropic are, but they're also like ahead of the pack at least a little bit. And again, kind of would bring up the average or if we didn't have OpenAI and Enthropic, we might try to hold Gemini up as a standard. It wouldn't be a standard that's like so much better than