The guiding principle of the Chinese AI ecosystem is the '45-degree line': capabilities and safety measures should grow together in tandem, being neither too far ahead of nor pointlessly over-engineered relative to each other.

9:51is a pretty pragmatic bunch of people with pretty pragmatic ideas, pretty grounded, pretty normal seeming people. They're not like the crazy sci-fi people. They don't they're not so influenced by sci-fi tradition. They're really just looking to make things work in a kind of practical one generation to the next sort of way. for the most part. A good source that I could point you to is the director and

10:18chief scientist of the Shanghai AI lab. That's a major institution based in Shanghai. Of course, his name is Xiao Bowen. Again, I apologize to everyone and especially my Chinese listeners for being just terrible with Chinese. joke about that over the last couple days has been that in general I feel pretty young for my age and I'm like pleased with how agile I feel like my mind is but when it

10:43comes to getting Chinese pronunciations right the neuroplasticity is low and I'm struggling so anyway I apologize for that but Xiao Bowen he is the director and chief scientist of the Shanghai AI lab and at the 2024 WIC that's the same Shanghai conference that I just attended did but obviously two years earlier he introduced this concept of the 45 degree line. This speech is available. It's on government websites. You can go find it.

11:13But the idea of the 45°ree line is that capabilities and safety measures should grow together. Right? That's the the 45 is kind of the y equals x slope of one. As your capabilities rise, your safety standards and measures also need to get stronger and stronger. And as long as those two grow in tandem and the safety measures are up to the challenge presented by the capabilities at any

11:39given level, then you're good. And probably these things in this telling kind of naturally should evolve together and both should develop in tandem. The idea is that this is important, right? we don't want to we don't want the capabilities to get far ahead of the safety measures. But I think also implicitly is like there's not really much point and it might be sort of a waste of time or perhaps even

11:58counterproductive to try to get the safety measures to be super robust relative to capabilities that don't exist yet. So the 45°ree line has been at least like one pretty broadly accepted guiding principle I think how the Chinese AI ecosystem at large thinks about AI safety. Now, we can ask, of course, how's it going? And I already kind of spoiled the answer that the American companies are doing better, but

12:24we can dig into that in quite a bit more detail. Concordia AI, which is led by past podcast guest from about a year ago, Brian Se, they maintain a website called AI.net, where they run a bunch of evaluations and plot them. And you can see just a really honestly almost overwhelming amount of detail on all the different models that they've tested on all these different benchmarks. You can really dig

12:51into it in quite a bit of detail. The graph that I found to be the most informative was the one that compares proprietary API models which are mostly American to open weights models which are mostly Chinese and finds that for all the big risk categories that matter the closed source the proprietary API only models are at or maybe a little bit above of that 45°ree line. Of course, we