There is no such thing yet as 'alignment with Chinese characteristics' — nobody in China appears to be working on mapping the durable Confucian tradition onto AI alignment the way the Claude Constitution imagines a model growing into a virtue ethicist, and that is a genuine green-field opportunity.

125:13biggest gap or like difference. I went looking for an analog in the Chinese system and I did not find it. If you have an analog, I would love to hear about it because I did look I asked a number of questions of a number of different people about this topic and never really got much of a response other than like yeah I don't really have anything for you. So the

125:35topic is, is there such a thing as alignment with Chinese characteristics? All if this episode as a whole is AI safety with Chinese characteristics and we've seen differences certainly, but a lot of similarities across all these different aspects of AI safety. What about alignment? Is there such a thing as alignment with Chinese characteristics? I was inspired to ask about this in part because I was using one of the Chinese

126:01AIs at the temple of Confucious in Beijing and just trying to learn a little bit about Confucious. Who was he? What's the deal? When did he live? One of the facts that I was taught by the AIS was that to this day in the region that he comes from his descendants who are now 79 generations hence 79 generations. Isn't that amazing? What the AI told me was that his descendants

126:31still to this day, 79 generations later, still identify as his descendants and perform certain rituals in his honor all this time later. And that got me thinking, boy, if we could project our values through 79 recursively self-improved generations of AIs, we'd be doing really well, right? right? We'd be doing like much better than I think we can reasonably expect to do if we just race into a

126:58recursive self-improvement mediated or generated intelligence explosion. So there's something there with the Confucian tradition that has made values and sort of respect for what came before quite durable 79 generations. So, I was thinking, boy, is there a way that this could translate into a sort of AI constitution or an alignment target? We've got the clawed constitution. Could there be a confusion constitution for AI? Unfortunately, for my enthusiasm on this

127:34topic, nobody seems to be working on that as far as I can tell. I didn't I did not get one pointer. One professor told me when I asked him about this, he said, "It's an interesting idea, but we are probably the generation in all of Chinese history that is the weakest on this traditional philosophy." He said, "You got to remember, we're all engineers. The humanities, that's not where people were going,

128:07right? I mean the Chinese leadership at the political level is all engineers. I believe she himself was a chemical engineer. He said we're all engineers. None of us really studied philosophy. None of us are schooled in the Confucian tradition in the way that previous generations were. And it's just not really in our wheelhouse to think that way. We're really practical. We look at problems as they present themselves and

128:34we try to find solutions. and we do care about making sure that AI is good for people, but there's not really a lot of that kind of thought going on. So, this I think is a really interesting opportunity still, but for now, the AI safety community in China is much more on the open AI side of the cordability versus character debate. They're about having clear rules, having the AI follow