ChinaTalk

How will GPT4 change the world? What implications does it have for policy, economics, and society? How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety? To discuss, I've brought together the AI Justice League: Zvi of 'Don't Worry About the Vase', Nathan Labenz of Waymark, and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

Dennis Wilder returns to ChinaTalk — this time with some broader thoughts on how the US intelligence community can rise to the occasion vis-à-vis China. In particular, we discuss: The importance of government hiring those with experience living in China; Contributions that the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) has made to China intelligence, and why it should be reinstated; A serious r...

Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Nick Mulder and Lars Schönander. Picking the narrative up in 1935, get real in this episode: Why the Great Depression, counterintuitively, made importing commodities cheaper, and how that affected Germany’s and Japan’s protectionism; The difference between autarky and autarchy; Whether Kim Jong-un’s North Korea could survive a full-on fuel em...

Today we’re releasing part one of our a two-part conversation with Nick Mulder, a history professor at Cornell and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War — a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022. With cohost Lars, Schönander, we discuss: The recent advent of the use of sanctions (for example, in the Crimean War, Britain continued to fulfill payments to Russia, th...

Data scientist Bryan Cheong breaks down how AI actually works, creating video using AI and how the technology is being used beyond image and language models. Also, I've got a meetup March 7th in Palo Alto! https://partiful.com/e/dVY7k51xQX4WhNr6AUcH Joined by Zheng, we also discuss: The farmers in India using AI for marketing Denoising and weights, the tech behind AI image generation tools What's...

Today we’re going to do a show about the scariest US-China news story I’ve seen in years, that “The US has intelligence that the Chinese government is considering providing Russia with drones and ammunition for use in the war in Ukraine.” Would China really arm Russia, and if so what will that mean for the world if the US and China end up on opposite sides of a proxy war? To discuss this I have on...

With AI on the verge of transforming the world, how are regulators across the globe approaching the challenges the technology might pose? Also, what does US-China AI collaboration look like today, and will it get caught up in broader tensions in the relationship? Matt Sheehan and Hadrien Pouget, who are both at Carnegie, come on to discuss. Matt's paper on US-China collaboration: https://www.brook...

William 'Balloon Guy' Kim returns for a roundup of the past few days of news around the Chinese spy balloon and unidentified object shooting. We share our favorite theories of what on earth is going on and what this all means for US-China relations. Subscribe to the ChinaTalk newsletter! https://www.chinatalk.media/ Outtro Music: Sammy Davis Jr's Up Up and Away https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hYN...

Hey ChinaTalk listeners, this year we’re going to do something new—occasional episodes in Mandarin! While getting mainland guests to talk about more conventional topics like US-China relations and export controls has been nearly impossible, I think doing more slice of life/business stories about odd corners of China in the pale imitation of Gushi FM is both fun and enriching to our coverage. In th...

How does one organization turn expert knowledge into real policy change? Dan Correa, CEO of the Federation of American Scientists and Founder of the Day One Project, discusses the power of policy entrepreneurship and shares examples of the ideas his nonprofit helped turn into legislation.  We'll delve into the nitty-gritty of policymaking and explore topics such as: How to make meetings with gover...

What do we talk about when we talk about tech policy? What are the weird corners of the chips and science bill? How is talent policy broken and what can anyone do about it? And broadly, if you want to change the world through better regulatory and executive action, how do you go about this? To discuss all that we have Divyansh Kaushik, a newly minted PhD from Carnegie Mellon currently at the Feder...

Chinese balloons over Wyoming!! To discuss, we have on today William 'Balloon Guy' Kim of the Marathon Initiative, Eric Lofgren of AcquisitionTalk, and Gerard Dipippo of CSIS. Intro Music: Up Up and Away, The 5th Fifth Dimension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5akEgsZSfhg Outro Music: NENA | 99 Luftballons [1983] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

Love it or hate it, AI capabilities continue to advance. As futurists imagine how this technology may one day be used, how it develops and who will be able to access AI tools will also depend on who funds AI projects and what hardware will be needed to get it to work. Lennart Heim is a researcher at the Center for the Governance of AI and the author of a fantastic AI compute syllabus primer, which...

China v Taiwan: who would win? Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and director of research at Brookings. He specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. We discuss The limits of scenarios that predict the outcome of a China-Taiwan conflict. What are intercontinental rail guns? How sports teams that play each other in the same year can have...

This episode is sponsored by Policyware. Check out Samm's class at https://www.policyware.org/chinatalk How do Chinese cyber laws and regulations affect multinational companies, and US-China relations? Samm Sacks of Yale Law School walks us through the latest developments in this arena — we discuss: Why Chinese data policy has been on front-page news in the past few years; What China is hoping to...

Say China wins a war for Taiwan. What happens next? To discuss the political and economic consequences of a PRC takeover of Taiwan, I have on today Jude Blanchette and Gerard Dipippo, both fellows at CSIS. Our conversation builds off their paper https://www.chinatalk.media/p/war-for-taiwan-what-happens-after. We recorded this episode in mid-December. Outtro Music: 水哥 ft. 蛋堡 https://www.youtube...

In 2023, ChinaTalk is going to Congress! First up in our series is Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat who represents Silicon Valley. We get into: What he hopes the China Committee can accomplish Why ChatGPT let him down What an effective industrial policy looks like Also, I'm hosting a ChinaTalk meetup in DC next week! RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/Zni1rBY3PFhy6WYFm2VK? Outtro music: Bruce Springsteen,...

What can $52bn for semiconductors actually accomplish? To discuss the tensions and tradeoffs underlying the decisions that the US government is about to make on how to spend this money, I have on today Jacob Feldgoise, an analyst at CSET and Vishnu Kannan, who works at the Carnegie Endowment. We'll be discussing their fantastic paper entitled: "The Limits of Reshoring and Next Steps for U.S. Semic...

As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, we consider the question of whether there are limits to what computers can know and how this compares to human understanding. Joining me on this episode is Sam Hammond, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, and Zohar Atkins, a rabbi and host of the podcast "Meditations with Zohar." We discuss The impact of AI on creativity and human thought...

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution makes his ChinaTalk debut! We get into: How AI is going to change art, education, politics and human relationships Why Tyler tried to write a book to explain America to the PRC How babies born in 2023 will see their educations changed by AI; Playing chess against the computer and creativity in the AI era; Religion, American antisemitism, and the movie Her; Writin...

Before we get back to the interviews, I read from the newsletter I run which you should subscribe to at https://www.chinatalk.media/ If you're interested in advertising on ChinaTalk, reach out at Jordan@chinatalk.media! Here's my year in review: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinatalks-year-in-review Favorite books: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/a-year-in-books Favorite everything else: https://ww...

Subscribe to the ChinaTalk newsletter! https://www.chinatalk.media/ Outtro music: Fred Again's Frank Ocean remix https://soundcloud.com/joseph-ibrahim/chanel-vs-a-new-error-frank-ocean-moderat-fred-again-mix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Subscribe to my newsletter! https://www.chinatalk.media/ Doug O'Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge and Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis go through our most important semis stories of 2022. We get into: Samsung and Intel's stumbles Arm taking on Qualcomm Risc-V's rise The politicization of semiconductors Outtro music: ChatGPT + PG One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvFGLSIU2c Learn more about your ad ch...

Today US Department of Energy Secretary Granholm announced a nuclear fusion breakthrough at Livermore Labs. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to be getting commercially viable fusion reactors anytime soon. Economist Eli Dourado wrote in a piece today: “Nuclear fusion has long been hailed as the next great energy source, capable of providing nearly limitless power without the harmf...

How do you get into chips? Doug O'Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge and Jon Y of Asianometry run us through how to they came to We also discuss Why starting with something's history can help you understand how it works. Who they talk to and what they read to understand their niches. Following your passion and making a whole video on Taiwanese 7-Elevens. Keeping the YouTube algorithm happy. SIA job...