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As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing this week, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere around the presumed A.I. arms race, Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat says. But are we even in a race at all? And, if we are, who’s winning? On this week’s episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross speaks to Kyle Chan, a foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. As opposed to the U.S.’s large focus on artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., China has largely focused on smaller, more efficient A.I. programs, as well as consumer diffusion, practical application and open source models. If we’re focused only on the threat of Chinese A.G.I., Kyle says, we’d need to “get rid of the guardrails. We need to not bind ourselves. We need to not have any kind of regulation or restrictions.” But that approach is beginning to run into some problems in the U.S., Kyle continues: Whether you’re talking about the backlash to data centers, or you’re talking about some of these models now getting so capable that they might not be at whatever A.G.I. level, but they are at the level of potentially causing greater damage, either in terms of cyberattack capabilities or maybe even in terms of augmenting what a relatively unsophisticated group could do with bioweapons. There are all these sorts of questions that the A.I. community has been talking about for a long time. But certainly, for the Trump administration, if you recall JD Vance’s speech last year, where he said basically we should not have hand-wringing over A.I. safety slow down the progress of American A.I. development. In other words, in this trade-off — and he viewed it as a trade-off — we should err on the side of going faster rather than putting on a seatbelt. Now we’re reaching that point where we need to think about still making progress as fast as possible, competing with China, making sure we do have the best A.I. models — we can keep that. But does it have to come at the expense of wearing a seatbelt or having some basic safeguards? Watch, listen to or read the full conversation here, for free , even without a Times subscription. submitted by /u/nytopinion

Originally posted by u/nytopinion on r/ArtificialInteligence