Aaron Ginn: US should treat AI dominance like a nuclear deterrent — export controls are backfiring

desperately need a deterrent to stop wars before they start. I want to hear him explain it. Aaron, welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey. Uh doing well. How you hear me? All right. Yeah. Yeah, we can hear you fine. Uh would you just uh give us a little walkthrough of your background?

Uh what you do, how you got to the place you are in today? Um no, that's a good question. uh you know say like the Lord works in mysterious ways. Uh so so we actually started this project this is my fourth company.

We started this project actually as a uh help you leave the cloud don't be cancelled and so what we found out is that data centers didn't have like a software stack to help monetize customers. So they didn't they you know basically they imagine like you're a merchant selling t-shirts and Shopify didn't exist. Mh.

And so then we started building this and then when the GPU crate started the data centers were like we need something to run this stuff and then we were there and so we started that four years ago and so like I can I can we had the right customer in mind.

Uh but in terms of like a lot of the other stuff that happened with the space I it just had this really nice marryment of like I've been working in public policy for over a decade as well.

have a foundation in DC policross think tank and also been like doing like political stuff on the side and then just so happens that like AI is the fastest you know regulation in Silicon Valley history and people view it as if uh you know it's regulated under missile technology law that's how it's regulated right now so so people in DC literally view that Jensen is selling weapons of mass destruction to other countries and so that's why they use the word diffusion proliferation right those are nuclear weapons words so those are this is not a this is not like in interns of politicians they don't view this as if you know you're selling just fun little gaming gear to to to different countries.

Um so uh so yeah so that's how we got into it and you know now we're uh in I think over a dozen countries we are in 50 data center or something like that doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in transactions.

So um so yeah so we think GPUs are going to be everywhere and uh kind of has reached that its gate velocity uh there's not really much the US government can do about it at this point. Yeah. Uh how did you react react to the new Nvidia deal that got announced in the last week?

You know, another two another2 billion dollar chips uh of chips to uh China. You think it's Oh, you mean the the H200? They're talking about the the reshoring thing with TSMC and Foxcon. Which one? The first the first part. Oh, yeah. The Well, I Well, I think it's positive.

Uh because I I think that the approach that Americans have to understand is that the way that China and so like I'm a Chinese exile. My family fled communist China. We fought for uh the KMT and uh then during the cultural revolution half of my whole family got murdered in China and so fled to Taiwan and then here.

So, you know, I'm I'm a I'm a hawk of all hawks. Uh and then my foundation also broke the story. If you remember the Chinese Chinese government buying land near the air bases. So, like my my policy foundation like broke that story.

So, um, and like I was telling John that, uh, all like a bunch of like Chinese ambassadors blocked me on Twitter and because I was like harping on it came from a lab, it came from a lab, like sort of sort of thing.

uh and but but anyways like the I think that the Americans like uh like to think the world works as if western kind of frameworks and philosophy and and a lot of if you like the history of Chinese and the way that they have accelerated their uh innovation curve which is by the way like not we sort of treat that postNixon era kind of frameworks is like how they we got schooled the pattern the pattern of China has always been to steal technology from other people And uh and so if you look at even how they got the first nuclear weapon.

So the way that they got that and this is just just a quick side story because I think it's helpful for for uh the west to understand just how how they work.

So uh if you remember uh Eisenhower was asked would we ever use a nuclear weapon against China to defend Taiwan and that actually whole story was planted by the Chinese because China was trying Mao at that time.

Matt was so crazy that even Stalin was guy Stalin was like that dude is freaking nuts and he kills his own people at too much right like he goes way too far you know I just do a couple million he's doing tens of millions right so so Stalin was like absolutely not we're never giving you nuclear weapons ever right because you're crazy and and so the Chinese basically invented this narrative and story planted in DC uh created this line within the state department that like well they could invade Taiwan and so then got to the media and then Eisenhower was asked and And uh then it was posted and he said, "Yes, we would use a nuclear weapon to to defend Taiwan.

" So then what Ma does, he goes back to Stalin and he goes, "Hey, do you want have America on your borders? " And Salin goes, "No, I don't want that, but I don't want to give you nukes. So what I'll do is I'll send Russian scientists to China to just co-develop a nuclear reactor with you, but just don't take my secrets.

" Right? Then five years later, they have a nuclear weapon, right? So, so they've done that with nuclear submarines, they did that with fighter jets, they did that with uh SAMs, they did that with aircraft aircraft uh technology.

So, this is just like a long line of history of like how they kind of work as like a country. So, but but when you're in an environment when they have 10 times the number of engineers as we do, uh they have a relatively centrally organized government that can execute big initiatives.

Uh but it's it's still a highly federalized government.

was in the Shanghai province and Shanin province the governors kind of like all work separately like like in America like they are all they're hyperfederalized but but generally they come up these like kind of big initiatives and big plans and so when it comes to like GPUs we have to realize that they are very much closer than we think like like the reason why iPhones are built there is because it's so technically complex to build an iPhone that we can't do that anywhere else it's not because it's cheap the cheapest place to build things is Mexico like just by labor hours but Mexico doesn't have the technical capability of doing that and so when we have the the situation of GPUs we have to understand that that it's not just like we can actually protect this technology for that long it the actual modes around the information symmetry that we have as a nation towards China on the advancement of chips is much smaller than than we think and I think it's like under 12 months so if you think they're like five years away I can be sympathetic to the airports controls but they're under a year the goal is to win the goal is to reach just skate blocks.

They like up on Hero, right? They brought everyone in Los Alamos not to be secretive. It's because we had to win. We had to be first because whoever was first defined the entire era of what nuclear weapons uh became. And so that and and then we actually, by the way, cut off all of our allies, too.

We we took the mathematicians from Britain. We said, "Hey, yeah, we'll share everything. " And then we made the nuke and then we cut them off and then they went to go build their own nuke.

So, so it's it's kind of the same situation where building GPUs is actually much easier than the US government thinks, which is why it which is why Amazon's doing it, Microsoft's doing it, Facebook's doing it, Broadcom's now a trillion dollar company.

And the second is that their actual uh ability on the foundry side is much is more like a year or two behind.

So in that scenario, it becomes where we need to distribute our technology like a Boeing asset to as many places in the world that wants to take it because then that becomes our footprint that we control that we can continually express and influence that other country.

Otherwise, Huawei is going to show up and is going to be like, hey, my thing is like, you know, 80% is good, but it's cheap and I'm not going to cut you off from the most important technology wave in in, you know, in in the next 10 10 15 years.

And that's a pretty compelling argument if you think that you're another country and and so that that's why I think this reorientation has to happen around where we actually are as a country in terms of how far we are ahead.

But also we can take advantage of that because the stuff is like quite easy to deploy compared to like CPU infrastructure and as well as the world wants it.

Um and and the the most recent controls are a little bit dishonest because if you if you go look at the January 15 ruling ruling uh it it is it adds Greenland and Portugal and Poland and Finland and adds Greece and it adds basically everywhere in the world but 19 countries.

So do we really think that Greenland is going to diffuse GPUs to China? No. It's because they have cheap power, right?

So it's turned into this like protectionism thing where we're like we have to protect our companies and I'm like wait a minute like I thought this was about China like so now we're like doing this to like protect and like isolate and so one reason why we we have lost the LLM race on the open source side is because because we've done stuff like that and and I think that's putting us again another disadvantage about another advantage for Huawei because Huawei can be like hey I had the leading open source models China does it's it's it's unquestionable and now I have a chip that's designed for So, so like we're putting ourselves in kind of a really difficult position and also a difficult position for Nvidia.

Uh because the reality is like this is the goal where we have to achieve this game philosophy first like with the nuclear weapon. Uh not like we can hold off this wall and like play these games with countries and just slow them down. In reality, it's like we just need to win.

We need to stop like messing around and trying to do these kind of stupid games. Can you give a hyperabridged version of your uh your version of AI 2027? like what does hitting escape velocity look like? Uh kind of like a potentially like a white pill like what does winning look like?

Uh I think Americans have the largest GPU cluster in the world uh as a deterrent. That's what I mean by the nuke button. And and that's a game of deregulating energy. Kind of like the other things that I think are more widely accepted. Uh like to me it's all energy should be acceptable. We can build on federal land.

All that stuff's great. Um, and we also need to we need to resource semis. But I think the way you resource semis is not randomly tariffing stuff and then providing exemptions when you have a lobbyist that is convincing enough to go to the white house.

I thought I thought we were supposed to be opposed to that as I guess not now. So we should focus on deregulation and then subsid sub subsidizing actual development here. So then giving tax breaks for people to use the Intel foundry or TSMC's foundry um to like like restore.

So so I think it's building large GB plus in the world. I think is being the production house for all advanced semiconductor work.

Uh but then also having like so the way I would view that is like a new Monroe doctrine that America is not going to you know rebuild uh the supply chain for fans and servers or fiber optic cables or anything like that like all that stuff even that is not in China because China is too expensive to build there.

So that's why they put it in Thailand, Malaysia and these other countries. But we can put that in like a Mexico.

we can put that maybe you know we're outsourcing prisoners del Salvador maybe we can build fiber optic cables too so like we can we can have a new Monroe doctrine of like reassuring everything within this hemisphere and I think that's more of like a reasonable and also quite more achievable task than just saying everything has to come back into America and then and then the the next part relates to open source where uh we have to just get better at at this and and we haven't gotten better I believe because protectionist measures that were mostly secondary effects.

I don't think they were primary operating for that. I think it's kind of more of a secondary outcome. But that's going to be how the space wins. It it's it's going to be a myriad of models.

Models being used for wide different purposes, models that are highly specialized and then kind of a separation between like platform as a service companies to help you run comp models and then infrastructure.

And so the infrastructure part we can actually win at because we're generally like good at we're good at um the face. We're good at energy, but we're not good at power, if that makes sense.

We're really good at like finding stuff and exploiting it out of out of the ground or or building different types of energy frameworks. We're not really good at power.

And and I think that that's where the rest of the world power you're defining as like converting that energy source into, you know, basically transferring that energy into chips, right? And like into the actual, you know, cluster effectively. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, because you think that like power in our in our country is is deregulated, mostly der say it's highly federalized. So, so just because the federal government says you should build power plants doesn't mean Virginia is going to do it, right? And and that's designed to protect our rights as as a nation.

It's designed to protect the rights of a state.

that the state ultimately is in charge of these things and has uh there's the reason why anything that's not enumerated in the constitution is given to the states is because the enumerate powers is designed to protect the states from big actions down do all these things uh and that's what's created actually a very stable political environment and I do think I'm opposed to terrorists in general but I think people are kind of overreacting they think that it's the end of the world and everything's going to be done I was like if America's that fragile like a lot of bad stuff is is going to happen either way because it's just not going to be one person that's going to take down our system because you know and I voted for Trump but and I don't believe that just from an ideological perspective but also just the nature of our country if you look at the history of our country it's been through worse and has survived because of the system and the our ethos that we've built.

Um, so, so when it comes to like this situation, I think it's uh I'll I'll quote a I'll I'll butcher a quote because he's he's way better than me, but um there there was a there was a prime minister in England who used to say that and that America is not good primary actor but an excellent secondary actor.

It wins secondary, never wins primary. And and it's because we don't generally rise to the task that's in front of us.

to kind of like go play around Netflix and kind of like mess around for a while and like spend money on energy that doesn't work and you know kind of basically BSing and then all of a sudden something happens and then we're like we got to go to the gym we have to win and we're going to win. We're be ruthless, right?

And and then we like show up, right? And and the rest of the world's like, "Hey, pay attention. Pay attention. " And we're like, "Why? " Like there's a new episode of, you know, Love on the Spectrum. So that's what it show, you know, like and Yeah.

And and I and so so I think that that's well I think the interesting the interesting thing right now is is and I'd be curious to get your take here.

We we had uh Jordan from China talk on just earlier and I was asking him I was like do the Chinese laugh at us that we don't ban Tik Tok and DJI and Unree and all these companies that are just obvious national security threats that like you could just end and it would be controversial but you know it's hard to argue it's it's genuinely hard to argue in in favor of allowing these companies to operate here when they wouldn't allow the same companies to operate.

Um I I want to kind of unpack something.

Uh uh one thing my sense is that you have a much greater fear of a US adver adversary like China with super intelligence with the biggest cluster in the world than super intelligence by itself right so like you're is it is it true that you're sort of like pdoom involves you know China winning the AI race and then you know using that to exert you know power and influence over us and the rest of the world.

It it's more of a um uh it's more of like losing soft power revolency I think of it as a let's think maybe like a metaphor to help like so let's think about airplanes so Boeing is a national security asset right it exists at the pleasure of the US government right and so it's not you know obviously we don't own it right but it's clearly something happened we would do something so same with like swift right same with the US dollar uh that's why the bond stuff is the most concerning out of the tariff uh drama is the behavior on long-term bonds.

Basically, the US liquidity is declining, which is like a very scary kind of thing because we are the default reserve currency.

And uh being pegged to the dollar and so the social influence is what creates wealth for America that uh being the policeman of the world doesn't mean just like where y'all live and where I live, the police aren't here in my house right now. But it's it's the fact of like they run it.

And if when we run the free world, everyone gets wealthier, we get more powerful and more meaningful, and we can continue to bring people out of poverty, introduce human rights, all these like great things that I think God has chosen America to be a representation of to the world.

Um, and so I view more like like uh China is not a kinetic country and it it has kinetic abilities. Totally true. But the most meaningful war that China's ever fought is the Indoena war was a couple thousand people. That's it in the history of their country and and they've done proxies that that that's true.

Not at the scale of Iran, but you obviously North Korea is the biggest proxy and they played a little bit in Southeast Asia, but they're pretty racist as a country. So, they don't really consider all the Asians equal. So, it's just more of who's on the border.

Uh like China is mostly CCP is mostly interested preservation and insulation. Like that's what they're interested in.

and and and so because we express a mimemetic desire to be expansionist because fundamentally the western philosophy is expansionist this is based on Judeo-Christian frameworks about being evangelical and being free free orientation I think it's also the way humans are designed uh to be freely uh in commerce with each other um that presents an adversarial view to China but fundamentally China like like I would give you another very very specific example too like the number of amphibian uh shipping vessels to take people from mainland to Taiwan, they have around 20 20 or 30.

They're actually capable of crossing that. So if they're planning on invading, you don't do 20 or 30, right? And the number of military you need is it's actually Pentagon. Hasn't Palmer talked about, you know, commercial fitted to serve the purpose of an invasion. But again, see that's asymmetric.

So like China thinks asymmetrically. They they don't think they think in in the manner of how do I get something to happen towards my favor without ever having a fighter bullet. That has been their entire foreign policy since existing like the Stalin example.

How they got submarines, how they got uh fifth gen fighters, like how they actually infiltrate Silicon Valley like like that they're everywhere in Silicon Valley. Like that's totally true. They've taken RP. Was that asymmetric or is that symmetric? Asymmetric.

Like like so it it that's the way they think about the world. And so for example like she had to took out huchintow right publicly.

Why is because the way the CCP works is like when it's confronted with a significant adversarial problem like like outside of of the country what typically happens is they replace the president or the premier and so was the most logical person to actually come and replace she.

So the asylum if you look at also there are some all of a sudden there's a bunch of people in the central committee and standing committee that have disappeared now they have that like have gone somewhere it's because if the history of the CCP is that when it's confronted with a challenge like TNM square someone all of a sudden that person just disappears it get it they get sidelined in the standing committee and and and that is the pattern of how the the the act because it's interested in the preservation of its party does a war increase the likelihood of preservation or decrease like like it decreases like like every war does that so because you don't know who's going to win so so they'd rather play asymmetrically because it's more of an assurance that they are going to win because we as a country are not very good at that asymmetric takes advantage of our western ideas so don't I I how do you think about American soft power in the context of you know the the two highest profile consumer AI products that I think are are top of mind right now are Manis And I'm saying that in a very American.

Manis, man, and manis and deep sea. Deep deep.

Uh and and you know, we had Tyler Cowan on the show yesterday and he was basically saying, you know, you know, these companies are basically trained on western models and by nature of that they the sort of western thought is baked into them and that's some form of soft, you know, soft power for the west.

But I I just don't want to go back to the B example. I don't want France to have Huawei gear. I want it to be Nvidia gear because that's an expression of America. So that that's what I want.

And and and that that's that's the mitigation thing of like if if we allow them to continue to asymmetrically take over the world through the a new belt and road initiative.

The first one failed it because they because they couldn't actually fund it as a as a society and the delivery of their products was actually pretty bad.

Um going you mean like roads that roads that are you know basically cracked in half and like dams that don't work and fall apart when you try to pull up your pants and and it's everywhere in if you talk to like I've been to Africa. You can see some stuff behind me from Africa.

like you talk to them there there's cars there with Chinese letters and stuff and they everyone in Africa says it's garbage stuff that they had to fix locally. So it just it just was a failed experiment.

But they're they're generally very good at uh this kind of focus manufacturing to then to export to create to create asymmetric influence.

Uh like that that's their goal and and I'm more I'm more interested in how that sort of as it relates to AI a footprint of Huawei similar as responded with with uh ZTE that how that would negatively impact our ability to influence foreign policy in Europe or in South America or Africa like that.

That's more of my concern. Not that they're going to invade Taiwan. I just think that that's like a very American western way of looking at the situation.

when the Pentagon says that it would take the entire people's uh people's republic army to to take like the entire not not not 80% 120% including reserve to run Taiwan if they actually if they did or would it be easier just to have a manurian candidate manurian candidate like like like flood the airwaves with like fake AI you know stuff into Taiwan and try to flip a party there is an entire party dedicated to closer relationships in Taiwan in the Taiwan Parliament so why would they invade It's just an American way of responding because that's how we respond when like someone's like, "Hey, they punch us.

" We're like, "Hey, I want to freaking launch missiles from a fate and like destroy your country, right? That's like we the way we we think about the world. " It and it doesn't mean that like again I'm a hawk on China.

just like what is the enemy and and I think we are appealing to the enemy but these export controls and regulating AI trying to do these polarif diffusion rules treating AI as if it's a weapon and regulating as such that enables the manus and the deepseek to like to like to be prolific right so that's why we're not doing open source is because all these like regulation stuff is happening on on in the west and China's like whatever we'll just diffuse the model and like you know everyone go to town right?

Uh that we won the internet because we were free and open. China's winning AI because it's free and open, not because they care about that. Mark Zuckerberg are like a word he's he's trying with Llama 4. It's been a mixed reaction, but he is trying.

Can you talk about, you know, something I find fascinating is the companies that feel extremely significant right now to US national security. uh Huawei, you know, the the Tik Toks, uh Uni Tree, DJI, they're all private, right?

And I'm assuming that that's like, you know, there there's various reasons you'd want to be private. One is they can access plenty of capital. But another obvious reason is that if you don't all your metrics can be made up, you can be doing all these things. You can be taking all the state funding, right?

Like you can just basically directly serve the state in a way that it just becomes much harder. Uh do you expect companies uh you know not not financial advice or anything like that but do you expect companies like you know Huawei and and DJI and Uni Tree all these critical companies to just stay private forever?

Uh like sure I mean I I think of it as again going back to like China is such a massive country it's very federalized.

So think of it as the Chinese people are very different than the CCP clearly and and so when China has something very successful like a deep sea phenomena what happens is that the CCP co-ops it but everything up to that point is China like the Chinese people like because we we you know speaking for my dad's Chinese like it like they're very industrious uh they're very driven uh people it's just part of the mindset but al also you're very skeptical it's a very actually low trust society uh similar to like India and some other uh Asian countries and so like you know my dad's in CDs he doesn't like the stock market like you know he doesn't trust banks and stuff like that so it's kind of like his natural like kind of like framework of the world and and yeah yeah and so so but but the desire to be industrious is like it's innate to the kind of orientation around what it means to have a Chinese philosophy and and so when the C when CB adopts stuff like that it's like to get to the next level as a company you have to get join the communist state apparatus and so everyone who's like a big company is co-opted in.

But to say that and this is where it's different than um like Linist style communism is like it's like they're they Mao adopted I mean I 100% oppose communism but you got to be fair about what actually happened like Mao took that as an authoritarian concept and just pressed it down on the people like it it's not a they're not purist in any sense that they're they're they're almost like a bit like rationalists like they because they they like they want to be powerful and they want to stay in power.

So if the ideology has to change, it will change. Yeah. Um and and so that's where they let many of these successful companies in China that are, you know, okay, as the New York Times says, flooding the European markets of cheap goods. Now it's like what they're flooding our markets with cheap goods.

Many of those are done by just Chinese entrepreneurs like like no state interaction. But anything that's extenduating beyond the state and a meaningful national security like an industry that is related to national security like the CCP is utterly in control of that. Mhm.

Um but you you have to understand the the ideology the like where it came from then understand theological framework of like where they want to go with it rather than treating it as if like like I personally don't believe for example that China's interested in spreading communism and and they don't have a common turn like Soviet Union did to spread communism like they're interested in preservation and and so that is not a type of a country where you're like you know they're going to go to war by any chance like yeah they're in fact they're very hesitate they're very hesitant to war um and if you read a book you read a book about like a history about China there's a common pattern in history of China which is self-implosion they've done it like four times um so like they also know that too like it just ends up being where like so you know this all kind of falls apart right and uh and I I love a book uh by it's by Rodney Stark he said that um China invented gun power at the same time as as Europe did and China put it in uh in fireworks to scare off ghosts and Europeans put it in a barrel to shoot a bullet.

Yeah. Right. And so so that that it tells you like very industrious, very, you know, um driven in terms of ethos, but it doesn't always land a plane. And that and that's what I'm leaning into is like yeah, Huawei will make something cheap.

we'll make something alternative to Nvidia, but like let's like not give them the rope where they're like, you know, America is opposed to proliferation as opposed to exports as opposed to open source is like like you're giving them all the the fuel to be like come to China, we'll give you AI even though it's not as good.

Yeah, that that idea of like mimemetics, mimetic rivalry in geopolitics is fascinating to me because I don't know if you've read Wong Huning's America's America against America, but it was this book that basically uh they sent an emissary to the United States. He looks around and he determines that America will implode.

And it's and it's clearly like their own anxieties about implosion uh you know, writ uh but America is undefeated and we're not going to implode. It's the last thing happen. Yeah, it's a it's a I think it's closest thing to heaven.

Like, you know, it's a great it's an awesome uh my family loves being here and uh it it's been an immense blessing. My my grandpa came here with nothing. Well, this interview has also been the closest thing to heaven. It's been been fantastic. Do you have a hard stop? Do you have a hard stop? You want No, no, I don't.

Yeah. I got I got a couple more questions. Uh one, what does having the largest cluster, right? this like supercomputer, you know, super weapon in and uh in some ways what does that actually look like in practice? Is it run by, you know, who who sort of operates it? Is it a network of clusters?

What does that actually look like in your view?

Yeah, I I would say be run by form of energy uh combination of mist uh be deployed in a place that's undisclosed and it's used as mostly as training in our own side as in our own military on like uh advancing their own capabilities of understanding what LM can do, understanding like how compute can work at scale because like LLM are again super cool.

We all use them every day. But it's really the paralyzed computing that it changes the way which warfare works and that when you have the ability to scale that that amount of computing power at a single moment. Uh it it makes all types of as which mostly target towards asymmetric sort of attacks on us.

Uh we have to be able to understand like what that actually means at that scale. And so it's not it's not Stargate that's clearly for open AI.

It's not like the DoD sect should like email Sam like hey can I can I borrow this for you know like it has to be something that we own we control that is like is part of the people's power and and the point of that also is a deterrent saying that if you people will do something bad with AI that that is inescapable it's it's part of the fallen nature of humanity that we take great things and we uh apply uh maladaptive uh adjustments to it and and so we have to just be prepared for that and and what that attack means.

I don't think we fully understand yet. We have theories around it. Uh but I I I believe that it's going to be some form of attack on our infrastructure that's not designed to handle this form of of sort of computing power targeted us. So it's mostly used with a deterrent.

Um and and also kind of show our footprint as like we are going to be the best at this. Uh and you know taking a small slice of the uh how how the budget going to be five trillion just to like say that we're investing F-35 F-35 cost about a trillion one trillion investment by the United States.

Uh a lot less to copy it actually. Turns out we write off all the R&D costs. It's actually a pretty great plane. Yeah. And that's say it's like it's like you lean into going back to the bad mises thing and I know you like Gerard.

So like it's like it's like we just lean into so much of like what China's really China is really good. Like why are we shocked that deep sea captain like literally like like how look at t-sh look at like one to many that's what China does best. Yeah. So so like we actually two trillion two trillion you two trillion.

Wow dude. Um uh I guess on this one question I have is uh again because this conversation is top of mind uh but Tyler Cowan yesterday was was very excited about AGI coming in the next couple days.

We don't know exactly what he meant fastest timeline fastest fastest timeline uh extremely extremely uh AGI social network open launching a social network. Um, but I I want to I I like this conversation's been uh tremendously fascinating.

I'd love to get sort of your personal definition, how you look at, you know, AGI and then what your what your timelines look like uh around it.

Um, so I could answer this differently, but I think it's more uh honest is that if you don't know what you're looking for from a uh primmaaccia perspective, you don't know how to measure it. So, how do you measure if someone's intelligent? Is it SAT? Is it I mean, is it is it do they make money? Is it that they're wise?

Good people? Yeah. Funny. Right. And and I think that that's where the AGI problem hits a wall, which is like what am I even measuring against?

Like like when when it happens when every single one of those tests, which are by the way just random picked out of a hat and the like 100% across and it still doesn't fully work. What do we do? Right?

And and that that's the funal anthropomorphic question is which is a metaphysical question of like this is why it's so fun. I have a background in philosophy and theology. It it's like what does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to actually represent intelligence?

And many people who push a asi agi they have a very piss poor understanding like they didn't read lock. They don't they don't know who Decart is. They don't Rouso is a stranger like they've read some Nichi because it was cool in high school.

But but there there's very little understanding about the the the longevity and the history of what we have valued as a just a social creature and the evolution of of our of our culture to say like what is meaning and purpose and intelligence and even the epistemology of there's a difference between information data numbers and knowledge like all those from epistemological perspect are completely different things right like knowledge is a discrimination of information data is a series of numbers And and if you look at people pushing AGI and ASI, they typically one have a very low view of humanity.

Like their anth their anthropology is like we're robots.

We're a reductionist thing like we're all biology and and which is like kind of been rejected since the new atheists have fallen aside and they kind of have like have all those presuppositions built into it versus a person like me who's like I'm I'm an evangelical Christian like I don't have that view of humans.

I think that there is an immaterial part of our nature. Uh numbers are immaterial, data is numbers. Like it's pretty logical to believe that like we are ourselves an immaterial. There's something about it. Therefore, I can't actually put it in bits and bites.

So, AGI and ASI, I think, is a trope to kind of make an interesting angle.

The other thing is, yeah, it's marketing and there's there's conflicts and it's hard to find somebody that works in AI, you know, that that obviously is intelligent on, you know, however you want to look at it, that doesn't have at least a $10 million, you know, position riding on the AGI marketing, you know, like this this sort of like it's almost here, like it's coming type of thing.

And so that that's why I was it's not like I I just don't believe it doesn't mean it's not going to be valuable. That that's the confusion. Yeah. is that if you if you create this trope, this red herring that's not going to be there, you then false flag, build a bubble and it all it's bad for everybody.

I I think I think Elwins is a as founders fund would say uh is that I have a Star Wars view of the world, not a Star Trek view of the world. And that technology is a is a positive adaption of the human capability to extend its arm further. And it only helps humans become more human things.

And and so a lot of the AGI ASI talk is it's really built on presuppositions of a negative view, a negative anthropology that is not only been disproven over and over again philosophically and the theologically but it just doesn't bear itself in the science.

Like it it the mind itself is as an example you can go back in the 80s and 70s and 50s there were like the mind is this.

we have fully discovered what the mind is and then 10 years later it's like we don't know what the mind is like it continues to expand and and I think that relates to unless you can actually pinpoint and understand what intelligence is on the anthropology side you're not going to be able to ever measure AGI or have any interesting anything else Jordy oh I'd love to keep going for another hour but we'll have you back on again soon this was great this is fantastic I'm sure we can go way deep yeah this is really fun thanks for coming on yeah we Talk to you soon.

Thank you so much, Jeff. God bless you guys. Bye. That's great. Uh well, let's rip through some timeline. Uh this might be a world record for a number of size gongs this uh this show. Let's hear though. Activate golden retriever mode. Not quite size gong, but close. Uh there's some good sound effects.

The soundboard's back in business, folks. Uh brought to you by Brought to you by our very own Ben. Ben personally recorded these sound effects. It is his voice. It's his voice. founder mode.

Well, speaking of founder mode, uh Sam Alman was in founders mode yesterday when founder founder mode yesterday when uh it it broke that OpenAI is exploring a social network arena with AI features. Uh can't imagine it's probably going to be absolutely flooded with Studio Giblly pictures.

Um but what is your take on the OpenAI social network? will you be