Show Notes
The AI news is coming thick and fast. OpenAI and Anthropic have called for the industry to pace its development, and to slow down if necessary so safety research can catch up, amid warnings from frontier researchers about the risks posed by increasingly powerful systems. But US President Donald Trump and his allies have ridiculed the idea that AI could threaten humanity, arguing the priority is staying ahead of China. With Beijing also pouring cold water on the idea, a coordinated slowdown looks unlikely to feature when Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping later this month. Fresh from ASPI's AI Masterclass, STW is joined by two leading China AI experts: Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Alex Colville, a China AI analyst at ASPI. They discuss what to expect from the Trump–Xi meeting, China's strategic goals for AI, and the controversial practice of distillation, in which companies take a shortcut by training their models on the outputs of rival models. They also unpack China's approach of releasing models with open weights, which makes them cheap to acquire and easy to download and modify. And they examine recent safety incidents, including the attack on Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI agents, along with other serious risks.
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