#193 – Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war

80,000 Hours Podcast

"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest biological design tools right now, like AlphaFold’s, are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of compute requirements than the frontier large language models. And China has the compute to train these systems. And if you’re, for instance, building a cyber agent or something that conducts cyberattacks, perhaps you also don’t need the general reasoning or mathematical ability of a large language model. You train on a much smaller subset of data. You fine-tune it on a smaller subset of data. And those systems — one, if China intentionally misuses them, and two, if they get proliferated because China just releases them as open source, or China does not have as comprehensive AI regulations — this could cause a lot of harm in the world." —Sihao Huang

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Sihao Huang — a technology and security policy fellow at RAND — about his work on AI governance and tech policy in China, what’s happening on the ground in China in AI development and regulation, and the importance of US–China cooperation on AI governance.

Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.

They cover:

• Whether the US and China are in an AI race, and the global implications if they are.
• The state of the art of AI in China.
• China’s response to American export controls, and whether China is on track to indigenise its semiconductor supply chain.
• How China’s current AI regulations try to maintain a delicate balance between fostering innovation and keeping strict information control over the Chinese people.
• Whether China’s extensive AI regulations signal real commitment to safety or just censorship — and how AI is already used in China for surveillance and authoritarian control.
• How advancements in AI could reshape global power dynamics, and Sihao’s vision of international cooperation to manage this responsibly.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:02)
• The interview begins (00:02:06)
• Is China in an AI race with the West? (00:03:20)
• How advanced is Chinese AI? (00:15:21)
• Bottlenecks in Chinese AI development (00:22:30)
• China and AI risks (00:27:41)
• Information control and censorship (00:31:32)
• AI safety research in China (00:36:31)
• Could China be a source of catastrophic AI risk? (00:41:58)
• AI enabling human rights abuses and undermining democracy (00:50:10)
• China’s semiconductor industry (00:59:47)
• China’s domestic AI governance landscape (01:29:22)
• China’s international AI governance strategy (01:49:56)
• Coordination (01:53:56)
• Track two dialogues (02:03:04)
• Misunderstandings Western actors have about Chinese approaches (02:07:34)
• Complexity thinking (02:14:40)
• Sihao’s pet bacteria hobby (02:20:34)
• Luisa's outro (02:22:47)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering team: Ben Cordell, Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore