Rationalism and Divergent Sinomodernity by Farrell Gregory at Palladium Magazine

The history of Chinese AI governance can be read in state documents filled with slogans and measured statements. Public pronouncements and comments on AI reveal a consistent focus on practical application and cautious advancement rather than the pursuit of transformative superintelligence. In 2017, China released its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, which set the ambitious goal of becoming a world leader in AI by 2030. Importantly, this was framed in terms of industrial competitiveness and economic output, not the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. […]

America’s 2025 AI Action Plan then went on to model development as a winner-take-all race between America and China on the basis of LLM scaling, stating that “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits.” A recent strategy document released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy mentions artificial general intelligence as a transformative technology, which “could present fundamentally new opportunities and threats.” Combined with the widespread perception that AGI is imminent for better or worse, the American AI strategy can reasonably be summed up as an LLM-scaling race towards superintelligence.

This does not seem to be how the Chinese see it. The Chinese AI+ Plan doesn’t mention competition at all, nor does it even mention America. Its focus is on diffusion, standards-setting, and making AI a value-add for other existing parts of the economy. Current Chinese AI policy involves decentralized distribution of benefits allocated by provinces and municipalities, supporting an open-weight ecosystem, and a multiplicity of regional labs. We should not necessarily take these documents at face value, but we should question why China’s AI narrative seems to ignore the “race to dominance” framework.

Makes a good case that China is playing a different game than the U.S. And given what Yuval Levin points out in his piece about AGI, one should consider that the race the U.S. is running may lead to a dead end. It’s interesting that both Levin’s piece and this article lay the blame for adopting the wrong worldview at the feet of the Rationalists and what looks to me like a sci-fi-inspired faith in an inevitable machine god. I get the sense that the wider society is paying more attention to what Rationalism actually holds, and it’ll be interesting to see what follows. How much power do Rationalists actually have at these labs? How indispensable are they? OCT 9 | REPLY

Are We Really on the Path to AGI? by Yuval Levin at The New Atlantis

The notion that we are moving in the direction of artificial general intelligence looks more like an article of faith than the conclusion of any argument or the implication of any set of observations. It was an assumption present at the birth of modern artificial intelligence, planted there by a variety of brilliant theorists and science fiction writers. Its profound influence on the culture of Silicon Valley has meant that it has played an important role in the conceptual evolution of the field. But it is not obviously justified by the evolution of the technology itself in recent years, and seems at odds with the general direction of that evolution.

The best piece I’ve read on AI in a while, probably because it confirms an inchoate suspicion that has been nagging at me. AI has been impressive in fields where progress is easily verifiable (like coding and math), and recursive self-improvement looks more tractable there. For ‘softer’ or more tacit kinds of knowledge, there’s less reason to expect the same kind of progress, unless someone finds a way to verify it. So why is the AI story presented as (and research seemingly geared toward) reaching general intelligence?

If we remain skeptical of how AI will evolve (maybe it’s AGI, maybe it’s more domain-specific intelligences), then many of the threat models and utopian hopes often ascribed to AI abstractly would need rethinking.

From what I gather, China doesn’t seem to conceive of AI competition as a race to AGI. Their approach seems much more practical and immediate, and thus better suited to domain-specific AI. Maybe the U.S. is playing the wrong game, and maybe for largely faith-based reasons. OCT 9 | REPLY