Why China isn't (as) worried about an AI apocalypse

0:01WBUR Podcasts, Boston. China is more in control of its own destiny when it comes to AI than probably ever before. The future of AI is not just in Silicon Valley.

0:27it's wednesday september 16th and this is here and now anytime from npr and wvur i'm chris bentley a little later on the show jesse appell an american comedian who got big in china for his Mandarin language stand-up, has a new book out about his cross-cultural journey. The word for panda is xiong mao, and the word for chest hair is xiong mao. So I called the travel agency and I was like, I would like to see the chest hair.

1:00But first, China's president, Xi Jinping, is scheduled to visit the White House next week. And while there is lots to discuss, AI is definitely on the agenda. The U.S. has been trying to give its tech companies a leg up on Chinese competition for years, going back at least to when the Biden administration restricted exports of powerful chips to China. President Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei are among the influential Americans who have framed competition with China as an existential crisis. But how does China see things now that American tech leaders are calling for a global slowdown in AI research and development?

1:43That's what we asked Kevin Hsu, a hedge fund manager and writer. He worked in the White House and the Department of Commerce during the Obama administration. Hsu talked to Scott Tong about how this discussion of an AI slowdown is going over in China, and why Beijing isn't so freaked out about Silicon Valley's doomsday scenarios. I think the interesting thing about China's response is that it's never as uniform as people assume here in America, right? We've had several different responses from the foreign ministry to several editorials written by a few state connected media outlets to the head of the Ministry of Public Safety.

2:21So there is a spectrum of view in China, just as there is a spectrum of view here in America. What I would say about what Dario Amadei's proposal has triggered is that not that China does not care about AI safety or AI security in the same way that we do, but that I think the anthropic-led vision does seek to strengthen expert control, right, to in a way only subjugate and restrict China further. Right, ban exports of leading chips to Chinese companies. Exactly, before talking to China. Well, China would much prefer to talk on a position or a level of equals as opposed to being kind of punished first.

3:01You mentioned there are some common concerns about AI risks, notably in the cybersecurity space. So what are the shared concerns to you? One of the most important shared concerns that has popped up in public, both on the Chinese side and on the American side, is this sense of loss of control of AI agents. And we've seen concrete examples of that now. We've had a pretty high-profile hack, right, of an open AI set of agents that hacked into an American company called Hugging Face, kind of escaped the sandbox, if you will, and run wild on the internet to hack Hugging Face. And we've also had another example of a firm in California who has had frontier U.S.

3:48model access, so not something that the Chinese side has access to. And they're a cybersecurity firm and found a very important, a huge vulnerability in WeChat, which is the all-encompassing super app in China that really runs the entire country almost when it comes to people talking to people. These examples alone, which all happened within the last few months or so, shows both sides that AI loss of control and the cyber risk that could be introduced is not a one company or a one country problem, it's everybody's problem. So then what we have leading up to this upcoming meeting between President Xi and Trump is, on one hand, it is a low-trust relationship between the two countries.

4:32There's skepticism about a plan coming from an American company to slow down AI in a way that would disadvantage Chinese companies. At the same time, they have some of these shared risks. What is a realistic, you think, conversation the two presidents can have next week? My hope, and I think this is within the realm of realisticness, is that the two sides, at least after they have an AI dialogue where the two leaders meet, gave a very explicit recognition that this is a joint shared risk, that the both sides need to at least establish some ongoing communication going forward to constantly just keep each other informed of the risk of seeing.

5:17This is not some kind of kumbaya cooperation or collaboration on any stretch of the imagination because of the low trust environment. But I think preventing risk from escaping out of the sandbox by AI is something that everybody can get their head around and should get their head around. Yeah. Let me ask you about export controls from the U.S. The U.S. already bans the sale of the leading AI chips to Chinese companies. And here's a piece of sound from Steve Bannon. He, of course, is the former Trump administration advisor. He told Morning Edition that the U.S. should continue to stop providing these chips to Chinese companies.

5:57Let's listen. Everybody says, oh, it's China, China, China. We'll shut China down. It's not going to be that hard. It's going to be controversial, but it won't be hard. Kevin, this kind of conversation about shut China down here in Washington, how does that impact the U.S.-China conversation on AI? I think the important thing to think about the efficacy of export control is that one, it is already in place, right? There are loopholes that Bannon has talked about that I do think should be closed when it comes to either smuggling or even remote access or cloud access. But what is also clear, the motion, the investment, and the energy to become completely self-sufficient in the Chinese ecosystem, from chips to memory to AI models to everything, is underway kind of regardless of what additional action Washington will or will not take.

6:52And that, in a way, means China is more in control of its own destiny when it comes to AI than probably ever before. Right. And finally, the U.S. has been having this conversation about these doomsday AI scenarios the last week or so. Many have talked about it for a while now. How was that conversation in China? I think the doomsday scenario has not permeated to as many of the Chinese ecosystem as it is here. For the most part, the kind of risks that people are dealing with in China are AI-generated deepfake, which must be labeled on any Chinese social media for them to be posted. There are regulations around the Chinese AI companion and their interaction with children.

7:37That is being restricted and regulated. These are kind of the everyday risks that I think the Chinese ecosystem spends more of their time thinking about and also regulating, as opposed to the human extinction level existential risk that still seems far-fetched. And not even our own government or our own tech ecosystem here in America is completely aligned on what to do about that and whether that should be treated seriously or not yet. That's Kevin Chu, a hedge fund manager and author of the Interconnected Newsletter on Technology, the U.S. and China. Kevin, thank you very much. Thank you. Coming up next, a very different American perspective on China.

8:21Robin Young speaks with a Massachusetts man who moved to China and became a famous Mandarin language comedian, but not too successful to avoid being typecast on China's version of SNL as The American. More in a minute. When we last caught up with then 30-year-old Jesse Appel, a Mandarin-fluent, rising, and rare American comic in China, he was stuck at home in Newton, Massachusetts, because COVID had exploded in Wuhan. It was February 2020. It would be a month before the U.S. was also shut down. So, desperate to help his Chinese friends, Jesse held a fundraiser at his old high school, Newton North, showing videos of Wuhan doctors weeping with dying COVID patients.

9:05That brought his audience to tears. And then on the count of three, he recorded their message to Wuhan. One, two, three, Wuhan ,加油! Wuhan, stay strong. The rest of the night, laughter. Jesse studied Mandarin in this school. Then at college at nearby Brandeis, he took a six-month language immersion course in Beijing. Then won a Fulbright scholarship to stay in China and study a form of Chinese comedy. It's called Xiangxiang. He was a rising star when stand-up comedy hit the country, becoming one of the stars of the Chinese version of Saturday Night Live. His work passed a half a billion views on international sites.

9:48But COVID made it tough to live back in China for lengths of time, so he launched a popular online China tea shop from the U.S., as one does. His new memoir is This Was Funnier in China, An American Comedian's Cross-Cultural Journey. And Jesse Appel, welcome back. It's great to be here. Thanks so much. You're right. You still sort of can't answer why China, but you sort of do answer that. You say everything felt like it had been done already in the U.S., Whereas in China, there were brand new shiny trains and theaters just waiting for new cultural ideas and creators. So exciting. But how humbling as well, because letters in Mandarin are also notes.

10:29Can you give us an example of that, how you might have said something that didn't mean what you thought it meant? Yeah. I'd been in China, I think, like two months, and I wanted to go to Sichuan to see the pandas. And the word for panda is xiong mao, and the word for chest hair is xiong mao. So I called the travel agency and I was like, I would like to see the chest hair. And this poor woman is like, sir, we don't have that. I'm like, oh, I think you do. It's kind of famous. And then something like switched. And then you're like, oh, thank God the tone's there. Otherwise, I would not be able to understand what they're saying.

11:08So that's China. But answering why comedy is easier. In eighth grade, you made a rap album in the voice of Julia Child. Julia Raps! Oh, it's on the radio. It's on NPR. This is the biggest promo that Julia Raps has ever had in its history. It was all like parodies of existing rap songs. Like instead of Jay-Z's 99 Problems, like, If you're having heart problems, I feel bad for you, son. I'm almost 99, but I'm still going strong. And then it was the fact that nobody was interested in it was completely irrelevant. To go to Shengsheng, which is, to me, it felt like Abbotting Costello, you know, a straight man and a joker.

11:49And yet in China, it's telling ancient stories in some cases everybody knows the words of. And your Fulbright class was with a master of Shengsheng. Tell us about Master Ding. Master Ding is amazing. He's a disciple of a man named Houbaolin, who is one of the biggest, if not maybe the biggest Chinese comedian of all time. He was known as the Chinese Charlie Chaplin. The cool thing about this is a comedy art form that is passed down master to student. Traditional bits. You see two people on stage, both wear these traditional long flowing robes. It's the sort of thing that like a regular person would have worn out in the late Qing dynasty in the 1800s.

12:28The comedy is performed in tea houses. Then Master Ding is my master, was the person who took me through the whole of it. Well, let's listen. We have a little bit of you and Master Ding. This bit is, we call it Singing the Three Kingdoms. Basically, me and Master Ding are both opera lovers, and so we do like Beijing opera on stage almost as in like a play within a play type thing. Okay, let's listen.

13:16And so I can hear the crowd appreciating it. You know, it's not that funny to Western ears. Yeah, well, this is, you know, comedy is all context. When you look at any other country's comedy, you're like, you know, you may not get it. I guess it's like, who's on first? You have to know baseball. Even beyond that, you got to know, how do men talk to each other? How do I actually be a real person? It's not a talking monkey routine where like, oh, this guy speaks Chinese and that's the bit. Right. And I just want to, Master Ding, during the Cultural Revolution, he performed for coal miners in distant villages.

13:52His car gets stuck in the mud, you tell the story. He pulls off his shoes and walks through it because he says, you have to just show up. There's another story you tell about yourself in which you took that to heart. You're going to perform on a Chinese cruise ship, and you misjudge the time zones, and you just make it there. And there's the ship, and you rest your hand on its hull, and it starts moving away. It was surreal. It's the size of a city. I see it. And so I walked right up, touch it, and it goes. It starts moving. It starts leaving. So you jump in a boat, a Coast Guard boat. They race you out to this moving ocean liner, pull up alongside.

14:29And there's a guy up there and they're like, who are you? And I'm like, I'm the comedian. What's your passport number? And so we did the whole check-in thing while racing out into the Pacific Ocean. Oh, it's great. They lower a rope ladder. You climb up that ladder on a moving 10-story ship from a little moving boat. So you're thinking your friends back in Newton already have top jobs and careers. You're not making any money. You're also perfectly positioned for this new wave of comedy that soon came stand-up. You not just join, you lead their ranks. Sure. Well, I feel like in the whole country, there were probably like a dozen people maybe that actually knew what stand-up comedy was and were trying to do it.

15:14they'd be doing these shows and the translation for stand-up in Chinese is toko xiu, which is like talk show, toko xiu. And so the audience thought they were coming to like Ellen, but like, it was fascinating because what a lot of people need there is to stand up on the stage with a microphone and tell people what they think. And the fact that stand-up gave Chinese people a way to do that, that was funny. And that was like, you're making everybody's life better by working through reality in real time. Well, within reason, there are censors. But suddenly, there are shows like this stand-up competition.

15:53Let's go!

15:58Oh, they love you. They love you.

16:09I actually wound up beating this very established Chinese comedian, and there was a little bit of like a buzz on the internet about it. But for me, I was like, this is really not fair. I worked on this bit for seven years. Well, this is why you went to China. You were part of something that was just happening there for the first time. And that brings us to live from Shanghai. It's Saturday night. Yeah. You were writing a lot of the scripts for this brand new show. But there's where you run into a wall. No matter how funny, no matter how good, you're Mandarin. You are still a white man. And the producers of the show felt that there was no way the audience was seeing you as anything but a white man.

16:49You were having the experience of every Asian or person of color performer in America ever. You became on that show the guy who would go on the weekend update type thing as Jesse, the white Jewish guy from Newton. Yeah. Well, it's made me a lot more empathetic. And it's one of the reasons why I'm so big on social media. Social is a place where the more you are you, the better you do. There's so much to your story. You land back in the U.S. after COVID with millions of fans in China, but you started comedy workshops and you started an online tea company. What? Yeah, I'm trying to run a late night show for my dad's kitchen for China.

17:31And I was like, this is not working. But it did work well enough I started taking some ads. unless you're selling something, you don't make any money. I had to sell something. My favorite Chinese company that wanted me to sell stuff for them was a watch brand called Biden. And I was asked, just out of curiosity, guys, why did you make a Biden watch brand? They're like, well, we noticed Americans love buying stuff with Trump's name on it. So we assume that Biden will be the same. And I was like, oh, you were so like, your logic is so good, but you were so wrong. What would I actually want to sell?

18:08And the only thing I could think of was Chinese tea because I had been a tea guy all my time in China. The tea in China is amazing. It's the best in the world. Whenever I would do a show in a tea region, I would take two to three extra days of vacation and go up into the hills and meet the farmers and just like chill. I started making English language videos about tea and people immediately were asking all these great questions. What's red tea? What's green tea? What's the steep time? But now I have one and a half million tea followers in America, some of whom don't even know I did all this comedy stuff.

18:39It's crazy. It's beautiful. You owe so much of this to Master Ding, who's died. And I know that when you went back after he died, I mean, you cried. You know, there are so many things he just did right. He treated everybody as a person first. I mean, this is a guy who teaches foreigners how to do comedy, and he didn't even speak any English. If I get some of that dust into my own work, it's what people see shining through and the way you go about doing the jokes and the way you go about doing the tea and our reflections on Master Ding's mentality to how to of how to be part of a bigger world without losing yourself.

19:17Jesse Appel, his memoir is This Was Funnier in China, an American comedian's cross-cultural journey. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you.

19:34Lots more to read and listen to today at hereandnow.org, including about the offstage drama happening at the Kennedy Center. President Trump is the chairman of the board of that performing arts center in D.C. And yesterday, the board of mostly Trump appointees voted to close the Kennedy Center. This story has been a bit of a saga. Jonathan Edwards has been following it all for the Washington Post. He talked about it with Robin Young. President Trump was at that virtual meeting, which included the Democratic Ohio rep Joyce Beatty, a board member. Her lawsuit is at the center of this fight. So first, briefly, what does her lawsuit say?

20:15Her lawsuit says that it is illegal to add President Trump's name to the Kennedy Center. That was her position back in December when she filed it, when the center voted for the first time to add President Trump's name to the center. It was her position when they tried again several months ago, and it was her position on August 13th. And then yesterday when the board of trustees tried a second and a third time to add his name in a different capacity. Yeah. Well, things erupted. Take this up. I mean, he called her incompetent. She called him incompetent. Tell us more. Yeah, these are two people who clearly are not fans of each other, but in previous board meetings, it's largely stayed cordial, according to what sources have told me.

21:11Yesterday was different. It got unusually personal. Trump accused Representative Beatty of obstructing repairs, accusing her of never really building anything and said she was essentially making a living by hurting the Kennedy Center. Representative Beatty fired back and said that President Trump's conduct was highly unprofessional and yet caused, quote, extreme harm, end quote, and insisted that she supports renovating the center but opposes tying that work to putting President Trump's name on the building. You know, at times they were talking over one another. You know, she called him ignorant at one point and said the things he was doing was ignorant.

21:56It got testy. Yeah. Well, you know, just to remind people, because this has gone back and forth so much, the president's name was on the building. We remember that. And a judge ruled then, you can't do that. It's a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. It can't be renamed. The name was removed. The board is trying to get it back with different wording this time to say, renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump. A judge saying no to that as well. The board voting to close. um Beatty's lawyer told morning edition they think the president's post uh last night which he said without his name no renovations the post itself is part of this illegality they sent the post to the judge what what happens now great question yeah we shall see secretary lucknick said that they will appeal and as you mentioned president trump has said that quote the

22:57The Washington Post's Jonathan Edwards, there is more to that conversation, including what renovations the Kennedy Center actually needs, right now at hereandnow.org.

23:12But that's it for the show today. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Lynn Managon, Karen Miller-Metzen, and Jill Ryan. Our editors were Todd Bunt, Micaela Rodriguez, and Michael Scotto. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow.

23:47Thank you.