The Coming Global AI Conflict w/ Gilman Louie | EP #54

0:01How do you see these two superpowers? They actually have a time table. They want to be in a leadership position as the global AI leader. We got their first renal face at competitor nation. Are we moving fast enough? The answer is no we're not moving fast enough.

0:20Their view of alignment and my view of alignment are very different, right? Is it going to be fundamentally Chinese, American, fundamentally European? It scares me Sometimes it will change everything the way we live the way we play the way we have relationships the way we learn Right everything to go is to lead not to win because winning defines a finite game We're in an endless game. I think this is our AI moment

0:48Welcome to moonshots and mindsets one of the conversations that is going on right now is is the United States prepared for the speed at which AI is going to transform everything, including governance, and is China better situated to utilize AI? I brought on stage this year at a Buddenz Free 60, the Honorable Gilman -Lewidia have that conversation. A look at AI in the US government versus AI in China. Yeah. Gilman is the past CEO of InQTel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Today he's the CEO of America's Frontier Fund, which is effectively our sovereign wealth fund here in the United States.

1:31It's an amazing conversation and one that we need to be thinking about as the speed of AI is accelerating. And it's going to have some extraordinary impact on who and how we run this planet. All right, check out this conversation from March 2023 at my private summit, abundance 360 with the honorable Gilman Louis on the future of AI and governance. And thrilled to have you here and thank you for your willingness to take on this conversation because it's a very real conversation in the world today, right? You have been overseeing so much and we're in the midst of these tumultuous times And, you know, we don't talk about the downside dystopian side here in 8362 much, but we need to talk about reality.

2:21And part of reality is the fact that AI is going to drive a lot of change in the world. It was Alex who said, I think it was Alex who said, you know, whoever is the dominant AI players in the world in the next five years will remain the dominant player. I mean, we're playing for keeps in some ways here. So if you don't mind paint the picture for me. Where are we in the AI UA, USA, and AI China relationship here. How much is the US government really leading and how much is the Chinese government really leading? How do you see these two superpowers? Well, that's a great question. I think first of all, if anybody spends any time understanding the AI, it's not because of what either governments are doing.

3:21Most of the AI innovation work is happening in academia and our companies. Though both countries have seated a lot of AI research. Now we do it through our organizations like DARPA, IRPA, our National Science Foundation, our National Labs. China does it with its national champions, with its university systems, and its regional organizations. I think the real question and the challenge for both countries is clear that both countries view that this is a competitive race. It's sort of the issue of winner takes on what that really really means. And China kind of led first in the world to go out there and said, as a nation for where they wanted to go, that AI was going to be critical.

4:11They actually have a timetable. They said, by 2030, they want to be in a leadership position position as the global AI leader. I used to take a group to China every year up until things started devolving, but it was clear that the party and the mayors and governors were making huge capital investments. They were recruiting, they were creating policies, they were creating cities that were focused on AI. Do we see the US doing the same? Well, I think right now because of the current situation, it's not just because of chat, GPK, though, that has accelerated things. The US kind of woke up and said, we now face a competitor nation, right?

4:58That's committed, that has integrated this as a part of a national strategy. Is this equivalent to the US versus Russia and the space race? Absolutely. They had their spuntnik moment when, you know, AlphaGo beat the best gold champion. Yes, right, lease it all right, so so that was their moment in in fact Even though I participated in this great study in this commission We you know two a 750 page report that we put out two and a half I'm gonna have chat you to read it right? It's just like that thick and chat can probably compress it down to you know a few pages But I think this is our AI moment.

5:35Yeah, all right This is our spuntnik moment, you know People are waking up in Washington and looking at chat GPT and are saying to themselves, what does this mean for our economy, for national defense? How should we look at these particular technologies in a much more profoundly different way than we looked at in the RWAI? Yeah. By the way, once again, please put your questions into the chat and upvote them. I'll be going to your questions here in a little bit. But I mean, listen, I'm a libertarian capitalist. I'm thankful to be American. I love this country. But when I think about linear, sclerotic systems, I think about the government.

6:19And so the notion, it scares me sometimes. I'm super happy that we have amazing entrepreneurs like we just saw on the stage here. We're able to do that. You're investing them. I'll get to that in a little bit. But do you think that the are you seeing from within the president's AI commission and so forth? Are you are you seeing the internal attention and awareness and significance here is they are? Are we moving fast enough? The answer is no, we're not moving fast enough, okay? The Governments have a very difficult time dealing with nonlinear change functions. Yes, they they'll really make change they can't understand how to put that in perspective.

7:01And so, and it's not just the US government or the Chinese government, and I just got back from Brussels, right? The EU is trying to wrestle with this. Now, all three countries at some level is afraid of particularly the new technologies around generative AI and other AI technologies that's on the bubble. Because unlike narrow AI, where we can focus it on the problem, We can't necessarily control its outputs. And that's frightening for governments. So, you know, and Brussels, what they want to do, at least some in the commission, you know, they want to regulate it. Right? So the first thing they do, they want to regulate it, that, you know, that's the first reaction of government always.

7:43Right. And on the US side, let's create tort law, basically sue people, right? This is the American way, so what we do. And then the Chinese are kind of go like, This might come out and say things that are not on the party line. And so you have to understand that kind of cultural realities of government as they look at these technologies and all three are wrong. I can give this example. I got this phone call. I won't say from whom. Instead, we got to stop this thing. We got to do a timeout. It's like stem cells all over again. And here's what we need to do. We need to call it more Torium and to be figured this thing out.

8:23Try to explain it's already out there. There are these companies, the code is totally available. It's open source. That strategy is not going to work. But they said it acts like a nine -year -old. It says stupid things. But it can put together dangerous combinations. You can build weapons systems off of this. And I said, look, if you're a nine -year -old acts out in your house, She throws food, kicks things around, throws a temper tantrum. Do you kill it? Right? No, you train it. You train her to be smarter. You put some rules around it. You get her to think about what are the ethical considerations of what it's doing.

9:09So our goal, all the countries, even our competitor, is to use AI in a way and mature it in a way so that it gets smarter, not dumber. You know, one of the lessons we learn in the Ukraine right now is dumber is deadly. Right? So this idea that I know there's been a huge debate about how AI is used on the battlefield, but dumber systems leads to higher casualties, right, and worse. Now, intentional. And so, you know, generally, smarter is better. Same thing is true with AI. This episode is brought to you by levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose.

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12:02Yeah. Could communism or socialism, where socialism is basically technological, social, with technologies taken care of you and communism is understanding the markets better than the markets forces could be? Are those systems potentially better structured for an AI world? Yeah, so it's pretty clear that authoritarian governments or socialist communist governments want to use AI to better serve its public, right? We have a very western point of view, right? Which is, we're kind of grounded in the American style of democracy, which I think is a good thing. I think ultimately that's the better model.

12:39But if you're in China, and you're... By the way, it could be made better with AI. Oh, absolutely. All systems could be made better with AI. But if you want to deliver higher quality, the things that any government, democratic or authoritarian worries at most, is unhappy populations. Unhappy populations leads... Of course we both. revolution and reform. So China is being a lot of effort of using their AI to deliver better services. So they put a lot of energy in things like smart cities, making sure their garbage is picked up on time, making sure that the public workers are actually doing their jobs.

13:20They're doing some other stuff that I find not necessarily great to social scoring, that you know, the monitoring and tracking, but again, culturally in China, this issue around using technologies for harmony. Yes. Harmony is making sure that you're increasing happiness. Increasing happiness and alignment. It's their view of alignment, and my view of alignment are very different. Right. So, how important is it for you think for the US to win this AI China arms race? If I were to polarize it that way, And where do you think we are in that? What would you as have to do to get there? So we're playing this big game of Chesa Go, I know your favorite game.

14:03And we're in a very early moves. So I think winning and losing is the wrong conceptual framework. It's really about leadership. So if you kind of think about, you heard some great speakers today talking about, you know, data sets and algorithms and open source, First, it is what platforms are companies and countries going to build their AI -driven applications on top of. And in the old days, all of us technologists, because I'm kind of old, right? We thought technology was... You're young and we'll have a longevity conversation later. Yeah, I wrote 120, but... Okay, good. But the challenge that we have is this concept that...

14:45And now, what do you write as your number? 120. What's that? You know, I know for your age, but what about one through five, about how you feel about AI? All five. Five, okay, great. Right, right. It will change everything. Everything, the way we live, the way we play, the way we have relationships, the way we learn, write everything. And it is going to be such a global accelerator. It will make everything go non -linear, all at the same time. Everywhere, always, all the time. But here's the thing. We're at VisitCout, 1 .0. Yes. Right? I mean, literally. This is like Windows 1 .0. The smell? Who's you who don't know what that is?

15:22That's like really early. Yeah, that's not really early days. But I go back to the framework of how these countries kind of look at this technology and what winning means. Whoever puts the data sets together, whoever puts the training sets together, whoever builds these models out, can't help a building bias into those systems. right? This idea that systems are not bias is impossible, right? Because bias is how we do judgment. It's the thing that we go is our shorthand of how we got like shorthunts in the brain. Shorthunts in the brain. And AI is going to develop those same shorthunts. And so, but we want them biased the way we want them biased.

16:01In a positive way, the way we view. So the competition between China and the US is not just who has a better missile system or who can shoot down the other guy's hypersonic faster. All that's really really important. But how we build all of our information systems and what cultural biases we put into there, right? Is it going to be fundamentally Chinese, fundamentally American, fundamentally European, right? Those cultural biases are going to be built in at least in this current generation of generative AI. It's going to be built into those systems. Let me remind you please put your questions in the slide O and we can bring slide O up when there's some, let's bring it on back here, and we'll get some of the participation.

16:44Can AI be regulated? I've been dying to ask you this question. I mean, there are regulators who want to regulate it through whatever mechanism, but is it even regulated? Well, clearly people will try to regulate it, right? For example, they're gonna try to regulate it, so you can't build the next toxin to kill everybody. Sure, right. We want regulations like that. So it will be regulation. But I think this concept that we can put the genie back in the bottle is false. That is this not going to happen. And so if anything, if anything, we got to move faster or not slower. Because the danger point is between that nine -year -old and that 30 -year -old.

17:26Yeah, so I love that. I think about AI is about to enter adolescents. It's where you're strong enough, but you don't know your strength yet. Yeah, you kind of stoop it. And the frontal lobe hasn't evolved yet. My kids are 11, I'm told it's gonna be blurry for a few years and then they wake up in the early 20s. And we're gonna use that blurringness to our advantage. People talk about AI, particularly generally, AI hallucinating. It's a bad thing. But if you actually look at what is hallucinating, it is actually its form of creativity. Right. We just need to, you know, I'll give you a great example.

18:03I just said, name all the awards that Gilmawlui had one. So it lists like a bunch of my CIA medals, and then three other medals I don't have. Right. So one of them was the Presidential Medal for Innovation. So I took it to the White House and asked them to deliver the medal next week to myself. Right. So, so, low. We're seeing these AIs be super creative. We just think it's a hallucination. We're not leveraging the power of these pattern recognitions to our advantage. I'm going to go to a couple of questions here. What is the likelihood of stacking AI on blockchain to keep governments transparent?

18:40A fact -based scoreboard? So there are a couple of problems. First of all, blockchain is huge of the energy and efficient. I have my own challenges around that. And the security models itself will last for a little while. I know we have a bunch of quantum resistant algorithms who are playing with us. We have that tomorrow night. But I would say that question might be grounded in this idea that AI fundamentally is explainable. That's kind of like lean coal. When I asked my child, how does she come up with that idea to eat that candy all at one time at the dinner table, she says, I don't know. It's the neural net.

19:21So she doesn't know what neuron fired at what time to meet that decision. AIs are like that. Now, can it be more transparent? Yes. Can we do things to make it more understanding at kind of how it got there? But at the end of the day, neural networks are neural nets. And anybody here understands that space, understands it. It's not statistical. It's not, right, deterministic. Mick Man from our singularity community asked, why have we not heard of a Chinese jet GPPT competitor? So that's interesting. Well, they're clearly working on one. Well, many companies, Chinese companies are working on this.

19:59Again, we got their first. It's a lot of vaccines on the, on the, we got their first. Right? It doesn't mean that we'll continue to provide that leadership going forward. I think we have to give the Chinese companies it and government credit for being able to actually apply these technologies faster than we do. Right? So that's why for, for the US and for, for, for, to Western countries and moving faster is going to be more important because if we don't, those foundational tech that all of that foundational AI could easily build upon Chinese technologies. A few questions. You previously served as the CEO of Incutel, which is an extraordinary venture fund, the venture fund of the CIA, which always thought was amazing as a concept.

20:46I'm curious, one of those subjects you could talk about here last year, we'll talk about again next year is the field of brain computer interface. Is Intel investing in BCI? Well, I'm gonna go specifically in Intel because I'm not actively involved in Intel and Intel. But this is an area of interest and it has been the interest for 30 years. So I would imagine every defense organization is gonna try to increase intelligence. Well, here's our problem, right? Our problem is our mental models is based on what humans do. So all of our data is based on what are, we call these Mark ones, our eyeballs can see, what we can hear, what we can understand.

21:22We design all of our information that are human centric. And the problem with that model is human should become the instant limitation, right? If you're gonna design systems in the future, you gotta break out of those sensory things, a direct brain interface. Now, why is the military interested in that? Well, for obvious reasons, right? If I'm underneath, you know, nine Gs, I'm waiting, my head weights 2 ,000 pounds, I can't move my hands, right? thinking about what that system should do for it to do. It's probably better than me having that disengling time to reach out at 9G to pull that aside also because the stakes are much higher.

21:59It's one thing for an AI to make a bunch of mistakes on picking a stock. It's another thing if AI picks the wrong things that ultimately leads to somebody's death. So it stakes a much higher. Let's talk to you. Let's talk about your newest venture, which is amazing, America's Frontier Fund. I've heard it described as the America's Sovereign Wealth Fund. And I've always wondered why doesn't the US have a Sovereign Wealth Fund like Saudi, has PIF and many other countries. So to talk just what is America's Frontier Fund? So our view is particularly because this revolution in AI, right? That because AI modeling and simulation digital twins, as we call them, Right, it's moving along at such a rapid rate.

22:46Yes, that those technologies are going to revolutionize foundational or frontier technologies for the next decade. So things that might have seemed 20 years off are not only going to be five to ten years off. You can talk about quantum. Yeah, right quantum is always 20 years away Right fusion is always 20 years away Right? Being able to decode and actually simulate a human cell is always 20 years away until now. Right? And so America's Frontier Fund is to make sure that the US begins to actually invest in the technologies that are going to transform the world. It's not just the AI. It's application of AI to improve all of humanity.

23:30Everybody, this is Peter, a quick break from the episode. But I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges. is what the breakthroughs are in longevity. How exponential technologies are transforming our world.

24:07So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with go to demandus .com, backslashblog, and learn more. Now back to the episode. When Goatsies last two questions here in our form and how can we, as taxpayers, advocate for the development of AI technologies and the race to embrace these technologies in the US, to maintain our competitive advantage?

24:50So should Americans citizens be saying to the White House and Congress guys, you got to You got to get in the game here. Well, absolutely. And look, the defense department was the first department of any military in the world to actually create its own AI ethics, which is amazing. Trust me, I was then there when the sausage was made. You don't want to know how we made that sausage. But what we said is, if we're going to have leadership in the world, if the goal is to lead not to win, right? I love that distinction. Lead not win, because winning defines a finite game. It's like video games. you know, we're in an endless game.

25:28Hopefully it's endless. The only way to win is not to play, right? Exactly. So in that particular case, right, I think the public needs to demand from the government. What are the frameworks of how we should be using these technologies? So, you know, I remember in the, in the 19 late 80s, and I was in medical school, I was playing with restriction enzymes. The first ability to chop up DNA and there were these very famous a silamar conferences where all the Jean -Jacques got together and they self -regulated before the government regulated them. Is that going on in the AI world now? I think the AI companies are beginning to get real about this.

26:08And our views this. And we try to communicate we being, you know, some of us who are trying to wear our government hats talking to our companies. And that is if you don't have some level of self -regulation, right? and responsible use, then somebody's gonna tell you what responsible use and regulate you. So, in the European world, that means ban. Right, if the European courts make a ruling, that's it, there's no appeal, right? That's not like the political system here, you just wait for the next administration to show up to go again, right? And the same thing, that's on the Chinese side, right?

26:46If you do the wrong thing, you might be gone for six months and come back later here is a high school teacher. So stakes are high. It's really, really high. And so companies, we cannot, I'll be really tough on my technology companies in America, right? We cannot have this idea that we're US -centric first when it deals with the rest of the world. Because when we go into a place like Europe and we say, we don't consider their values what they've gone through as a group of countries. And we apply just blindly, right? Our ethical overlays on those models. It doesn't work, right? And so we culturally have to be much more open -minded in understanding the baseline.