An insider perspective on China and AI, from Biden’s NSA | The Cognitive Revolution

Описание: Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on the Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. We thought it was such a good interview and we wanted more people to see it, so we’re cross-posting it here on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Jake and host Nathan Labenz discuss:
• Jake’s four-category framework to think about AI risks and opportunities: security, economics, society, and existential.
• Why Jake advocates for "managed competition" with China — where the US and China "compete like hell" while maintaining sufficient guardrails to prevent conflict.
• Why Jake thinks competition is a "chronic condition" of the US-China relationship that cannot be solved with “grand bargains.”
• How current conflicts are providing "glimpses of the future" with lessons about scale, attritability, and the potential for autonomous weapons as AI gets integrated into modern warfare.
• Why Jake worries that Pentagon bureaucracy prevents rapid AI adoption while China's People’s Liberation Army may be better positioned to integrate AI capabilities.
• And why we desperately need private sector leadership: AI is "the first technology with such profound national security applications that the government really had very little to do with."

Check out more of Nathan’s interviews on the Cognitive Revolution channel:
   / @cognitiverevolutionpodcast  

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Originally produced by:
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This edit by:
Simon Monsour, Dominic Armstrong, and Milo McGuire | 80,000 Hours

Chapters:
• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:07)
• Jake’s AI worldview (00:02:07)
• What Washington gets – and doesn’t – about AI (00:04:42)
• Concrete AI opportunities (00:11:18)
• Trump’s AI Action Plan — and whether the US government will ever adopt AI for its own use (00:19:36)
• Middle East AI deals (00:23:34)
• Is China really a threat? (00:29:06)
• Export controls strategy (00:36:13)
• Managing great power competition (00:55:50)
• AI in modern warfare (01:02:57)
• Economic impacts in people’s daily lives (01:05:30)