Name: Why America’s Future Depends on Winning the AI Race (with Alexandr Wang)
Uploaded: 2025-03-04T00:00:53.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why America’s Future Depends on Winning the AI Race (with Alexandr Wang)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why America’s Future Depends on Winning the AI Race (with Alexandr Wang)' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-04. Transcript available.

who's the who's the current leader in ai development like is it america is it
china
is it israel is it trying to think of another uh superpower russia maybe um or
yeah who is it
taiwan i know has a lot of the chips yeah and they manufacture a lot of the
chips over there
um and does it matter what country leads in ai or does it just matter the
company like scale
or another ai company so does that make sense that question no totally totally
yeah so so today
america is in the lead but um but china as a country is is sort of hot on our
tails
um like there was uh there's all that news about deep seek a couple weeks ago
and uh deep seek in
still in most places around the world is the number one most downloaded app you
know it's downloaded a
ton and yeah everywhere around the world frankly um and is a chinese ai system
right and so it's
starting to rival a lot of the american ai systems also because it's free and
you know it uh it kind
of like shocked the world so right now if you kind of look at it um us and
china are are a little bit
neck and neck maybe the us and america is like a little bit ahead and you kind
of like look at you
know if you go back to each of the three pieces that i talked about so um the
chips and the computational
power the data and the algorithms um if you were to rack and stack us versus
china on each one of those
you know we're probably we're ahead on the computational power because the
united states is the leader at
developing the chips and and most of the most advanced chips are american chips
um they probably beat us out
on data um because china they've been investing into data for a very long time
as a country and then on
algorithms we're basically neck and neck um so it's a pretty tight race um and
you know to your question
about does it matter or what is what does this mean um i uh i think it's
actually going to be one of the
most important uh you know questions or most important races of our time is is
it us or chinese
ai that wins because um you know ai is more than just being a tool that uh that
you know we all we can
all use to make our you know build whatever we want to or make whatever ideas
we want to happen it's also
um you know it's a it's a cultural uh staple right you know if you talk to an
ai that ai is kind of a
reflection of our culture and our values and all that stuff so in america we
value free speech and
you know the ais are you know need to are built to support that whereas in in
china there's there
isn't free speech and so um you know if if the chinese ais are the ones that
take over the world then
all these chinese ideologies are going to become exported all around the world
and and so so first
is there's a couple dimensions here that i think matter so first is just the
cultural element which
is like do we want kind of democracy and free speech um to be the the cultural
ai that wins or do
we want sort of the more um you know frankly totalitarian ais in china to be
the ones that win
and then there's sort of the um there's like the uh you know you start getting
to economically so ai is
going to be something that helps um all the companies in the united states
thrive and so
if the us ai wins then we're gonna you know the economy will grow faster we're
gonna have more and
more opportunity you know the country will still be better and better and
better um and and um the
economy will keep growing we're versus if chinese ai wins then chinese economy
is going to grow
way faster than the american economy so there's sort of the the cultural piece
the economic piece and
then lastly there's there's the there's kind of the warfare piece right and you
know ai we haven't
really talked about it but has clear potential to be used as a military
technology and we don't want
you know we don't want uh another country to have because they use they have
better ai to have a much
stronger military than than america's so like how would they do that how would
they have a better ai or
how would they use it to have a better military yeah how would they use it to
have a better military
like why is that kind of a concern or potential concern yeah so so one of the
things that's been
happening over the past you know decade for sure is uh is lots of hacking cyber
hacking going on so
you know in america um even recently we had this huge cyber hack called salt typhoon
where um where
the chinese hacked our uh telecommunications companies who hacked our for the
phone companies
damn they did they got it and they got all sorts of crazy data as a result of
that oh they know i'm a
pervert i'll tell you that yeah look at this this happened in 2020. salt typhoon
is it is widely
understood to be operated by the china's ministry state of security um its
foreign intelligence
service and secret police chinese embassy denied all allegations saying it was
unfath and irresponsible
smears and slanders um high profile cyber espionage um in 2024 u.s officials
announced that hackers
affiliated with salt typhoon had accessed the computer systems of nine u.s telecommunications
companies
later acknowledged to include verizon at t-mobile spectrum lumen consolidated
communications and
windstream the hackers were able to access metadata of users calls and text
messages
fuck homie we're fucked dude i am you seem good including date and time stamps
source and destination
ip addresses uh keep going keep going and phone numbers from over a million
users most of which were
located in washington dc good light them up dude in some cases the hackers were
able to obtain audio
recordings of telephone calls made by high profile individuals such individuals
reportedly included
staff of the kamala's 2024 presidential campaign as well as phones belong to
donald trump and jd vance
according to deputy national security advisor ann neuberger a large number of
the individuals whose
data was directly accessed were government targets of interest wow yeah that's
great
so do you think this also that that whole thing could be not real and it's just
a story that was created
uh that seems pretty real because there's there's real they're like um i mean
there's like 20 stories
where uh where the chinese have hacked american systems like they hacked this
was uh this must have
been close to 10 years ago now but the chinese hacked the database in america
that stored all of the
clearances so they hacked in they they managed to hack into knowing who are
literally all of the americans
who have security clearance oh security clearance yeah so i thought even what
was on sale i was like
who cares that's great though damn oh damn so they knew everybody who had who
knew oh who knew
information who knew secrets yeah so once they knew that then they know well
that's a great point of
operation to go then well now let's get find their data they can just hack all
of them yeah so so they
so already china is hacking the out of america that is definitely not an understatement
yeah it's
exciting kind of i mean it's unfortunate but it's also exciting i like some espionage
you know i can't
sleep unless somebody's eat really going through it um but then but then so
this is but that's a real ai
thing so ai can be used to do that because you can like prompt it to go and do
things like that yeah
yeah yeah there's there's a bunch of recent because it's all data yeah there's
a bunch of recent
demonstrations where ai is just like how in in go how ai beat the world's best
go players ai's starting
to beat the world's best cyber hackers and the world's best yeah so it's uh i
don't know if you saw mr
robot um i didn't but i dm'd with magnus magnus carlson no that's cool pretty
cool so yeah but
no mr robot is it good uh it's it's just it it shows like all this hacking
stuff and like you know
cool it makes it seem really cool okay cool i'm gonna check it out but uh but
yeah no hacking like
like you're gonna have ai that are hacking everything in america and this is
one place where
this is like us versus china will be really come to life which is who has
better ai that's better at
defending against the hacks from the other guy as well as hacking the other the
other guy's systems
um that's gonna be that'll just that'll just start happening that's basically
starting to happen right
now or it's you know cyber warfare has been happening and then ai cyber warfare
is gonna start happening
yeah basically as soon as you know as ai gets better yeah we had a craig newmark
who created craigslist
on yeah and he was talking about how what if they hacked like everybody's teslas
to all just drive
off a cliff one day or they hacked everybody's ovens to go up to 400 degrees in
the middle of the night
while you're sleeping and then fire started work like just things like that
that you don't start to
think about that um once something's connected to the grid or something like
that are connected through
routers and wi-fis that that that could be feasible yeah no it's there's a lot
of um there's a lot of
things they could do that won't even like seem like that big a deal at the time
but could be
really really could could be a big deal so for example let's say the chinese
like they just took
out all the military uh like communication systems and all the military
software systems um like took
out the satellites took out all that for like 10 minutes and in those 10
minutes they like you know
invaded somewhere or they like did some crazy thing like they can just there's
there's the the thing
about um about this stuff is like everything at you know as the world's become
more connected it also
enables you know different kinds of warfare so uh so cyber warfare is really
big also like the um uh
you know uh information warfare is another big one so what does information
warfare mean so this is
information warfare is all about you know um in a place what is what are like
the stories this is
kind of gets to like you know the like propaganda or you know these conspiracy
theories like what are
the stories that um in a place that we're trying to make happen or not make
happen and we know that
china does a bunch of information warfare called iw it's sometimes called but
they they have a they
have whole operations this is actually the craziest part they have like they've
they've hired the chinese
military at various points has hired millions and millions of people who are
supposed to be on like
various like chat groups and whatsapp groups and we chat groups and whatnot and
just um spread the
right kind of stories that'll make it such that they can like um they can make
their political aims
happen so for example in uh when when china wanted to start like kind of like
um uh i don't know what
the word is like uh like uh when hung when when china wanted hong kong to
become a part of china
again which happened just not to not to you know pretty recently the prc right
the prc exactly when
they want propaganda is that the way you're looking for yeah they would they
would yeah exactly they
would use a lot of propaganda and that's information warfare to be able to just
make it such that that
all happened much more easily well it's unbelievable i'll see stories even
about i'll be going through
tick tock and see a story come up about something in my life that is not even
true insane some of it looks
fun but never was a part of my existence and then you'll see hundreds of people
have said something
about like and they'll and they'll have friends that'll ask me about it i'm
like that's just crazy like
totally but i so yeah it's amazing to think of how many things we're watching
or absorbing that um
are just uh are are created just to delude us yeah i don't know if delude is
the word is it
trick us or make us think something just to halloween us out um wow so there
was a lot of interesting
things you know what's crazy man some things makes life scary but then it also
makes it interesting you
you know it also makes it interesting in a in a in a fun way