Reid riffs on the AI race with China and if the US should regulate AI

Following last week’s chat with former diplomat and author Anja Manuel, Reid talks about the potential benefits of an FDA for AI, the current status of the global race for artificial intelligence, and predicting what’s to come from American AI companies. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:03Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:08Aria Finger?

  Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.

• 0:18Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 0:24Aria Finger?

  So, we recently talked to Anja Manuel. And elsewhere, she has essentially called for an FDA for AI that requires testing and approval for new AI tech. What do you think of this idea? What are the pros? What are the cons?

• 0:38Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I'm going to cheat a little bit because Anya and I talk a lot because she's so spectacular and in this zone of area that I try to help. And she is deeply expert. So what I know is I can interpret what she's saying on FDA for AI differently than people would normally reflex. Because they normally reflex to say, oh, across the board, everything that happens vis a vis how AI touches consumers, hence FDA. Whereas Anya is actually starting with a viewpoint of actually, in fact, when it touches possible kind of global infrastructure, weapons, other kinds of areas, we should have a, you know,

• 1:23Reid Hoffman?

  kind of what's being done today with the UK and other AI safety institutes. How do you make sure that the essentials are done there for preserving kind of global social integrity? And I don't necessarily mean that about misinformation and kind of media sources, but actually kind of like the infrastructure of society. And that, I think, is a very good idea. It's one of the reasons why, you know, I helped kind of both on the UK and the US sides stand up their AI institutes. It's part of the reason I'm going out for the French Action AI Summit in Paris. I think that kind of global cooperation, in particular with our allies and kind of out

• 2:07Reid Hoffman?

  and as we were talking about in our possible episode with Anya, the global swing states, things of one. But it's also, of course, important with our competitors and our antagonists, you know, such as Russia and others, to also do this because I think it'll be very important. Now, The pros and cons kind of get to the pros on doing this is really important for kind of global stability. The cons are that, you know, one, it's obviously going to be, take a bunch of time and be difficult to do and whether it's, you know, kind of how implementable it is, you know, which we talked about some in the episode.

• 2:49Reid Hoffman?

  There's also this kind of question around, you know, regulation tends to accrete, you know, and one of the things is, you know, per our episode on super agency, you know, one of the key thing is innovation into the future and what we're getting in terms of safety and other benefits is really important. And so you don't want the, the regulation to too naturally accrete to really prevent those really good futures. All of which Anya would actually agree with. It's partially because she's so focused on this is what it means for geopolitics. This is what it means for a global, stable order for humanity.

• 3:29Reid Hoffman?

  And kind of what is the decades of institutions we've built since World War II that have made the post-World War II era, you know, one of the most safe and kind of least warfare like, you know, kind of global environments for humanity in that timeframe and why preserving that's really important and why the institutions and treaties and including where, you know, AI applies to terrorism, rogue states, you know, cybercrime, et cetera. It's important to do this.

• 4:02Aria Finger?

  Well, so when we think about the sort of global race for AI, AI is moving so quickly. And one of the things we want to make sure is that the US is, continues to be one of the leaders. Looking back over the last year, or even honestly, the last few months, like, has your opinion changed on where the US is in sort of the balance of power, whether we're on top or people are gaining on us? Like, how do you see that? And how has it changed?

• 4:27Reid Hoffman?

  Well, as Anya mentioned, part of what we've seen in the last couple of weeks right before that we were recording this is things like DeepSeek out of China. And all of us, you know, kind of technology watchers who, you know, previously were accused of being a little too histrionic about how close and how intense the race is with China. It's a demonstration that it's actually, it's a game on and the race is there. You know, DeepSeek has a bunch of different new features and the efficiency of how it was trained and operated that is, you know, kind of useful and one of the things that puts them in the, in the race. You know, one of the things that, as you know, Arya, that I've been talking about some

• 5:09Reid Hoffman?

  is how important it is that AI is American intelligence because to embed our values, to preserve the kind of world order that the US has been so instrumental in helping create and lead since World War II. And that, you know, not only is AI amplification intelligence, but also should be American intelligence. And so I think that the, the short answer is the, the gap has closed between, you know, kind of Chinese capabilities and American ones. And that's part of the reason why it's important that we redouble our efforts across the board. I think the efforts that, you know, we've been doing, you know, try to get TSMC and

• 5:52Reid Hoffman?

  semiconductors and, you know, in Intel fabs going is important. I think the, going to be really critical to do the refactoring various kind of energy permitting and development regulations, you know, not just nuclear, which will be very important for clean, but also just getting a lot more electricity provisioned and built effectively, along with data centers to, you know, how do we enable both our startup ecosystem and our hyperscalers to continue to develop at speed? And the good news is both of them are very strongly in the, in the game, but it's like, it's, it's not a question of, of kind of like, well, you know, how do we contain hyperscaler X?

• 6:35Reid Hoffman?

  It's a question of how do we get those developments and deployments at full speed and benefit the rest of the American society and the American world order?

• 6:45Aria Finger?

  I think, you know, Anya made a good point when we spoke to her that You know, the, the US is still the hotbed for innovation around the globe. Like China is catching up and they're closing gaps, but we still have our companies here moving as fast as possible and doing some really exciting things. And so, you know, in the last few months, we saw the arrival of O1. And so just give us a little bit about what you thought of that. And then any sort of thoughts, excitement, predictions for what's to come for these American AI companies?

• 7:17Reid Hoffman?

  A lot of O1 was kind of under commented. So, you know, the usual discussion around, you know, kind of the AI race is the next level of, of scale model. It's kind of like, and that's partially because we're conditioned on that from GPT-3 to 3.5 to four and kind of 4.0, you know, with four and 4.0 kind of being very similar in scale and size. And O1 is actually a retraining of kind of GPT-4 or 4.0 and put in a way that gets a set of different kind of 4.0 models trained and, you know, tuned in specific ways and kind of thinking together and thinking in kind of multiple parallel chains to kind

• 8:01Reid Hoffman?

  of generate the chain that is deepest. And it was one of the things that Sam Altman and Satya Nadella were gesturing at earlier last year is they're saying, well, what happens if you give more time for these AI models to think, but as opposed to like type in prompt, get answer, you kind of give it a more detailed kind of task and then it works on it for a while, you know, in a very, very quick proxy to how human beings work. Cause one of the superpowers, of course, of 4.0 is it's really fast and O1 generates a little bit more slowly, but can do the various things like, you know, detailed planning, chain of thinking.

• 8:42Reid Hoffman?

  And the places where O1 can be magical has been deeply under commented and it's actually in fact, a contributory vector to the whole scaling model. Cause you think, oh, well, we've got a one with GPT-4.0, but like, okay, we could have a one with GPT-5.0. And so, you know, kind of like these become two different parameters for increasing. And it's one of the things that even when. You're going to get to, because Anya was also clear that there's a set of different technological areas where China's in the lead because it can deploy those technologies, because it has a

• 9:21Reid Hoffman?

  hardware manufacturing edge relative to us on some very important vectors, drones, others. But it's kind of one of the areas where it's like, no, no, that's still an area where we're clearly so far ahead. But like, one of the things I commented in my book Blitzscaling is the only place that I've gone in the world, which makes me feel that Silicon Valley is moving slow, is China. And it's part of the reason why that speed to motion and going with intensity and clarity is actually, in fact, so important. The only place I've seen large companies work at the speed that the startups work in Silicon Valley is China, not in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has other ways to to kind of stay competitive and do stuff, but they

• 10:05Reid Hoffman?

  don't work at the same speed that a Xiaomi or a Tencent or a Baidu or others tend to operate. And so, anyway, so I think O1 is is under commented because of the amazing amount of, kind of call it, professional and cognitive capabilities it adds across a wide range. And so predictions for 2025 are obviously, well, I think we're going to see an intense amount of stuff being developed on how coding is accelerated. I think we'll see all of the major players, not just Microsoft and Google and OpenAI, but also Anthropic and others,

• 10:47Reid Hoffman?

  you know, working intensely on coding. And coding is not just important for its own sake, because there's kind of almost an infinite demand for software engineering, but it's also the lens on to how a whole bunch of other work gets amplified. One way of conceptualizing that lens is that part of what we're going to have, all of us, every single professional, you know, Aria, you, me, Reed, is a coding copilot in our phone, in our PC, in terms of

• 11:19Reid Hoffman?

  How we're operating. Also, once we've solved some of the coding acceleration, it gets to a slightly less clear fitness function, things like law, medicine, other areas that can also essentially make that work. And so part of the acceleration of coding, which I think we'll also see from O1 and other things, will be this acceleration of all of these other areas. And so those are, I think, some of the key kind of things to watch and track in 2025. And as those accelerations happen, we can then see what other accelerations will be coming in the near future after that.

• 12:02Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aliyah Yates, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 12:23Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saieda Sepieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, Venasi Delos, Malia Agudelo, Parth Patil, and Little Monster Media Company.