Adults and children

I for the most part enjoyed Dwarkesh Patel's recent interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while listening to it in the car (No way am I going to waste two hours of video time watching two guys like this talk). Without a doubt, the best part was hearing Jensen beat Dwarkesh down when the youngster was advancing simplistic arguments. Much as Stephen Kotkin -- when appearing on Patel's show to discuss his bio of Stalin -- had impromptu started in calling Dwarkesh "DP" or maybe even "DK" to put him in his place a little.

Dwarkesh is no doubt a force of nature, an impressively smart guy who reads and studies prodigiously and gets a parade of really smart people from diverse places come on his podcast. But he more than anyone epitomizes a trend exhibited at times by the haute technoscenti to talk 175 miles per second out of the apparent belief that their time and that of their interlocutors and listeners is so valuable that it must be optimized through machine gun staccato speech. So that software engineers become "SWEs" etc, because the thoughts just must must must come out.

The big bone of contention between Jensen and Dwarkesh comes when the youngster shows that he has bought hook, line and sinker the neo-Cold War logic of restricting the export of top of the line Nvidia chips to China. We all kind of have. It's hard to think our way around it. Jensen pushes back, insisting that there is much more to AI than chips ("it's a five-layer cake") and that by restricting the export of Blackwells and whatever the next-gen top Nvidia chip to China, we are forcing their champions -- first and foremost Huawai, it seems -- to build around their absence and create an AI stack that will be quicker and will come to dominate AI in the global south. 

I'm honestly not sure who's right here, but I know who the adult is in that room, and certainly Jensen has good points. Fundamentally he is also right that we need to foster more interplay and dialogue between US and Chinese researchers as a counterweight to the Sturm und Drang emanating from the top of the political establishment on both sides of the Pacific. I have heard that the Chinese people are even more jingoistic than their leadership at this point in time. Points of lower-level interchange between our societies are dramatically less in evidence than they were 10-15 years ago. We need to have contact all up and down society to remind ourselves of what we are dealing with (another nation where people want to live and raise families and eat and sing and sleep) to offset the power-crazed ideologues and those who want to be inscribed in the Book of History as Big Men.