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Minus One · 4 min · Dec 13, 2024

Countries will compete to adopt US or Chinese AI stacks

Alexandr Wang says Chinese labs have caught up in AI research and predicts countries will choose between US and Chinese stacks. He sees chip access and export controls as bargaining tools in that contest.

Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang is founder and CEO of Scale AI.

Dropped out of MIT to co-found Scale AI in 2016; Meta invested $14.3B in it in 2025 and hired him to lead Superintelligence Labs.

  • Aditya Agarwal, Host · General partner, South Park Commons

    One of Facebook's first engineers, he helped build its first search engine; later CTO of Dropbox.

About this segment

Alexandr Wang says Chinese labs have caught up in AI research and predicts countries will choose between US and Chinese stacks. He sees chip access and export controls as bargaining tools in that contest.

From “Scale AI & the Startup Hunger Games with Alexandr Wang”, Dec 13, 2024. Watch the full episode

“There's basically no research gap between the leading US labs and the Chinese labs.”
Alexandr Wangat 20:05 · Minus One20:05

Takeaways

  1. AI stack adoption is becoming a geopolitical contest.
  2. Wang says US and Chinese labs are close in research.
  3. He sees chip access as a policy lever.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 34:31AI founders need to separate conviction from industry hype4:18
  2. 42:08AI startups can win by focusing where giants cannot3:13
  3. 30:15Model progress now depends on specialized human data3:55

  4. 20:02Countries will compete to adopt US or Chinese AI stacks4:13

  5. 26:53AI agents need to leave chat and enter existing workflows3:25Up next
  6. 12:59Scale rewards economic impact over technical difficulty4:50
  7. 49:45Enterprise startups should budget time for bureaucracy3:31
  8. 10:42Enterprise sellers must shape perception as well as reality2:20

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 20:04

    First, I think there's no gap in research. There's basically no research gap between the leading US labs and the Chinese labs. So, you know, they're basically caught up in terms of performance. And there's like pretty far-reaching implications for how this plays out going forward. And so that was kind of like a landmark result. I think there's probably a few things to watch. I think the first is which AI technology gets exported more between the US versus China. It will be this race to see which AI stack, so to speak, becomes more globally adopted. So in the first wave of technology, the US came out on top. So Google search is basically globally dominant except for China.

  2. 20:58

    social networking, American social networking is basically dominant everywhere except for China. Then in sort of like the second leg of this race, when it was more of our hardware and telco, China actually came out on top. Huawei technology became pretty widely exported globally. It was sort of packaged in with the Belt and Road initiatives where China sort of pretty quickly became the partner of choice for the majority of countries around the world, actually. And now I think AI is kind of the third phase. So you can see that the U.S. forced the UAE to decide if they want to be on the sort of like China Huawei stack or they want to be on the U.S. stack. The UAE for now is picking the U.S. I think we're going to see a lot more decisions where, you know, countries are going to decide are they on the U.S. AI stack or the the on the Chinese AI stack. I don't think

  3. 21:47

    the U.S. even the U.S. from a foreign policy standpoint doesn't even really care about being the AI stack globally. I think we care about being the AI stack to some of our partners, but not all the partners. That'll be one war that happens. And the other one that happens is, the thing to really watch is the export controls. So one of the most important things that the Biden admin did is they launched very restrictive export controls on chips. So there's maybe like one one hundredth the number of high-end GPUs in China versus the United States because we don't let them buy them. And they also don't have ASML machines and they don't have all the sort of precursors to enable them to actually build the chip industry. With President Trump coming in and with sort of new players in the field, I think one of the questions, I think one of the biggest

  4. 22:43

    questions is, are we going to maintain a hard line on the export controls? I think we certainly should. That's one of the biggest things that's enabling us to maintain a strong advantage. And what is that negotiation going to look like? Because there's, the looming threat is by 2027, President Xi and the CCP have said they want to take Taiwan. So, and they've asked the military to prepare um the people of liberation's army to prepare to take taiwan by 2027 so there's this looming date three years from now um uh by which you know china's at least the ccp is at least saying that they'll take um they'll take taiwan and uh as soon as president trump gets into seat and gets inaugurated january 20th that's going to start the clock on the negotiations which is can we prevent China from taking that action

  5. 23:39

    or prevent China from blowing out the PSNC or, you know, prevent the sort of catastrophic scenario and what do we need to give in exchange? And I think that will be, you know, whether it's the headline or it's like a low-grade kind of negotiation over time, that is the big picture thing that we'll watch over the next few years. And ultimately, I think there's like... too much incentive in the world, like World War III will be averted.

  6. 24:03

    I don't think there's any interest to get into a hot war, but I think we need to watch like, what are we going to have to give in exchange for them not invading and not taking over the semiconductor industry?