Dario and Wenfeng are the only two Serious AI leaders

Upon reflection, I am not at all surprised by Dario's hawkishness. He's sincere and he's making sense, under assumptions that look plausible from his vantage point. I think Dario and Wenfeng are the only two Serious AI leaders (with the increasingly irrelevant exception of Demis), and their motivations are very similar. Both can think beyond AI and even beyond business or tech, they want their respective civilization to survive and realize its potential. Both see this won't happen by default, prefer hope to cope, and assume responsibility; because someone has to, and nobody else will. They are, essentially, superior men. (I still hate Dario because he's morally wrong and dumb. But he's not a petty man, and that counts). Dario is San Francisco born and raised, a Putnam contestant, a Princeton scientist. Just look at him, at how he dresses or moves, at the design language of Claude (Claude who?), the Superbowl ad. Here is a man who wasn't born for a B2B SaaS era; he belongs in Los Alamos or Xerox PARC, he's homesick for a world that ended before his birth, and he looks almost racially alien in the transmogrified 2020s California. And I think the whole contemporary EA thing, with group houses and weird sex, disfigures his fate rather than defines him; though he'd have always found a weird camp and an ideological hill to die on – back then, he'd have been either a red diaper baby or an autistic ahh eugenicist like Shockley (or both). It's no wonder he despises Altman, who's a commensurate merchant, if terrifyingly optimized. In his essays, Dario says quite clearly – and people on both sides of the debate miss it – that AGI is the only chance of America and more broadly the West to remain dominant or, indeed, at all relevant. He hopes to end the CCP, but the top priority is closer to home. Pay attention: in "On DeepSeek and Export Controls" he doesn't doompost about Chinese *priority to AGI*, about the risk of them "winning the race". He says: "if they achieve mere PARITY, if they merely ALSO have millions of chips in the critical window 2026-2028, we are COOKED, we don't get a bipolar world, we just get a Chinese hegemony". He is NOT racist towards the Chinese; he might be one of the least racist people in the game. He looks at the US, at his beloved home, the beacon of liberty and harbinger of Fukuyama's end of history and all that, he steps over a fentanyl zombie in his hometown, and understands that on a fairly short horizon this bitch will get its shit pushed in over Taiwan, kicked out of the Eastern Pacific, evicted from global markets, and brought to its knees. He looks at Trump and Hegseth and sees brutish monkeys at the end of imperial lifecycle. He sees what @Bluebearmonkey sees: butthurt wypipos who can't do mafs, coping and seething. He sees the writing on the wall. Forget ending history – not getting ended will depend on CCP's goodwill. As for why he doesn't believe that will be forthcoming, this is another matter. Suffice to say he doesn't think relying on their goodwill would be dignified. Fair enough. Luckily, he's not a random chud lamenting the fallen West and quaking in terror of the Yellow Peril. He's the CEO of an ideologically cohesive, very rich, very well-connected frontier AGI company. And AGI means he gets to change the timeline. All of these Chinese advantages – workforce, STEM graduates, industrial integration, dual use supply chains, non-retarded and strategically patient governance – all of them are as dust before a sufficiently superior, widely deployed AGI, and then ASI! His essays lay out a pretty clear ladder. 6 months of a gap result in unstable bipolarity. One year of a gap is enough to achieve minimal viable defense in cyber domain. Two years of a gap is enough to speak from a position of strength about slowing down Chinese AI. Three years, and it's "WWII marines versus Medieval swordsmen", flawless victory, a victory so cheap it can be had in passing, like the Venezuela operation, irrespective of lacking political will at home. And then, history might finally end with the triumph of liberal democracy. He does explicitly cite Fukuyama and set this target, he's very quaint in such things. For him, Francis is unambiguously a prophet; the world just doesn't measure up yet. Time to repair the world. Most people can't understand. They'll say he's hyping for IPO, that he's attempting regulatory capture, that he's racist, EA, fumbled a baddie, a Jew, can't compete… whatever. Dario doesn't care, he has a cult called Anthropic and a clear goal: survival and victory for his civilization. That goal is also threatened by the AGI effort per se; so Dario calls for pacing the frontier. But he doesn't lose sight of the other, human threat. So it can sound a bit bonkers how he talks of the risks of extinction but is still so psychotically focused on beating China. Those are the same concerns. Wenfeng is also a man out of his era. He's a very classical natural Chinese elite; maybe a Confucian junzi, maybe a Taoist mystic. He looks at his people and sees an endless sea of xiaoren who've been conditioned to hustle and grind and cut corners rather than dream and create, he sees myopic fast-following, fear of abstract thought, lack of confidence, revenue-maxxing corporations who'd poach a washed-up VP from Google and burn money on traffic buying rather than invest in domestic talent and innovation, and the dark shadow of American AGI that folks like Dario will use to forever lock them in this – or even more degrading, forever irrelevant – condition. He understands that nobody else is stepping up; the Heaven has appointed him on this task, to provide the means and to educate by example. He makes enough money to not have to bow and scrape before arrogant investors. He buys 10K A100s. He creates DeepSeek – and I repeat, without certainty that it'll work, DeepSeek 深度求索 is a quote from Li Sao, an ancient story of a virtuous minister who was slandered at the court and drowned himself – and he delves into the unknown. DeepSeek is, in some ways, a cult too. Most people can't understand. They'll say it's a side hobby of High-Flyer, to squeeze the GPUs used for trading stocks. They'll say he's a price butcher; they'll say he's subsidized; they'll say he's arrogant or can't do business or lost touch when he doesn't serve them their favorite goon bot or raises prices to free up compute for R&D. They don't get how petty their whole way of thinking is and how serious this all has become. Researchers of the caliber he needs – do understand. Maybe that'll be enough. By Wenfeng's estimate, China is up to 18 months behind. That's aligned with Dario's victory condition. He wants to make it 3 months, which is Dario's unstable bipolarity condition. So they are necessarily at odds. Wenfeng probably can understand Dario. Dario might be too blinkered and ideological to try to understand Wenfeng. But they're both serious men, and their motivations are very easy to understand for me. They are, however, both inscrutable for the petty.

This means that in 2026-2027 we could end up in one of two starkly different worlds. In the US, multiple companies will definitely have the required millions of chips (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars). The question is whether China will also be able to get millions of chips.

If they can, we'll live in a bipolar world, where both the US and China have powerful AI models that will cause extremely rapid advances in science and technology — what I've called "countries of geniuses in a datacenter". A bipolar world would not necessarily be balanced indefinitely. Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything.

If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It's unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage. Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.