DEFEND EXPORT CONTROLS

“A very similar thing played out more recently when the US released its export controls expanding how it applied the entity list, designations, it applied what's 50% rule, what kind of captures all subsidiaries that have a 50% ownership stake with the listed entity. Inadvertently perhaps, they didn't realize they're going to capture 20,000 to 30,000 additional Chinese companies. China reacted. That's where we saw the rarest export controls. So it's been this period of overreach and then backing down.”

“He said, when you use DeepSeq, it has no sense of humor. Like the more advanced Google engines, ChachiBG, OpenAI, and so forth, you can actually joke with them. They're developing a sense of humor, and that his theory was that over time, humans will respond to more human AI. And China is constrained because they literally have people using algorithms for word searches, but policing what's said about Xinjiang or Tibet or democracy.”

“I think another big one to watch, particularly as we get closer to the midterms, is push back on the tariff and trade agenda. We're starting to see price issues in the United States. That's the kind of thing that really hits home for, you know, most Americans, who knows about the national security strategy, but they're going to go to the grocery store. And if it got really expensive to buy stuff, or if Christmas shopping is really expensive this year, that's the sort of thing that's going to change political sentiment.”

“So just to give a couple of examples, right, you've got this long list of bad things that China does economically that we're going to fix. How are we going to fix them? There is no guidance on how we are going to fix them. I mean, you can intuit from other parts of the strategy or just the actions that the Trump administration has taken to date, that a coercive, tariff-led approach would be the way to go, except we've already tried that, and it doesn't seem to be inducing China to change any of its behaviors.”

“That is all different now, and I think fundamentally, there is a question about whether this administration believes that we are in fact in a strategic competition with China or not. If you look at, for example, the National Security Strategy that came out earlier this week, it clearly emphasizes that there are some concerns with China. We have concerns particularly, and this is where the lens most seems to be, is through the economic lens. So much less emphasis on the security threat that China presents, much less emphasis on the US need to kind of keep China, I hate to say the word contained, but contained, you know, from a regional security perspective, and much more just on, let's figure out how we can make a deal with China.”

“Everything about China's industrial policy for the last decades has been about self-sufficiency getting off of US tech. It is, as you know, a little bit more complicated than that. You've got private sector Chinese firms who are just going to want the best technology available. But look at what the Chinese government's response to this loosening of export controls has been. It's thanks very much for this unilateral concession. We're now going to go tell everybody in China to not buy the Nvidia chips because it runs directly counter to the goals of self-sufficiency.”

“We did a trade war game where we were trying to play out some of these dynamics with the US trying to make a deal with China as it's imposing tariffs on everyone else and trying to push a de-risking agenda, all these different factors. It was notable that in the course of the game, as soon as the United States started negotiating with China, all the other countries were like, well, we're not doing anything on China de-risking. We're not going to sanction China. We're not going to do more export controls. That's exactly what has played out in the real world.”

“I don't know if this was intentional that you used a font metaphor, just after we learned that Secretary Rubio has condemned the use of Calibri in State Department of Correspondence. Yup, that came out. So apparently, we're going back to Times New Roman for official correspondence. What is wrong with Calibri? Is Calibri woke? It's too woke.”