VR, DeepSeek, China, and an optimistic future

Video Description

I interviewed Alvin Graylin, an author and entrepreneur. He has lived and worked in both China and the US, and we discuss his experiences in each area. He has worked in semiconductor industries as well as speech recognition and other fields. Alvin describes how virtual realities and other extended reality ideas are coming to fruition with new hardware and AI integration. He talks about new types of headgear and Ray-Ban sunglasses, and we discuss past experience with Google Glass. In terms of our future, Alvin is a strong optimist. In fact, in his book he played the optimist while his co-author played the pessimist. I thought he had a particularly good answer to the existential risk question starting at 57:40, check it out! #ai #vr #china 0:00 Intro 0:49 Contents 1:00 Part 1: The geopolitics of semiconductors 1:05 Living in China and the US 2:02 Current position is at HTC 2:20 Involvement in semiconductor space 3:25 Intel and Pat Gelsinger 3:52 Startup in China based on conversational search 4:59 Startup was before its time (2005) 5:41 Geopolitical tensions between China and US 6:12 China blocking Western companies? or just putting rules in place? 6:38 Comparison with TikTok trying to operate in the US 6:53 China prioritizing technology leadership 7:53 Lots of Chinese AI research and PhDs 8:57 Quality of those research papers 9:44 Still working with HTC but from the US 10:24 US is centre of innovation 10:42 Companies in the US are led by immigrants 11:52 Canadian universities should be on "standby" 12:48 Escalating tension, brewing AI arms race 13:16 Part 2: extended realities and AI 13:27 definition of XR , etc 14:17 Brief demo of hardware for extended realities 15:06 Google Glass comparison 15:18 Example: researcher with one handed keychain 15:55 Learning lessons from Google Glass 16:30 Multiple vendors coming out with new devices 17:13 Rayban sunglasses from Meta 18:25 Alvin's book introduction 18:59 Alvin takes the optimist view (of course) 20:13 Example: Optimistic HCI vision of the future 20:54 Starting with speech processing systems 21:41 Speech recognition evolved very quickly 22:15 The effect of increasing computing power 22:51 We will get to AGI very quickly 23:25 What if AGI comes this year? Too fast? 24:06 Industrial revolutions took decades 24:59 Universal basic income in different countries 25:51 Is the US's success correlation or causation? 26:37 US success partially based on attracting smartest people in the world 27:46 Funding sources in different countries 28:50 China spending on infrastructure 29:35 AI frontier models are a depreciating asset 30:11 Every AI lab is using the same resources 30:36 Fei Fei Li startup 32:05 Generative AI makes wearable headgear more popular over the long run 32:53 Can't you just rotate an image? 34:06 DeepSeek model just released (previous model V3) 36:02 Limiting resources to limit China progress is backfiring 36:40 American labs are collaborating with defense industry 37:14 Part 3: Our future with AI 37:28 Doom, acceleration, and other philosophies 38:16 Middle path makes sense, optimistic 39:37 Moloch is forcing everyone to race ahead 41:31 The Manhattan project for AI 43:18 If you have (weapons) tech, you will use it 44:51 Game theoretic argument about coordination 46:01 We have an iterated game in real life 49:11 Staghunt instead of prisoner's dilemma 50:24 It does not make sense to defect 51:16 What about vendettas? 52:15 The transition period will be tough 52:36 US and China need to form a group to create incentives 55:19 Star Trek and alien analogies 55:50 What a world of abundance looks like 56:33 The next 5-10 years is the most dangerous 57:40 The question of existential risk 1:01:35 More scared of teenage AI 1:03:36 Would be such a major change for society 1:04:47 Current democratic processes are not ideal 1:07:03 Problems with the US social safety net 1:08:08 South Korea birth rates 1:09:14 How many people are needed in the world? 1:10:28 Rethinking the economy etc 1:12:36 Fun and long conversation, read the book 1:13:45 Interesting time to be alive, and high responsibility 1:14:07 Outro