Five bangers from Nathan Lambert: 1. China's compute gap: "You talk to people [in China], and you're like, 'Oh, I heard an average OpenAI researcher has five thousand H100 equivalents that they can access at any time,' and like their jaw just falls to the floor. They're just like, 'I can't comprehend.'" 2. China's talent pool: "The Chinese labs are very technically excellent... To say that China is anything but equal on talent, you're gonna have a hard time because they just have so many people being trained at such a high level." 3. OpenAI's superpower: "[The frontier labs] have just taken the most ambitious bets the earliest in order to get there, and that's why OpenAI has done things like kickstart the reasoning model revolution." "And I think that kind of breakthrough and that beautiful plot with the inference scaling laws is peak OpenAI. They're really good at getting this plot that just changes how everyone thinks about everything." 4. Underestimating the competition: "The Chinese are so good at building models as well. I think there's a bit of cope where people are like, 'Only we are good at building models.' There are so many companies. There's, like, 20 to 30 companies that are building good models." 5. The AI risks that are already here: "[The lack of preparation] is kind of the thing that worries me more than, say, RSI is coming and unlocking new risks. There are risks that are here and that are gonna continue to diffuse." "Figuring out how to get society to prepare is very hard. I'm of the opinion that we need more eyes, we need more science, so that society feels informed." @natolambert