556. The US-China AI Arms Race and Badenoch vs. Rory’s Centrism
7/22/20261 hr 1 min
Is China quietly outsmarting the US in the AI arms race, and is Trump laying the pitch to challenge the results of the US midterms with his repeated, unfounded claims of Chinese election meddling? Why has Zelenskyy sacked his popular defence minister just as Ukraine is winning on the battlefield? Does Kemi Badenoch’s purge of Rory-adjacent centrists from the Conservative Party show she is even more ruthless than Margaret Thatcher?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRory Stewart· Host0:01
Three months ago, the defining story in artificial intelligence was the race between China and the US, with China seeming to be a long way behind. And yet today, China is unveiling AI systems that are strikingly close to the US frontier, while Xi Jinping launches a new international AI organization and invites the developing world to join it. So what exactly are we looking at? Is China genuinely catching America technologically, or has it become extraordinarily good at taking American breakthroughs, building on them, and making them cheaper, open, and more accessible? And is this summit really about artificial intelligence at all, or is it something much bigger about soft as well as hard power? A Belt and Road Initiative for AI, an attempt to make Chinese technology, Chinese standards, Chinese institutions the default digital infrastructure for the Global South. Because if that's right, then the real competition, both in AI and in geopolitics, may no longer be over who builds the single smartest model. It may be over who shapes the technological order that the rest of the world ends up living in. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.
Alastair Campbell· Host1:24
Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £200 below the Ofgem price cap. Plus,