Jeffrey Ding on China's AI Dream, the AI 'Arms Race', and AI as a General Purpose Technology

In episode 16 of The Gradient Podcast, we talk to Jeffrey Ding, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation

(01:35) Getting into AI research(04:20) Interest in studying China(06:50) Deciphering China’s AI Dream(23:25) Beyond the AI Arms Race(36:45) China's Current Capabilities in AI(46:45) AI as a General Purpose and Strategic Technology(57:38) ChinaAI Newsletter(01:04:20) Teaching AI to Policy People(01:06:30) Current Focus(01:09:10) Interests Outside of Work + Outro

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Jeffrey Ding (@jjding99) is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, as well as a research affiliate with the Centre for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford. His current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers, with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. He also puts out the excellent ChinaAI newsletter, which has (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics.

Podcast Theme: “MusicVAE: Trio 16-bar Sample #2” from "MusicVAE: A Hierarchical Latent Vector Model for Learning Long-Term Structure in Music"

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (@andrey_kurenkov), a PhD student with the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab working on learning techniques for robotic manipulation and search.

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