{
  "video_id": "reddit_1wel7o1",
  "channel_slug": "singularity",
  "channel_handle": "r/singularity",
  "title": "A Chinese researcher's opinions on a unified slowdown",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1wel7o1/a_chinese_researchers_opinions_on_a_unified/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260912",
  "published_at": "2026-09-12T19:07:08+00:00",
  "transcript": "I have seen that this subreddit is arguing over whether China will cooperate or be forced to slow down AI progress if the US wants to do so. As an AI researcher working in China, I think this problem is a bit more nuanced than how it is usually framed here. \n\n1. Will China voluntarily slow down? No, not as long as China is still playing catch-up. \n\nResearchers here do care about safety and the future of humanity, and the CPC is also concerned about an AI takeover. But this is not the first priority for most Chinese AI companies right now. Unlike what many people on this subreddit think, Chinese AI companies are mostly commercially driven rather than state-supported. There is intense competition among Chinese companies, just like in the US. For the sake of stock prices, they will not slow down.\n\n2. Will China be forced to slow down? It's possible, but not really likely.\n\n Chinese companies rely on distillation due to a lack of compute and the pressure to keep up. But in recent months, in-house chips have been expanding rapidly, which allows companies like Moonshot to train models with trillions of parameters. From what I have seen, it's quite naive to believe that embargoes can stop Chinese engineering.\n\n3. Will China cooperate to slow down? This is the most interesting part. \n\nAt the company level, Chinese AI companies are definitely not going to cooperate with Anthropic, because everyone here absolutely hates and mistrusts Anthropic for dismissing and demonizing China. At the state level, I think it's quite likely that there will at least be some formal agreements between China and the US on pacing the frontier, as the CPC always wants to play a part in global governance, and it has far more control over AI companies than the US does. But I don't expect these agreements to actually slow things down much.\n\nThese are just some of my thoughts.\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[54 upvotes] I mean if their AI is proving difficult to control or manage they'll slow down. It's not commercially helpful having a swarm of agents wreck your computer systems.\n\n[39 upvotes] Here's the thing with \"pacing the frontier\" - are they going to pace the companies that are not at the frontier?\n\nWhy should Mistral for instance slow down when it's like a year behind anyways? Why should China slow down now? What if they just say sure we'll slow down once we caught up?\n\nSo unless OpenAI and Anthropic are basically like, \"yup we could easily keep 6 months ahead of Chinese labs even without RSI, we'll still be progressing at an exponential pace, we just don't want to go vertical with an intelligence explosion\", we'll end up with like a dozen labs caught up to the frontier in a year. Which basically destroys OpenAI and Anthropic's business entirely.\n\n[13 upvotes] Well this is a great post. \n\nBtw just in general would you say it’s true that Chinese people have a positive opinion of AI? \n\nHave you seen good productivity gains so far?",
  "transcript_chars": 2949,
  "ingested_at": "2026-09-13T01:30:25.462194+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
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    "score": 202,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.93,
    "num_comments": 87,
    "author": "Imaginary_Music4768",
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