He replaces John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois in one of the most high-profile decisions of Bari Weiss’s early tenure as the network’s editor in chief.

© Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

社交平台X公司老板埃隆·马斯克周三表示，其集团将遵守澳大利亚对16岁以下青少年禁止使用社交媒体的规定。澳大利亚是首个采取此类措施的国家。

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（德国之声中文网）《金融时报》周二（12月9日）援引知情官员报道，特朗普总统的特使给予泽连斯基仅“数天”时间，来对美方拟定的和平协议做出回应。这份协议被认为带有很强的俄罗斯手笔，以出让乌克兰领土，换取美国尚十分模糊的安全保证。

乌克兰总统泽连斯基周一在伦敦会晤了英法德领导人。他告知，在上周六长达两小时的通话中，特朗普的特使威特科夫（Steve Witkoff）和美国总统的女婿库什纳（Jared Kushner）敦促他迅速做出决定。一位知情人士表示，特朗普希望在“圣诞节前”达成协议。

知情官员说，泽连斯基告诉美国特使，他需要时间与欧洲盟友磋商，然后再对华盛顿的提议做出反应。基辅担心，如果在没有欧洲支持的情况下，美国单方面推进它的和平协议，将导致西方团结破裂。

一位西方官员形容乌克兰的境遇进退两难：一方面，他们无法接受割地条件，另一方面，他们也很难拒绝的美国要求。

周一，特朗​​普在接受Politico采访时，被问到是否为泽连斯基设定了达成协议的时间表。特朗普表示，“嗯，他得抓紧时间，开始接受现实……因为他正在输掉（这场战争）。”

DW中文有Instagram！欢迎搜寻dw.chinese，看更多深入浅出的图文与影音报道。

© 2025年德国之声版权声明：本文所有内容受到著作权法保护，如无德国之声特别授权，不得擅自使用。任何不当行为都将导致追偿，并受到刑事追究。

米色墙纸

我翻了翻我向 ChatGPT 提的第一个任务是什么：不出所料，果然是文字工作，写一个英语文书。后面还有随大流，让它帮我做一个减肥食谱。当年标志性的黑绿配色，真是唤醒人的记忆。

那时的 GPT 还不像现在这般「巧言令色」，也不如现在智能，长长的文本我要截断成几节，每一次发过去都要在开头附上 prompt，保证它理解任务。

三年前，ChatGPT 像彗星一样出现，不只是它在事务型工作上的便捷和智能，恰恰是它在这种对话、探讨当中，闪现出了「像人一样」的苗头。不管是记忆能力，还是绝不重复的语句，它第一次让人意识到，纯粹的二进制语言，居然可以有这样的表现。

它逻辑通顺、情感充沛、几近完美。从此「表达的门槛」不存在了，语病、错字、词不达意，都可以交给吸收了亿万数据的大语言模型，由它生产不会出错的成品——甚至只需一次输入。

但代价是什么？文学评论中有一种说法叫「米色散文 beige prose」，指的是语言平实、构简洁的行文风格，类似于中文里的「描白」。这种文风简练、舒适，但也因此缺乏识别度，像米白这种颜色一样，不会出错也不会出彩。

像极了 ChatGPT 会给出的东西，尽管现在三年过去，模型的更新一次比一次强，但始终不会脱离 LLM、transformer 最最底层的核心：概率。

概率的暴政

其实平心而论，GPT 的口吻和腔调如今已经形成一种「AI 风味」，还真有了一定的识别度。在 GPT 5.1 上线之前，在 OpenRouter 平台以隐名模型上线，也被网友通过和往届模型的回答相似性做比较，找出来是 OpenAI 的出品。

ChatGPT 几代以来，各自都有不同的文风：经典的「不是……而是……」，更早一点的「接住」「我在」，历久弥新的破折号、加粗、还有不分青红皂白就出现的 emoji 表情符号。

虽然说，这些小花招并不是总讨人喜欢，但不会出大错：本质上，大语言模型是在「预测下一个词」，它依据概率行事。只要踩着最大公约数走，又能坏到哪儿去呢？

不过，一个冷知识是，模型算法并不总是选择预测中概率最高的词——这解释了为什么同一个 prompt 会得到同一个大意下不同的结果。算法工程中会引入 Temprature、Top-P、Top-K 等方法，为结果注入随机性。

为了符合人类反馈强化学习（RLHF）中对「有用性」和「安全性」的定义，这些参数带来变化，但它们仍然必须在「概率较高的一组词」里抽样。所以算法并不完全输出平均值，而是会画一个圈，在不出大错的情况下，进行一些小小的发挥。

于是，三年当中，从小红书里的探店文案，到年终总结里的自我剖析，再到营销号的起号文案——你会发现一种惊人的相似性，所有的文字都变得通顺了，所有的观点都变得「不是……而是」了，偶尔有些不错的发挥，可总体而言，所有的情绪也都变得粗钝了。ChatGPT 带来一种无风险的创造力，也是概率的暴政。某种程度上，算法厌恶惊喜，它的本质是平滑。

不过无论如何，AI 味道的内容已经渗入我们的生活，我们也逐渐不再为此暴跳如雷。我们和 AI 形成了一种诡谲的默契：为了效率与得体，可以心甘情愿地让渡了部分性格。

思维的逆行

如果说前两年我们在训练 AI，那么第三年，AI 开始训练我们。尤其到了第三年时，各种应用工具都越来越丝滑，也越来越全能的情况下，用户和 AI 的关系，走向了一种奇异的「共生」。

这体现在，我们已经分不清谁在训练谁。

起初，我们以为自己在训练 AI。我们给它数据，给它反馈，教它像人一样说话。

除了工程师，没有人是为了训练它而用，都是要解决具体问题的，需要它交付答案乃至更复杂的成果的。于是，为了得到更精准的答案，我们开始钻研「提示词工程」（Prompt Engineering）。我们学会了把复杂的、充满歧义的人类想法，拆解成条理清晰、逻辑递进的指令。

在提问之前，我们的脑子里会先进行一轮「预处理」，剔除掉那些过于感性、过于跳跃的念头，因为我们潜意识里知道：「AI 不明白这些个东西，要用它能听懂的方式下指令才行。」

使用工具的过程，就是在被工具形塑 ——这句话已经说倦了。所以，在一个强调平滑的大语言模型面前，我们也变了，变得更合乎逻辑，更有效率了，也更像机器了。

看着屏幕上飞速生成的文字，我们既感到「一切尽在掌握」的快感，又感到一种主体性流失的虚无在暗中扼住喉咙。

唯一留下的

「这也算更新？」到第三年时，ChatGPT 的更新已经完全不像曾经那样 引起惊呼，更多的是吐槽和埋怨。苹果用了十多年才做到的事，OpenAI 三年就做到了。

然而吐槽归吐槽，用还是在用。ChatGPT 如今是坐拥 7 亿用户的超级巨头，在它生日这一天，有很多的「生贺」——连罗伯特都酸了。

再联系到 GPT 5 上线时，全球各地用户对 4o 被强制下架的不满和抗议，你不得不正视一件事：我们和 ChatGPT 之间，还有一个关系维度叫「情感维度」。

越来越多的人在向 ChatGPT 倾诉那些无法对活人说出口的秘密。听起来很悲哀，但如果你真的体验过，你会发现其中的张力极其迷人：你知道屏幕对面是一堆冰冷的矩阵乘法，你知道它的「共情」只是基于统计学的模仿。但在某些时刻，这种「模拟的理解」比「真实的不耐烦」要温柔得多。

人类的倾听往往带着评判，带着「我早告诉过你」的傲慢，或者带着急于给出建议的焦虑。而 AI 只是倾听（或者说，处理），只是安抚，它提供了一种「无风险的亲密」，还是无条件的。

「论迹不论心」，何况 GPT 都没有心，在一个没有实体的对象面前，好像人才能真正意义上的卸下防备。

情感维度的张力，恰恰最能代表我们和 ChatGPT 之间的关系：常常帮助，总是交心，偶尔纠结。

这种关系，也代表了我们和人工智能的第一个阶段。三年挺长的，但又还很短，只是人类和技术漫长共舞当中，一小段浅尝辄止的舞步。

在下一个三年，又一个三年当中，我们会继续停留在这种充满张力的关系中，而我们所能做的，最「人类」的事情，就是保持那一点点偶尔的纠结——这样才能证明，那个坐在屏幕前的，依然是一个复杂、矛盾、无法被完全计算的人。

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Here to discuss is of the Silverado Policy Accelerator.

We get into:

• Why this is, in Dmitri’s words, “a disaster”

• There are military balance of power implications for selling chips to China

• Why the rest of the AI ecosystem is against selling chips to China, Why Trump made this call anyway, and why SME export liberalization might be next

• Where the GAIN Act goes from here

Listen now on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s first toast the unfortunate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Nicholas Jon Ganjei. On Monday morning, he proudly issued a press release for his cool-sounding “Operation Gatekeeper,” which intercepted $160 million worth of Nvidia H100s and H200s.

That afternoon, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States would allow Nvidia to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China. Dmitri, please make sense of this for me.

Dmitri Alperovitch: There’s no way to sugarcoat this — it’s a disaster. This isn’t only about the Department of Justice. The U.S. Attorney General’s statement highlighted how critical AI is to military applications. The President’s own AI action plan discussed how the United States must aggressively adopt AI within its armed forces to maintain its global military preeminence, while ensuring that the use of AI is secure and reliable. This technology is essential to U.S. military dominance and the successes of the U.S. Intelligence community.

You have to give the administration credit — it is doing a lot to ensure all levels of the U.S. government are adopting AI. Why we would enable China to do the same is beyond me. Are we going to sell them aircraft carriers or Virginia-class submarines? Should we let them into AUKUS? This is effectively what we are doing.

It is outrageous that Jensen Huang has been able to pull the wool over the eyes of people in government and on Capitol Hill, convincing them that arming our primary adversary — the one we are unquestionably in a cold war with — is somehow good for America. I understand it’s good for Nvidia’s sales and for him personally, but it is a disaster for our national security.

Jordan Schneider: What I find baffling is the contradiction in Nvidia’s public messaging. Jensen Huang and his company argue that their technology will revolutionize every conceivable industry, all requiring massive amounts of GPU capacity. But when asked directly about the military implications of selling these chips, Huang downplays the risk. He suggests that China’s military will acquire the necessary chips regardless and claims they are too sophisticated to use American technology for sensitive, dual-use applications. It’s ludicrous that this technology is transformative for every field except for the military.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It doesn’t make sense. AI will transform everything. Even in civilian uses, do we want China to win in automotive, energy, and everything else? Because that’s what you’re enabling by selling chips to them. The primary concern is their military and intelligence services, but we are also in an economic competition. I would rather kneecap Chinese competitors to enable our own companies to succeed. Why would you do otherwise?

This is equivalent to selling supercomputers to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. No one even considered doing that. You could make the case that it would support Soviet agriculture and feed starving people, but no one said that because those same computers could be used for nuclear weapons testing and countless other military applications. There was no debate about it — it was understood to be a bad idea.

50 years later, we’re in a cold war. This is unbelievably shortsighted — putting profit above national security. Jensen Huang said if you’re a China hawk, you’re unpatriotic and un-American. I think selling supercomputing capabilities to the Chinese military is as unpatriotic and un-American as it gets.

Jordan Schneider: Jensen, if you’re listening, you’re invited to come on ChinaTalk anytime to make your case.

Dmitri, what’s telling is that the rest of the tech industry is finally pushing back. After months of staying quiet for fear of losing access to Nvidia chips, major players like Microsoft and AWS are supporting measures like the GAIN Act. The benefit of selling chips to China is mostly limited to Nvidia. U.S. hyperscalers and AI labs now face a powerful new competitor for limited chip manufacturing, driving up prices. The upside seems narrow, especially when Nvidia’s strongest argument — that the world, including China, will be locked into CUDA — seems far-fetched.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Nvidia’s argument is knowingly false. The GAIN Act is the ultimate ‘America First’ act. It stipulates that before chips are sold to countries of concern like China, we must ensure that U.S. demand is satisfied. American companies are first in line. How anyone could argue against this is beyond me.

The Act doesn’t say, “we’ll cut China off completely to ensure their military doesn’t get chips” — we’re saying, “let’s make sure American companies have priority.” It’s a no-brainer. I’ve talked to hyperscalers who are supportive of this act, and even other chip companies are saying they agree with the concept. The fight wasn’t about the details — the fight was a push for no restrictions on sales to China, which is unbelievable.

Jensen’s argument that the U.S. wants to make China addicted to the American tech stack is ridiculous. There is no addiction — chips aren’t cocaine. You can see this today with every single hyperscaler — Google, Amazon, Microsoft with its Maia chip, and now Meta with its own custom chips — all saying they are moving off CUDA. Many already are.

The top two frontier models, Claude and Gemini, were reportedly trained on Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs, respectively. There aren’t enough chips to go around, and for cost and strategic reasons, pretty much every frontier company is now using a multi-chip architecture — CUDA, Trainium, TPUs, and others. There is no addiction. Companies were able to make that switch in months, it’s easy — this is software and APIs. You can give AI one API and tell it to rewrite it in the form of another. It’s a trivial task.

Now we’re selling China H200s. This is probably the start of a broader concession on Blackwell, and then Rubin. Jensen won’t stop at the H200 — he will want to sell everything. The Chinese want to receive the latest and greatest chips, not only the Hopper generation. We’re going to sell them these chips, and they’re going to build competitive models. DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are already good — they’re at most 12 months behind. They will quickly catch up and become leading models.

China will keep investing in Huawei because the Chinese are not stupid. Jensen says that if we don’t sell them chips, they’ll invest in their own, like Huawei’s Ascend chips. They’re doing that anyway. Xi Jinping is going to demand it, which is why you’re seeing China’s response that they will restrict the importation of H200s to ensure there is still domestic demand for Huawei chips.

Huawei’s Ascend chips will eventually catch up, and Chinese companies — supposedly “addicted” to the American AI stack — will switch over in days or weeks. What will we have achieved? We will have relinquished our lead in frontier AI models, and eventually, they’ll have chips that replace Nvidia’s. It is myopic and stupid for Nvidia’s own business model. They are focused on the next quarter and the next year versus a couple of years from now when China dominates both chips and frontier models.

Jordan Schneider: If this goes through, and tens of billions of dollars worth of chips are exported to China, and the future you portend comes true, will there will be a political price to pay? This was a major talking point for Trump on his campaign — “Winning the AI race” and “American AI dominance”. A year or 18 months from now, if China is releasing crazy new AI-powered technologies that were all trained on Nvidia chips, that will be a tricky political dance. Nice calls from Jensen won’t be enough to smooth that over.

Dmitri Alperovitch: We are already there. Almost a year ago, there was a brouhaha over the release of DeepSeek. The surprise was unwarranted: it shouldn’t have shocked anyone paying close attention. But people reacted with, “Oh my God, the Chinese are catching up.” Of course they are. Deepseek was built on H100 chips, which, until recently, were not restricted. There will be another DeepSeek moment, but worse. DeepSeek was good, but it was still behind frontier models. The next models will be better.

Sam Altman is in panic mode over Gemini 3 because its capabilities eclipse his models. This will happen to all American frontier models and to the country more broadly. The Chinese will crush us with cheaper power, tons of researchers, and massive state subsidies. The one thing they were missing — compute — will now flow into China.

Jordan Schneider: The Financial Times reported Chinese companies were training models in Malaysia or Singapore. That’s not ideal and not as efficient as AliCloud’s operations in China. There, they can rapidly deploy numerous H100s while benefiting from straightforward communication, a reliable power grid, and lower energy costs.

Dmitri Alperovitch: We should have been cracking down on H100 access in Malaysia and elsewhere. Chips shipped directly to China will be prioritized for high-side intelligence and military networks. Chinese agencies can’t use public clouds in Malaysia for their classified data. But now they can grab those chips from private companies in China and prioritize them for military purposes, as they do with everything else.

Jordan Schneider: That seems like the most salient reason China would want the chips inside the country. Training models in Malaysia is annoying, but only 10%-annoying. There are also data privacy restrictions, which they can get around if they’re serving domestic consumers in China. What do they want complete control of their chips for? The sensitive stuff that they would never trust a random Singaporean cutout to do for you.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The U.S. government cannot get enough chips. Agencies have told me they are compute-dependent for inference and cannot get enough chips. Now we’re shipping part of that limited supply to China. How does that make sense?

Jordan Schneider: Let’s flip this around.

Dmitri Alperovitch: One more point. The H200 is from the Hopper generation, not the latest Blackwell generation, but it has High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). We have a current ban on the export of HBM to China. The H200 decision calls HBM protections into question, as the technology is already being exported on Nvidia chips.

We may see a cascading failure of export controls. I am hearing of discussions about relaxing export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which would make it easier for Huawei to manufacture Ascend chips in China. I hope that doesn’t happen, but there are people in the administration pushing for it.

Jordan Schneider: A year ago, the administration was being pressured to restrict chip technology to China. First there was the H20 situation, then the Laura Loomer saga and teh “twilight of the China hawks.” Lawmakers Vasant, Greer, and Rubio even intervened right before the Xi Jinping meeting to urge against concessions. Now, only a month later, this policy has been enacted without any clear reciprocal action from China other than continued soybean purchases.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I don’t know.

Jordan Schneider: To be determined. The main thing they’ve done recently is bully Japan. That’s the only big new development. And now we’re deciding to throw this other carrot into the mix. It’s weird.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The crazy thing is that China isn’t even asking for this. It didn’t come up in the Trump-Xi meeting. This is a concession to Jensen Huang, enabling Nvidia to make money at the expense of U.S. national security. I could understand it if this were a trade to get something we desperately want from China, like rare earths or a commitment not to invade Taiwan — though they would never do that. But it’s not. We are getting nothing for it. It is a favor to Jensen, to China, and to the PLA.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not even a big favor to my 401(k) — it only went up by two and a half percent. Come on.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Nvidia is in trouble because its U.S. market is going to shrink. Its primary customers, all the major hyperscalers, are building their own chips and want to move off of Nvidia’s platform. It’s desperately looking for another market, in China and the Middle East. That is why the company is pushing so hard for these export controls to be lifted. Jensen probably sees this is an existential problem.

Jordan Schneider: Dmitri, I appreciate your energy. I am so tired of these guys. I have to give Jensen credit for his stamina in making those calls and fighting through this. He has delivered twice now.

Dmitri Alperovitch: And he killed the GAIN Act.

Jordan Schneider: The man’s on a roll — he’s scored a touchdown.

Dmitri Alperovitch: And by the way, he’s not only going after the China hawks. The entire industry — from the hyperscalers to other chip companies — is on the other side of the ledger. He’s single-handedly beating everyone in this town. It is astonishing.

King Jensen

Jordan Schneider: Last year I asked you why more rich people don’t invest their time and energy to shape political outcomes. The thesis was that if you put the time and work in, you can get results. This is Exhibit A for CEOs trying to push through initiatives that may not have polled well initially. If you put in enough legwork and time on the phones, you can make things happen.

Dmitri Alperovitch: You have to give him kudos — he’s done incredibly well at the influence game here in D.C. He is putting in the time, meeting with anyone. He even said he’ll meet with Elizabeth Warren, one of his chief critics on the Democratic side. He’s calling the President almost daily, it seems. He got this done by badgering the President, repeating, “Get me my chips, get me my chips, get me my chips.” Donald Trump finally said, “Fine, here you go.”

Jordan Schneider: This development suggests the administration dismisses both the national security and the economic arguments for restricting this technology. It ignores the reality that these chips are vital in a strategic military competition.

Economically, it also overlooks the fact that strengthening Chinese competitors will harm American industry for decades. We should be consolidating the technology that drives productivity, not ceding it to a rival.

Dmitri Alperovitch: I don’t agree. The majority of this administration is opposed to this decision and does believe we are in a strategic competition with China. Call it a cold war. I know people in the administration agree. The president was convinced that selling China American AI stack is good for American business, and that Chinese firms will be addicted to it. But it’s a nonsensical argument. Jensen lied, because there is no addiction to the stack — it’s easy to move off of it. Unfortunately, he has been able to carry the day for now.

Jordan Schneider: This isn’t selling the “stack.” Selling the stack would be Nvidia chips run by AWS or Google, running Western models. This is selling the lowest level of the stack. I guess if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) relaxations come true, we’ll be selling the two lowest levels.

Dmitri Alperovitch: This is the equivalent of selling Ford cars to China in the hope China will be “addicted” and not prefer any other car. It is stupid on its face.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not even selling the Ford car — it’s selling the axles.

Dmitri Alperovitch: That’s all it is. There are huge problems with this decision. First, this is enabling the Chinese military and intelligence services, which are adversaries we could one day be at war with. The DoD is planning for a fight with China and stressing the need to overmatch its capabilities. Second, it puts Chinese firms on equal footing with American firms. Why would we do that? It hurts American companies and the American economy.

Jensen’s argument against export controls is inconsistent with his own business practices. He claims controls only encourage strategic competitors to innovate. By that logic, he should open-source his proprietary CUDA framework to AMD, because God forbid they develop a superior alternative. He doesn’t practice what he preaches. He is protecting his technology with patents and trade secrets, like any other company. Yet, he insists the U.S. should use a different strategy at a national level. It’s insanity.

Demand for chips in the U.S. already outstrips supply. Diverting this limited resource to a strategic military and economic competitor is a self-defeating act — we are actively surrendering the Cold War. I’m not an “AI doomer” — this technology is profoundly important for economic and military power. That is why there is no valid argument for helping your main rival develop it.

Jordan Schneider: Hey, White House. Hey, Nvidia. If you want to come on ChinaTalk and make those arguments, we could hash it out here.

Maybe we’ll be saved by the Ministry of State Security, who convince themselves that this is a crazy CIA plot to backdoor hack the PLA. It’s a longshot.

An Institute for Progress chart shows the U.S. and its allies currently possess a large compute advantage over China, roughly a 13-to-1 ratio. Selling large volumes of chips to China could drastically change this balance.

The main question is how Huawei’s domestic production compares to Nvidia’s global output from its fabs. If we withhold advanced equipment and AI chips from China, we can confidently expect a continued U.S. advantage. If these sales go through, it’s unclear who will lead in compute power in next 5 to 15 years.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It will be China, because they’re going to subsidize the hell out of this and we won’t.

It’s not over. Capital Hill is upset about this. Don’t count out Congress, the GAIN Act isn’t dead yet. There will be a fight to prioritize chips for American companies and to see what restrictions are possible — maybe export control reviews by Congress. There are bills floating around.

Also, Donald Trump often changes his mind. Others may convince him to revert this decision. The good thing about Donald Trump is that you’re never done. Whatever happens today can be undone tomorrow, and we need to take advantage of that.

Jordan Schneider: That’s the great irony in all of this. Given the political hesitancy on both side of the aisle and the possibility of Trump changing his mind, Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance are unlikely to bet their firms’ futures on Nvidia chips. This is going to be a political football, and one Truth Social post won’t end it. The strategy of “addicting Chinese firms” over the long term — setting aside Beijing’s own goal to indigenize chip production— won’t work.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Beyond politics, this strategy fails for basic business reasons.

China won’t get enough chips. You have Jensen acting as king, allocating a scarce supply of Nvidia chips to hyperscalers and now Chinese customers. Since there isn’t enough to go around, that scarcity forces them to rely on other chips.

No one wants to pay the “Nvidia tax” or be completely dependent on a single monopolistic supplier. Everyone wants to diversify, which is why you see them all building their architectures on multi-chip designs. Committing 100% to CUDA, politics aside, makes no commercial sense.

The Magic of AI

Jordan Schneider: Let’s close on some vibe-coding. I can’t be too depressed going into the holidays. Dmitri, I hear you’ve been having some fun with Opus 4.5 recently. What’s it done for you?

Dmitri Alperovitch: It’s magic. Anyone with a bachelor’s degree, not even in a technical field, can be a software engineer within three years, if not sooner. It is so easy to develop applications. I’ve built two mobile apps in the last month and a web app for personal use. Opus 4.5 is magic. I built a mobile app yesterday in 15 minutes, and most of that time was spent on setup, authorizing it on the Apple Store, and configuring my device. The capability is incredible, and it’s improving everyday.

This is the innovation we have to look forward to, and we want to make sure our American companies, our government, and our citizens are the primary beneficiaries. We want American frontier companies to be the best, and then we can restrict these models from actors we don’t want to have access.

I’m on the board of a number of companies, and I’m telling them all to start measuring their engineers on their use of AI in development tasks. Anyone who isn’t using AI should be considered for a performance improvement plan (PIP). This is the next hammer. It’s like when hammers were discovered tens of thousands of years ago — whoever didn’t use them fell behind. This is an unbelievable productivity tool.

One of my companies has a software engineering team developing their products. They’re also pulling people from other departments, like security, to help build the next module in Claude or other models. These teams are creating prototypes, and even production-ready versions. It’s unbelievable how you’re able to raise the productivity of everyone, not just software engineers.

Jordan Schneider: I want to say the same for analysts, think tankers, Hill staffers, and folks in the executive branch. It is a superpower. We were having a debate about whether Huawei can backfill Nvidia and what the ratio of chips would be. It took me 45 minutes to build an entire data visualization with sliders for different assumptions. How much HBM will China get? How tight will the export controls be? How much will they improve using DUV? How far behind will Huawei’s chips be compared to Nvidia’s?

Beyond the fun personal applications, it’s the “bicycle for the mind” aspect that people should experience, especially for thinking through policy problems. If you’re wrestling with a knotty issue that has numbers, contingencies, or second-order effects that are hard to hold in your head, ask Claude to help you visualize it or see the other side of the argument.

The hallucination issue is almost gone. You still need to fact-check the details and trust your gut if something seems off, but the improvement has been dramatic.

Dmitri Alperovitch: It depends on what you’re using it for. At some level, it’s garbage in, garbage out. If you’re training a model on Reddit and asking about something very esoteric, you’re not going to get a good answer.

Jordan Schneider: You are doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t spent time with these models. Try to integrate them into your day job. You should be hanging out on Cursor and Claude, trying to build little tools and apps to make your workflow easier or allow you to do new things.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Building apps was nostalgic for me. It brought back the emotions I felt as a kid in the 1980s when I learned programming. It was an amazing feel coding your first “Hello, World!” program or, in my case, a simple game in QBasic. The magic of seeing it run was a special feeling, and you felt so proud and accomplished.

This took me back. It made me think, “Oh my God, this is magic.” In the ‘80s and ‘90s, you had to have technical expertise and learn a programming language. You still need some technical skills today, particularly when you’re debugging or if you don’t understand how Swift works or how to deploy iOS apps. But all of that is going away.

Jordan Schneider: It’s going away.

Dmitri Alperovitch: The accessibility of this technology changing everything. For years, we thought only nerds could access the magic of programming. Now, everyone can, and that is going to revolutionize everything. The interesting thing about AI is not that it’s going to make tasks easier and faster, but that it’s going to make other things that you would never, ever do before accessible.

The cost of software engineering iwill drop to zero. Everyone will be building dozens of apps — for their grocery list, for managing their kids’ schedules, whatever it may be — because it’s so easy. You can custom build something that would be useful only to you, with no commercial value. Even for coders, we wouldn’t spend our time building those apps it was a lot of effort. Now, that effort is gone.

Jordan Schneider: The activation energy for doing a side project has dropped to zero. What I’m excited to see created, Dmitri, is the “senior policy official simulator.” That’s a classic nerdy ChinaTalk idea.

Dmitri Alperovitch: So nerdy.

Jordan Schneider: But you read all these memoirs from government officials. Jake Sullivan said the one thing you can’t experience beforehand is being in a crisis. You can have a Tim Geithner level — all of a sudden it’s 2009, and it’s not like you’ve lived through a financial crisis before.

Having a visceral experience — a VR Situation Room meeting, a VR flight on the plane with the president trying to convince him not to sell chips to China — getting reps in those high-stakes political, personal, and commercial situations could be transformative. It doesn’t have to be for politics and national security. We haven’t had a nuclear crisis in a long time.

Having the deeper, emergent human capabilities that AI simulations of these events can provide seems like a big upside for human competence when dealing with crises in the future. I’m excited about it. Rockstar Games, if you’re out there, give me a call. We can do some cool stuff together.

Dmitri, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being a part of ChinaTalk.

Dmitri Alperovitch: Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Mood Music

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Painting in the Dutch Republic during the Golden Age was rich in landscapes, interiors and images of everyday life, but didn’t abandon storytelling. Many of Rembrandt’s finest works are religious narratives and tales drawn from classical mythology and history. This article shows a selection of paintings by the less famous, and how their stories extended beyond those that had been most popular in the Renaissance.

The Annunciation (1667) is a large canvas, and among the few religious paintings that Adriaen van de Velde made following his marriage to a Catholic woman, and his conversion to Catholicism. Although the angel is a little awkward, it seems hard to believe that this was painted by a landscape specialist.

Three years later, van de Velde painted a classical myth in his superb Vertumnus and Pomona (1670). Vertumnus was the Roman god of seasons and change, who could assume whatever form he wished. Book fourteen of Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of his transformation into the form of an old woman, seen here on the left, so that he could gain entry to Pomona’s orchard and seduce her. Sadly, the yellow he used to mix greens has faded in parts, leaving some of his vegetation blue.

Jan Lievens’ painting of Quintus Fabius Maximus from 1656 may refer to this Roman’s victory at Tarentum, as told in Plutarch’s Lives. The great Carthaginian general Hannibal was only five miles away at the time of the Roman repossession of Tarentum, and this made Hannibal realise the impossibility of mastering Italy.

Paintings of fables, that had already started to become popular among Flemish artists at this time, appeared in the Republic to the north. Among them was the story of the Satyr and the Traveller, or the Man and the Satyr. A man made friends with a satyr; when the man’s hands were cold, he blew on them to warm them up. When the two were eating together, the man blew on his hot food in order to cool it down. The satyr decided that he couldn’t trust a creature whose breath blew both hot and cold, so broke off their friendship.

In 1653, Constantijn à Renesse, a former pupil of Rembrandt, painted his version of this fable in Satyr at the Peasant’s House. This shows one of the family blowing on the hot food in their spoon, although at this stage the satyr hasn’t reacted to the contradiction.

Jan Steen, in his telling of The Satyr and the Peasant “Who Blows Hot and Cold” from about 1660, gives a clearer account, with the satyr looking worried at the viewer, as a man (still wearing his hat) blows on a bowl of hot stew. He also pays attention to delightful details such as the cat skulking under the table, and a rich supporting cast.

Steen went on to paint two unusual accounts of what happened in schools across country districts in the Republic.

His The Village School from about 1665 shows physical punishment in a contemporary school. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, and is already wiping tears from his eyes. A girl in the middle of the canvas is grimacing in sympathy.

A few years later, Steen painted a scene in a larger and more chaotic classroom, in The Village School from about 1670. Although there are two staff sat at the teachers’ desk, the man is distracted, perhaps in cutting himself a fresh quill. The woman teacher sat next to him is engaged in explaining something to a pupil. Around them, all hell is breaking loose. In the distance, a boy is stood on one of the trestle tables. Older children are teaching younger ones, and a small group at a table at the right are trying to write while others get up to mischief. One younger child in the middle of the foreground has fallen asleep against a hat.

Gerrit Dou approaches social realism in his detailed account of The Young Mother from 1658. As she sits at her needlework, her child is attended in their wickerwork crib by a young nurse. Around them is an eclectic collection of objects, from a large cabbage, hanging game and a bundle of carrots at the right, to a bird cage and an upholstered chair at the left. Suspended above them is a chandelier, and a wooden spiral staircase ascends to the next floor. This family appears to be living in affluent squalor.

There was even an anthropomorphic fad for paintings showing gatherings of birds ‘singing’ together, and I think Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s Concert of the Birds from 1670 is probably the best example of those entertaining paintings.