This is a late comment, but this thought bothered me from the beginning, and maybe it’s timely since Trump is finally about to meet Xi in China:
China is preventing Meta from buying Manus. … America should be thrilled about this, because it will discourage tech entrepreneurship in China. Why build what you cannot profit from?
China and America are rivals. It would make no sense for either country to allow its rival to purchase ownership of truly strategic assets. I don’t know if Manus counts as such, but obviously China doesn’t want to be dependent on the American AI tech stack (which I believe Vance, Sacks, and Jensen Huang have all argued should be an American goal). They want to be technologically autonomous as much as possible.
Incidentally, concerning a hypothetical future China-America treaty on pausing AI, I wonder if South Korea would be especially important in making it happen. I am not fully up-to-date, but South Korea, while still in the American sphere of influence, has maintained good relations with China (or as good as anyone manages), and I think the AI safety movement is relatively strong there.
This is a late comment, but this thought bothered me from the beginning, and maybe it’s timely since Trump is finally about to meet Xi in China:
China and America are rivals. It would make no sense for either country to allow its rival to purchase ownership of truly strategic assets. I don’t know if Manus counts as such, but obviously China doesn’t want to be dependent on the American AI tech stack (which I believe Vance, Sacks, and Jensen Huang have all argued should be an American goal). They want to be technologically autonomous as much as possible.
Incidentally, concerning a hypothetical future China-America treaty on pausing AI, I wonder if South Korea would be especially important in making it happen. I am not fully up-to-date, but South Korea, while still in the American sphere of influence, has maintained good relations with China (or as good as anyone manages), and I think the AI safety movement is relatively strong there.