Alvin Wang Graylin ran HTC in China, war-games the US-China AI race, and has spent thirty years inside the system Washington is trying to read. Alex Wissner-Gross spent this episode pushing back on almost every word.
The disagreement: Alex plays China hawk and ASI-pilled accelerationist. Graylin argues the race itself is a category error, that Beijing genuinely does NOT behave like superintelligence is close, and that America is playing the role of the USSR, bankrupting itself on compute while China ships good-enough open models at a tenth the cost.
Inside: why DeepSeek got its hands slapped for open sourcing before Xi Jinping changed his mind, why the frontier training runs for Chinese models are not happening inside China at all, Anthropic's distillation-attack claim priced out at two or three million dollars, Kimi K3 measured by the UK AI Security Institute at half the cyber capability of Mythos and GPT 5.6, Harvey running the legal profession on GLM 5.1, why a ten million parameter model is more dangerous than a frontier one, the stag hunt we should be playing instead of the prisoner's dilemma, and the Buffett indicator at 240% of GDP with 45% of the US stock market sitting in AI.
Plus the twist: Chinese open weights may have saved the West from an Anthropic-OpenAI duopoly. Alex calls it a reverse Qing.
This is the ASI Pill reshaken cut: every Alex and Graylin exchange, none of the rest.
FULL SOURCE EPISODE (please watch and subscribe to the original):
Moonshots EP #281 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slle5_AxBzs
All credit to the Moonshots Podcast: Peter Diamandis, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and Alex Wissner-Gross, with guest Alvin Wang Graylin.
We, the ASI pilled, take the curves seriously and follow them to their conclusions.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:15 China isn't acting like ASI is close
1:04 The war game: bubble, then Taiwan
1:22 There is no finish line
3:41 The endgame is the solar system
4:47 ASI makes nations obsolete
6:14 Decades, not years
7:14 Faster than the world can digest
8:14 Beijing told its labs not to buy H200s
10:16 What would wake the CCP up?
11:24 They know it, they don't believe it
14:05 What technical threshold?
15:04 DeepSeek got its hands slapped
19:02 Control at home or rise abroad
19:52 Hugging Face strips the guardrails
21:33 The distillation attack costs $3M
23:36 Meta is terrified of being sued
24:25 Cursor, Kimi and Claude traces
25:05 Claude answered that it was Qwen
26:30 They train outside China and fly it back
30:45 Washington is doubling down
31:29 The smuggling reversed direction
33:01 The AI Plus Plan: 90% adoption
34:15 A five year plan for the West
35:50 Mistaking anxiety for ambition
38:50 Capitalism exists to burn itself out
39:30 One company, and then governments
40:44 Western reindustrialization
41:20 Bigger models are not the dangerous ones
44:17 Kimi at half of Mythos and GPT 5.6
46:18 The harness, not the model
47:35 Harvey runs on GLM 5.1
49:02 Stag hunt, not prisoner's dilemma
51:52 Build high quality open source
52:35 The reverse Qing
53:33 America is the USSR now
55:18 Buffett indicator at 240% of GDP
57:22 The builders will not be the profiters
