This is a very long letter which probably could have been a lot shorter. Yet, there are plenty of interesting insights that make it worth the read. For instance:

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. As Sam Altman once said (and again this is fairly humorous): “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction.

A lot of the letter deals with the ways that the US discourse around AI us fairly nonsensical. I think Wang has good insight into China, and his ability to compare what he sees happening there with the US milieu.

The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies?

Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines.

And Wang is able to synthesize these observations into statements like this:

Rather than “winning the AI race,” I prefer to say that the US and China need to “win the AI future.” There is no race with a clear end point or a shiny medal for first place. Winning the future is the more appropriately capacious term that incorporates the agenda to build good reasoning models as well as the effort to diffuse it across society.

It may not seem like much of a statement, but when you compare it to the perception of AI that one encounters in mainstream American media (or even to what the man on the street has to say about AI), it certainly feels like wisdom.

Wang manages to place some of the distinctions between the US and China in stark contrast:

western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor. By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China.

There remains, nonetheless, the conviction that authoritarianism can't outcompete liberalism:

Authoritarian systems have always hoped for the implosion of liberal democracies, while it is the liberal democracies that have a better track record of endurance. But I also don’t think that authoritarian countries are obviously wrong to bet that western polarization will get worse.

Yet, the distance between what we have been calling liberalism and what we have here in the US is growing smaller.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest blunders was its decision to raid a battery plant in Georgia, which put 300 Korean engineers in chains before deporting them. I suspect that any Korean, Taiwanese, or European engineer would ponder that episode before accepting a job posting to the United States. What a contrast that looks with China’s approach, which for decades has been to welcome managers from Walmart, Apple, or Tesla to train its workforce.

There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low. For all the American complaints about home affordability, relative housing costs can be even worse in big European cities. London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.

That last line is a killer. I love the quality of life in Europe, but building any kind of life there would be really hard for economic reasons.

Not that the US is really doing all that much better:

No president would have gotten around to starting a project that has no chance of being completed in his term. Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.

The letter is long, but full of points about the contrast between China and the US.