Debaters are Always Right: Competition with China is About AI Integration, Not just an AI "race."

While American politicians take selfies in foreign concentration camps, Chinese politicians support AI education and integration

A lot of the retoric about AI competition with China is about a race to the most recent “development.” Is the US ahead of China in AI? How far? What if China gets to AGI first (even though AGI is more of a continuum than a specific point)?

The problem with this line of thinking is that strengths and weaknesses are at the margins. Based on pubicly available information, most think the US is ahead, but only by a bit — maybe six months.

But given how close it is, that’s not really what matters because China is close and ‘good is good enough.”

Two former debaters, including a college National Debate Tournament champion and a leading nationally competitive high school debate from Lakeland Schools, echoed this in a recent article —

Yet focusing only on the technological frontier obscures the true nature of the race. Raw performance matters, but second-best models can offer significant value to users, especially if they are, like DeepSeek’s, cheap, open sourced, and widely used. The real lesson of DeepSeek’s success is that AI competition is not simply about which country develops the most advanced models but also about which can adopt them faster across its economy and government. Military planners like to say that “amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.” In AI, amateurs talk benchmarks; professionals talk adoption.

Former AGI safety researcher Miles Brundage and China-US AI competition researcher Grace Shao

I’ve been pushing this argument since Jeffrey Ding, a former high school debater and Tournament of Champions winner, argue this in his book — Technology and the Rise of Great Powers.

So, how does the US do with adoption? Not so well.

1 — At the applicationn layer (Shao)

So I remember even a year and a half ago I was visiting Beijing for a work trip and I just popped into TCM doctor's office for like acupuncture just as I'm like generic shoulder pains right and I was like this wasn't a big deal and the the little like the young doctor she was maybe like you know in her late 20s she was quite new and she started asking m she's like I know that you like you're a tech reporter before like tell do you know anything about this thing called AI she's like I now use it for my diagnosis. ..Even my friends in the US right now who actually even there's one who works in self we were talking about it recently and he was so reluctant to try out AI he's like I don't need someone to write my emails for me i can do that myself and I'm like dude you literally work in tech how are you not using this to enhance your productivity he's like no no no like are they just like polishing my emails for me like you're not trying the deep research like products you're not trying a lot of the products that can actually help you cut like one-third of your time um and and I think there's that definitely mentality difference i think you're hitting on a good point here uh which is that I think the conventional wisdom in the US has been like why can't China compete before deepseek the mentality was why can't.

(2) The manufacturing layer (physical AI products”)

Here where all the manufacturing is done here all like I'm talking about not just like thinking about your clothes right, not your cotton t-shirts or whatnot. It's like all manufacturing this is like your um your scanners your your batteries your TVs whatnot anything and everything right all of these things the the the mechanics of it the engineering of it the cheap labor frankly the cheaper product the supply chain it all kind of brings it together so we're seeing companies like Unitree taking up I think like 40% global share in quadruplet I can never say this word right quadruplet um robots and like something like 30% in humanoid robots and they're like 1/3 1/4 of the price of Boston Dynamics um so if you're looking..companies like Chinese leading EV companies bring in the Deep Seek LLM .. you existing pretty strong like these like uh EVs and you embody them with AI they're really really strong so like I said the AI competition per se is not really just like in LLM.

Apple’s Tim Cook made a similar point —

So, what an the US do?

(1) We can admit defeat and emphasize white nationalist traditional roots, blame immigrants for our failings, try to destroy China’s economy, alignt with any dictator that will talk to us, abandon science, be really mean, and invade our neighbors. This will serve to distract the public from China’s relative ascendance.

‘(2) We can prepare students for an AI world and newly emerging economy. Shao notes —

Party cadres from different regions competed to market their loces as China's next AI hub lawmakers made a raft of proposals from promoting AI related education and scaling up the technologies application to boosting research

DeepSeek’s founders were entirely educated in China.

(3) We can support student entreprenuralism. “Shao again,” as we say in debates.

Because that hustle culture entrepreneur culture (in China) also really feeds into each other and I think it's making it more and more vibrant.

Minute 35 on of this podcast also makes a strong can for reorinting the educational system towards entrepreneuralism and away from the traditional educational structures.

(4) If people want more “high tech manufacturing” to be done in the US, then they need to focus on training people to do that. This isn’t about sticking a pin in an Iphone.

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The reality is that we are going to have to do stuff, not just offer ignorant criticisms of China that you feed to your base as meat..

Many Americans assume that since Chinese people are “Communist” and receive near free health care, that they are lazy and not-entrpreneurial. They assume that the government tries to control their universities so that they can’t innovate.

Neither of these are true. In China, education is value as much as after school sports in the US. Students work incredibly hard at school (evening and weekend school is a thing beyond day school).

But, these images of China are drowned-out by US politicians.

Instead, US politicians spend time taking selfies in front of concetration camps, while, at the next moment, criticizing China for its human rights record.

Chip Roy —

[Note that Van Hollen was trying to get someone who was sent to the camp as a result of an “error” out]

I degress a bit, but it doesn’t take a genius to show up and destroy stuff. What take intelligence is coming up with new ideas and leading people.

Preparing students for the emering AI World, including through entpreneurship training and helping them develop high tech manufacturing skills, seem like good places to start. Both of these will improve the odds of AI integration into society. This will actually strengthen US competition internationally.

Supporting debate, including the development of nationally competitive debaters, also seems like a good idea. They are all doing “deep research” in high school.