#33 | Raise it, don’t race it with Alvin Graylin
If nobody can say where the finish line is, what is the US-China AI race for, and what does running it cost? Alvin Wang Graylin has spent 35 years building companies and shipping technology in the United States and China. He is a senior fellow on technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, a digital fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, a Professor of AI and Tech Policy at the University of Washington, and the author of Our Next Reality . The conversation covers: Burning Man as a working model of a post-scarcity economy: Alvin’s second year in the desert, embedded with the organizers, with ten questions added to the yearly census for a study on whether a gift economy could scale past one week a year The four races hiding inside “the AI race” (benchmarks, arms, innovation, platform), who leads each, and why he argues military applications rarely need a frontier model The three assumptions holding the race together: that China will not slow down, that only one lab is safe enough to hold the keys, and that AI is happening anyway. His account of talking directly with Chinese labs and policymakers Why he calls AI a beer bubble rather than a soap bubble: real liquid in the glass, poured far too fast Raise, don’t race. Intelligence as data multiplied by time, why capability is jagged, and why you cannot make a baby in four months by recruiting a second mother Wu Wei alignment: curating pretraining data, giving a model a good childhood, and why a less corrigible model might be a better one Early-career work, T-shaped learning, and what a GI Bill for the age of AI would need to include Rapid fire: the Pope’s encyclical on AI, a book on Demis Hassabis, and the one sentence he would put into every model’s pretraining data Alvin’s work Coexistence Above All: https://abundanist.substack.com/p/coexistence-above-all-why-we-should The Wrong Race: The US, China, and AI Competition (Quincy Institute): https://quincyinst.org/research/the-wrong-race-the-us-china-and-ai-competition/ Has the AI race shifted from U.S. vs. China to open vs. closed? (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/has-the-ai-race-shifted-from-u-s-vs-china-to-open-vs-closed/ The AGI Windfall Mirage: https://abundanist.substack.com/p/the-agi-windfall-mirage The Great Reckoning Before the Reconnecting: https://abundanist.substack.com/p/the-great-reckoning-before-the-reconnecting The Enterprise AI Playbook: Lessons from 51 Successful Deployments, with Pereira and Brynjolfsson (Stanford Digital Economy Lab): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/enterprise-ai-playbook His Substack, Abundanist: https://abundanist.substack.com/ Our Next Reality (book) Also mentioned Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen (Stanford Digital Economy Lab): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/ China’s AI Safety Governance Framework 3.0 (TC260): https://digitalpolicyalert.org/change/21442-national-cybersecurity-standardisation-technical-committees-artificial-intelligence-safety-governance-framework-version-30 Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI: https://humandevelopment.va/en/magnifica-humanitas/l-enciclica.html The Infinity Machine, Sebastian Mallaby Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez Worth the hour if you want the case against racing from someone who has spent a career shipping.
