LIMITLESS: U.S. vs China's Race to Superintelligence | Jeremie & Edouard Harris

Bankless

News, Tech News, Technology

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Jeremie and Edouard Harris, co-founders of Gladstone AI and national security advisors, join us to break down the real score in the U.S.–China AI race. We unpack what it actually means to “win” in AI: from cutting-edge model development and compute infrastructure to data center vulnerabilities, state-sponsored espionage, and the rise of robotic warfare. The Harris brothers explain why energy is the hidden battleground, how supply chains have become strategic liabilities, and why export controls alone won’t save us. This is not just a geopolitical showdown - it’s a race for superintelligence, and the clock is ticking. ------ 💫 LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW https://limitless.bankless.com/ https://x.com/LimitlessFT ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🟠 BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:05 AI race: who's ahead? 4:41 Framing AI as an arms race 12:58 Gov't awareness of AI conflict 20:38 AI reports feel like sci-fi 24:44 China vs US: model race 29:11 Shift to inference-time compute 31:19 China’s software vs US hardware 34:28 Open vs closed source politics 38:56 China’s energy dominance 43:32 America’s electric grid lag 47:55 Supply chain vulnerabilities 56:30 US chipmaking onshoring 1:01:08 U.S. lead in chips 1:04:00 DUV vs EUV bottlenecks 1:08:26 Manufacturing gap in robotics 1:11:53 Fear vs optimism in culture 1:17:26 Coordination vs dynamism 1:22:10 Bot-driven opinion warfare 1:25:58 China pushing degrowth narratives? 1:29:05 National security recommendations 1:33:36 Co-op or conflict endgame? 1:37:27 Closing ------ RESOURCES Jeremie Harris https://x.com/jeremiecharris Edouard Harris https://x.com/harris_edouard America’s Superintelligence Project https://superintelligence.gladstone.ai/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Brian here. You guys are in for a treat today. The episode you're about to hear
0:08.4	was pulled from our new Limitless podcast, where I occasionally guest hosts, as I did today,
0:13.2	along with David and our new co-host, Josh. We've talked before about the geopolitical race
0:19.3	between the U.S. and China for the world's
0:21.8	reserve currency status. But there's another race taking place, one that's moving faster,
0:26.2	with more urgency, may even be more important. And that's the AI race. The question for today,
0:33.0	who's going to win the AI wars? Is it the U.S.? Or China? This is an incredible episode, two guests who are
0:39.3	experts on this topic. Now, moving forward, episodes like this will be on the Limitless podcast feed,
0:44.5	so you won't see them here. If you haven't already, stop what you're doing, go subscribe to Limitless
0:49.2	on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you listen. There's a link in the show notes if you want to do that.
0:55.2	Limitless explores a frontier of AI, just as Bankless has explored the frontier of crypto.
1:00.2	We believe these are the two frontiers for wealth generation and freedom for this decade.
1:05.5	You've got to level up on both. Enjoy this episode. Are we winning or losing the AI race to China right now? Oh, wow. Okay. That'll just
1:14.8	take 30 seconds. I mean, well, it depends. It depends. But it depends in interesting ways.
1:22.7	So there are different dimensions of the AI race. One way you can split it up is supply chain-wise,
1:28.1	right? You look at the whole AI supply chain, what goes into training a leading AI model,
1:32.4	where there's talent, right? That's one big input. In that respect, there's a bit of fog of war
1:38.0	around who exactly is where, especially on the Chinese side, but judging by the kinds of engineering advances that go into making
1:46.7	your DeepSeek R1, your Quinn 3, there are very, very legit people in the Chinese labs right now,
1:53.2	Deepseek and Alibaba actually being among the clear leaders in China. But then separately,
1:59.5	there's a question around the hardware that's used, right?
2:01.2	You have the talent to train these models to architect them, but then the actual physical
	...

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