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Out-of-Date: Academic Cooperation

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Mr. Trump noted in the summer of 2025  that “the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,” which Joe Biden called “a defining technology of our era.” Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that “you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.”

Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs….In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin. Beijing is aggressively cultivating American-educated and American-employed researchers via the Thousand Talents program.

Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?

Excerpt from  Mike Gallagher, Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home, WSJ, Aug. 19, 2025

McKinsey Loves its Bots and Proud of It

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Companies have paid dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise for nearly a century, relying on the firm’s armies of consultants to synthesize complex information, crunch huge amounts of data and map out solutions to thorny business challenges. But what happens now that AI can do much of that analysis in a matter of minutes—and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck to boot?… McKinsey has reduced its head count…and rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents. These bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients.

Traditionally, a strategy project might have required a project leader, four consultants and a partner. Today, it might need a leader and two or three consultants—alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities. Bob Sternfels, head of McKinsey, said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs. “We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build AI agents,” he said. 

Excerpt from Conor Grant, AI Comes for Consulting, McKinsey Faces an “Existential” Shift, WSJ, Aug. 8, 2025

Can AI Do That? Knowledge Impossible to Copy

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Zuckerberg hasn’t had much success in his efforts to hire the field’s biggest stars, including OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever and its chief research officer, Mark Chen. Many candidates are happy to take a meeting at Zuckerberg’s homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. In private, they are comparing gossip and calculating Meta’s chances of winning the AI race.

The handful of researchers who are smartest about AI have built up what one described as “tribal knowledge” that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco, where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough. 

Excerpt from Ben Coen et al, It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses, WSJ, June 27, 2025

Why Zuckerberg is Always Winning? the Magic of Free

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Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial-intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology free betting that providing the hottest new technology free will drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving Zuckerberg more control over the way people interact with machines in the future… Meta felt the cost of not controlling its own destiny when Apple decided in 2021 to cut off its ability to gather data on their users without asking for permission—something Meta had relied on to target ads. The company said it took a hit of more than $10 billion in revenue in 2022 as a direct result. The company’s stock swooned 26%.

For the AI-giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established…

Meta in April 2024 released its most recent generative AI tool—dubbed Llama 3—free for any company to use and repurpose so long as they have fewer than 700 million users. And it integrated chatbots based on Llama 3 into Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and on the web.  “All of our properties are free, we help people connect with each other, and we want to help connect people with AIs that can help them get things done,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s always been our playbook. That’s what the company ethos is about…

Excerpts from Excepts from Salvador Rodriguez, Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free, WSJ May 19, 2024