Billionaire investor Peter Thiel known as out Apple and Google, warned about TikTok and bitcoin, and criticized China at a latest occasion. Listed below are the 17 finest quotes. | Foreign money Information | Monetary and Enterprise Information

Peter Thiel.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

• Peter Thiel called Apple and Google this week about their links to China.
• The billionaire tech investor warned about Bitcoin, TikTok and AI.
• Thiel wants to restrict the access of US investors to Chinese markets and vice versa.
• You can find more articles on Insider’s business page.

Billionaire Peter Thiel warned Bitcoin of a “Chinese financial weapon,” criticized Apple and Google for their connections to China, and suggested banning TikTok in the US at a virtual Richard Nixon Foundation event this week.

Thiel, the vocal libertarian who co-founded PayPal and Palantir and sits on the board of directors of Facebook’s Facebook board member, also raised concerns about technology theft and artificial intelligence, and called for stronger restrictions on Chinese investments in the US and vice versa.

The event was called “The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security” and the topic of discussion was “Big Tech and China: What Do We Need from Silicon Valley?”

Here are the 17 best quotes from Thiel from the seminar, which have been slightly edited and compressed for the sake of clarity:

1. “There is shockingly little innovation in China. But they were very good at copying and stealing things.”

2. “I criticized Google a few years ago for working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civil-military merger, Google has been working effectively with the Chinese military. One of the things I was told by some From They thought to insiders at Google that they might as well give the technology out the door, because if they didn’t give it, it would be stolen anyway. “

3. “I had a number of conversations with some of the DeepMind AI people on Google. I asked them, ‘Is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?’ and they said, “Well we don’t know and don’t ask questions.” You have this almost magical thought that, by pretending everything is okay, that way you are engaging and having a conversation and the world improve. “

4th “If you look at the five big tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have very, very little presence in China. So they’re not an inherently pro-Chinese constituency. Apple is probably the one that’s structurally real because of the problem the entire iPhone supply chain is made from China. “

5. “We have to call companies like Google to work with Communist China on AI. I also think we should put a lot of pressure on Apple.”

6th “On Facebook, during the Hong Kong protests a year ago, all Hong Kong employees were in favor of the protests and free speech. However, Facebook had more employees born in China than Hong Kong. And Chinese nationals actually said it was just western arrogance, and they shouldn’t be on Hong Kong’s side and things like that. The internal debate has felt that people are actually more against Hong Kong than Hong Kong. ”

7th “TikTok is problematic because it contains this incredible exfiltration of data about people. They’re creating this incredibly invasive map of a large portion of the population of the western world. It’s a pretty powerful application of AI, in a sense, to find ways to get around making it extra addicting and figuring out which videos to show off so that you keep watching more and more. It doesn’t seem like shutting it down would be an economic disaster. “

8th. “In a totalitarian society, one has no qualms about getting data about everyone in every possible way. That makes AI a very tricky technology as there are many ways that we don’t want to use them in the US or in the West.” Highlighting the use of AI by the Chinese government for comprehensive facial recognition.

9. “People often say that crypto or bitcoin is a vaguely libertarian technology. If crypto is some kind of libertarian, AI is some kind of communist.”

10. “Although I’m some sort of pro-crypto-pro-bitcoin maximalist, I wonder if bitcoin should be seen in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the US. It threatens fiat money, especially the US dollar, and China wants to do things to weaken the dollar. If China’s long bitcoin, maybe the US should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works. “

11. “An internal stable coin in China – that’s not a real cryptocurrency. It’s just a kind of totalitarian measuring device.”

12th “Make it harder for Chinese investors to invest in the US, and maybe we should make it a little harder for American investors to invest in China. We have US investors that are investing in China and becoming a large constituency for open capital flows “I think a decent chunk of the Wall Street crowd is pretty bad in that regard. I would recall it on both sides – making it harder for US investors to invest in China is an almost as important part of it.”

13th “China doesn’t like it when the US has the reserve currency because it gives us a lot of leverage over Iranian oil supply chains and the like. You can partly think of the euro as a Chinese weapon against the dollar. China would have liked to see two reserve currencies.”

14th “One of the very strange dynamics in Silicon Valley is that people don’t do much with semiconductors anymore. One of the strange problems with 20 years of intellectual property theft and where IP isn’t as valuable as it used to be is that you’re learning not to invest in things like that. “

15th “People are too entrenched to do things that worked in the past or to copy a model. Building a new search engine was the thing for Google in 1999. It probably isn’t the thing today. It is very difficult to assert oneself against it. ” Google by doing exactly what they are doing. “

16. “You can think of big tech as something that is very natural. It may be unnaturally big. It’s unhealthy. It’s too strong. But it’s the nature of technology to be big. Big science is actually an oxymoron. If you have a huge science factory, there probably isn’t much science going on at all. “- to criticize how science has been overly institutionalized and dominated by big corporations.

17th “President Trump’s de-platforming was really extraordinary. It seems like you’ve really crossed some kind of Rubicon where you might declare war on a third, 40% of the country – that seems really insane.”