Azeem Azhar

You can compete in other areas, but you want to be soup to nuts in that area.

And if you want to have systems change, it's going to be messy, especially given that there were all these interrelationships that you're working from.

um and i think maybe also she is more ambitious he is more excited to develop a higher degree of resilience as well as to weaponize the interdependence that china has vis-a-vis the rest of the world there is this word that goes around which is sovereignty uh and it's appeared in google trends far more in the last two years than it did in the previous 50 and of course there's a very legalistic formal term uh meaning for the word sovereignty but there's also

vibe-based sovereignty, which kind of means we can sort of make our own decisions.

And of course, lots of countries are talking about sovereign AI and sovereign energy and sovereign this and sovereign that.

In truth, there are only two countries in the world that have the depth and the capacity, the dynamism to achieve that vibe-based sovereignty in any real way.

But even they, it seems, are quite dependent on each other.

Totally.

Okay.

Absolutely.

So let's talk about AI then, because of course, AI is running on the chips.

Let's give the received wisdom right now.

So the received wisdom is that the US leads in the frontier, that the US foundation model labs are brilliant.

by and large chasing after the machine god that is AGI or ASI, and that the US is highly constrained by some of its physical infrastructure, so the power systems and so on.

And on the other hand, China is doing really well with open source models.

It has abundant power capacity, and the open source models are getting better and better.

But critically, the Chinese state-civil enterprise fusion is all about

deployment and that these are two entirely different approaches to AI.

I think that's the received wisdom.

Is that right?