Azeem Azhar

Is that wrong?

But, you know, what started to change, I think, was in the mid-2010s when the strategic importance and national importance of data

particularly data about citizens, started to emerge amongst policymakers.

And you get to the stage that by 2020, more than 100 countries have got their own data privacy frameworks.

We always think about GDPR, but Kenya had one and Brazil had one.

They were expressing some desire of classic Westphalian sovereignty in this new domain against the backdrop of essentially having been happy for the Americans to do the running for 30 years.

Yeah.

I just returned from Abu Dhabi this morning, and of course, the UAE has gone all in on AI as a technology for the nation, as a technology for its industry and economy.

It's building huge data centers.

But critically, to your point about new model providers, they have released in the last two or three weeks a really performant open source reasoning model that is extremely light, measured by billions of parameters.

And, you know, it is interesting to see that, to your point, nothing's yet locked down.

There are certain things that feel rather more locked down.

So Nvidia's chips and TSMC's fabrication and ASML's lasers.

But above that layer, there is still quite a lot to play for and quite a lot of space then for countries to think about what does sovereignty mean in this environment.

We'll have to see.

But, you know, we don't know.

I mean, I think this goes back to the question I asked you about AI that you so neatly dodged, which is that we don't know how the industry structure will play out.

We're full of surprises.

The internet provided a ton of surprises.

Remember, it was always going to be about decentralization and it ended up being incredibly centralized.