Azeem Azhar

necessarily messy, feels incoherent at the tactical level, because what you need to do is generate momentum, generate force in order to change the system.

The White House, the administration has been reasonably clear about the gestalt that they want, which is sort of make America great again, have fewer dependencies, have a greater, more transactional control over

relationships with other nations rather than alliances that are writ on paper.

So perhaps, you know, tactically that will always need to have that sense of frivolity and friction rather than, you know, people in suits walking down a checklist.

I wonder whether what's really going on here is system building, that we tend to talk about

the components or the minerals.

We tend to talk about the bandwidth of the memory in the chips or whether the battery can come out or whether a particular rare earth is allowed.

But perhaps it's as much about creating these

innovation and technology systems that are not dependent at a fundamental and strategic level on your great rival, right?

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.