Azeem Azhar

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.

It was going to be about the Arab Spring and people speaking with one voice and it ended up being anything but that.

So...

One of the things that I've got some experience and some scar tissue from is trying to understand exactly the path that a technology takes from here to there.

And as I said, China seems to have a different approach to AI, which seems to focus on deployment rather than really, really breaking the frontier.

I mean, is that a fair way of characterizing it?

I'm not sure.

Well, I mean, there is that necessity because ultimately they don't have the chips and Huawei is starting to produce chips that can be suitable for training high-end LLMs, but they are way, way behind where NVIDIA sits right now.

But there is also this question about what actually drives

the economic success of a technology like this.

So I'm sure you know Jeff Ding well.

Jeff had his book recently and he made the case that it's less about breakthrough innovation and more about broad diffusion and deployment.