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Your first have a AI expo for national competitiveness. So where are we in US competitiveness when it comes to out of show intelligence.
Well, the good news is the US is way ahead of China and everybody else, and I think that's going to continue for a while. To me, national competitiveness is the challenge for the next ten or twenty years because the Chinese are really focused on dominating certain industries and we need to compete with them and make sure we win. In the case of artificial intelligence, we are well ahead two or three years. Probably we have China, which in my world is in eternity. I think we're in pretty
good shape. And the crazy valuations, all the money, all the new experimentation, this sort of enormous adoption of AI that's occurring. We have a lot of implications on society and very good for business.
What about well, ultimately, the of regulating artificial intelligence, is there any risk that we stifle innovation and.
So doing.
There's always a risk of premature regulation. My simplest example there is Europe. I've spent ten years trying to convince Europe to actually innovate instead of regulate, and they just keep regulating. The current act AI EU act is essentially regulation, not investment in the future. So you can see that Europe is highly unlikely to be relevant. China, of course,
is struggling because of chips shortages and so forth. All that they're ready to win if they can get the harder that they need, and the rest of the world.
Is not focused enough on this.
So the good news from myself my position in terms of America here we are in DC for national competitiveness.
We're the likely winner if we don't screw it up. What could screw it up?
Could it be a lack of government focus? How much you how would you grade the current administration when it comes to a focus on innovation and funding it.
We've been working with the US government and they've taken a largely handoff, hands off, you know, tell us what's going on approach, which has worked pretty well. There are now voluntary commitments from all the companies. That's a good first step. I'm sure there will be areas of real problems, you know, cyber dangers, biological dangers and so forth, and I would expect in the next ten years you'll see
real regulations in some of these spaces because of potential harm. Today, it's unlikely you're going to have serious harm unless you think that the deep fakes are a serious harm, which they may be in some cases.
So we're okay at the moment.
Would you worry about the next administration if it was indeed Underbiden, if it was a Trump administration.
We are steadfastly bipartisan on this issue because the development of AI benefits everybody in the nation. It benefits in terms of, you know, curing cancer, helping with climate change, new materials, making energy more efficient, distribution use, and so forth, and so on. Actional competitiveness should be a bipartisan issue in each administration. You have to get to know them,
you have to get them up to speed. One of the strange things about America is that we change over the entire government every four or eight years, and then you have this whole new bunch of people who have to learn both how the government works and also they come in with an agenda. I'm not too worried about it because everybody benefits from this, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're a liberal or a conservatives.
Nuanced and it's also a nuanced relationship that corporates have to work with the United States and indeed with China at the moment. And I'm really interested you say, perhaps China is being pushed behind because of its lack of access to chips all we currently navigating that nuance.
Well, Well, the Trump administration followed by the Biden administration did a good job in getting those rules in place. It's a good example and not a common example, of how a targeted intervention has a positive measured outcome from the standpoint of the national security.
So I think we're good there. It's very important.
And I led the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence a few years ago for the Congress. It's very important that we get more basic money out of the government for basic research.
We're building intelligence.
We're building a new form of non human intelligence that will change the world forever in a good way. And furthermore, it needs to be done with our partner countries. These are the five Eyes of the UK, that sort of thing some of the European countries. And also it needs to be done with American values. So using China as the bogeyman, imagine if they were in charge of the Internet, and they were in charge of the rules. And you imagine how very different your experience as a user on
the Internet would be today. You can show up, you can be anonymous, you can do whatever you want within reason. That kind of freedom is central to the spirit of the Internet, and it's important to be preserved.
Talking about a bogeyman and a Chinese related bogaman, TikTok became the bogaman that many are now trying to regulate, to indeed ban, or to sell. There's been some reporting that you've been interested, alongside Manution in potentially purchasing us TikTok.
Would you still be.
I'm not currently looking at that. I looked at it for a while. My personal view on this is you're better off regulating than banning or a judicial action. All the big tech companies are now in the hands of the DOJ in various legal fights. I would prefer to see a regulatory regime that is sort of has the right incentives and the right prohibitions for all of these things.
My own view of TikTok is that TikTok is not really social media, it's really television, and that you can regulate television by the equivalent of the equal time rule, but somehow we're not having that conversation.
What's interesting is, of course, you say, many big tech companies are currently well entangled from a time perspective with the DOJ one of them being where we know you holm from? Of course the previous CEO of Google. Where did you rate from a personal perspective? Where Google is in the AI competition race.
Well, it's interesting that almost all of the technology you're seeing today was invented at Google about five to ten years ago. And it's one of the sort of great things that during that period Google had a roughly in my estimate, two thirds of the world's talent in AI was working at so Google had a very very strong head start. I think Google is a complicated place, is a lot going on. Open Ai, in particular came out with GPT three three point five and four and did
a fantastic job. I think that was the competitive nudge that has gotten Google back in the game. What I like now is you have these two huge companies, Microsoft and open Ai together and Google Google Alphabet again operating together, and you have them putting billions of dollars hardware and enormous software teams to invent this new future. This is
not to take away from Anthropic, another competitor. Obviously, whatever Elon is doing with x dot ai, he's raising a huge amount of money, and Meta has recently released a four hundred billion parameter modelers and the process of releading it that looks really, really good. So that competition is the right answer to the regulators and to everyone's question. Competition brings out enormous value to consumers. And eventually people will see this and they'll say, oh my god, look
at what this does. And it's free. And of course all that money was paid out of the markets. Billions of dollars that's going in right now, and they'll monetize it somehow.
Does it have to.
Be led by the big corporates? How much well optimism do you have that the startup culture is what's going to breed the innovation as well you as an active investor as well as someone who's trying to breed competitiveness from a national perspective.
I've tried to invest in most of the companies because I frankly can't figure out which ones are going to be successful. One of the most interesting startup successes is Anthropic, which is now valued very high, started off as a bunch of founders who came out of open Ai, who had invented some of the technology but not all of it, and they built an unusually good product. Their big partner is Amazon, and that again makes sense to me, right because they can do it faster than Amazon. They're very,
very focused. So this new industrial structure of these deep partnerships is not a bad thing.
Look.
The important thing is the arrival of these large language models is a new economic problem in our industry because the amount of capital. In my fifty years of doing software, we never had capital constraints. We just had software people and the software. We always had whatever capital we need. Now in order to do anything, you need ten thousand or twenty thousand in video H one hundreds B two hundreds, which cost forty thousand dollars a pop.
So you do the math.
All of a sudden, your idea to get started has to have a billion dollar valuation. That's event in a software industry, and an unfortunately one which I think tends to reward large companies as a bush of the smaller companies. The best scenarios where the large companies are investing heavily, and the small companies are right up trying to invent the new future. And every once in a while one of those small companies becomes some huge monolith. Look at Meta, look at TikTok. You get the idea and.
You mentioned, well a global company there with TikTok. What about European startups? Could we have a giant out of Europe or is regulation just ended up? Would you invest in a European startup?
I have been.
Investing in France personally because the French ecosystem, in particular under President Macron, is much more silk and valley like. It's going to be rare to see the successes in Europe that you see in America in the UK, and the fundamental reason is they can't get the capital and the regulatory structure is so prohibitive. It's really sad because
the European talent pool is amazing. The opportunity to build companies in terms of impact is huge, and I think frankly the government and the regulation is slowing them down.
So I'm not writing them off.
I'm doing some investing, but so far the action will be in the US, the UK and Canada, where the regulatory structures are much more permissible to economic investment.
And when we started this conversation, you said, the US is leading as long as they don't screw it up. One piece of advice to ensure that the US doesn't.
Let's start by saying, the US capital system is extraordinary. You can raise billions of dollars based on an idea and a promise of a scale business.
Let's not screw that up.
The second thing is, let's not regulate these companies before they do something. Give them a chance to figure out how to monetize these spaces and build new businesses. Look at the tech companies that define the US stock market.
Look at the value created. For the last couple of years, the.
Sort of Lucky seven, the Famous four, whatever you want to call them, have driven the US stock market as the primary drivers of wealth for the whole nation. Right, So the game that we're in is one where we want to create another one, and another one and another one. That opportunity is how economics works in America, and we're in a position to provide global platforms at scale using the combination of American research, American policy, and all of
this money that's raisable This is a godsend. Every other country in the world would want this. Let's keep it going.