“Not to alarm you further, but we still don't really do what's called advanced packaging. Packaging isn't put the chips in a box. Packaging is how they layer the chips, which is incredibly sophisticated to get enough compute on a chip. Even though we're making them in Arizona, they go back to Taiwan for packaging. Problem. You gotta get that in America. If you did a supply chain breakdown of an AI data center, you'd be not happy with how much still comes from China.”
“In lower income countries, the education budget might be $300 per kid per year, and the class size might be 50 to 70 kids. There's just not a lot of learning going on. And I think the combination of a Starlink on every school and tablet for every child and then really good AI software will close the gap.”
“I think we're in a bad place. I don't think we can effectively compete with China economically technologically without allies. They're just too big. They're too big, they're too determined, and so we need allies, including Europe, by the way, including Southeast Asia, including the Global South. If you were to say to me, what is the biggest mistake about how this administration is handling China and their China strategy? I would say, kissing off all our allies.”
Operating and investing require different personality types
“Operating personality, you're like a dog with a bone. You never give up on a problem. You just work it. You work it. And investing personality is staying very broad, not falling in love with an idea, you know, cutting your losses and moving on. Like, when I tried investing, I just fell in love with all the entrepreneurs and kept the amount of money, and then none of it worked out.”
“I think we have so many systems in this country that were just created for a different time. Adult education is essentially either non existent, poor quality, or stigmatized. Companies have precious little incentive to redeploy people instead of just laying them off. Let's get ahead of this crisis and do the change that's necessary now so we can thrive in an AI economy. America rises to the challenge in times of crisis, and we have a minute to figure it out.”
AI risk includes mass unemployment and civil unrest
“Winning isn't just innovating the technology at breakneck speed. If you create incredible social, political, and economic unrest, that is not winning; that’s automating America’s decline. As much effort as we're putting into winning the chip race, we better putting that same amount of urgency into coming up with systems to cushion us through the transition. Otherwise we won't win. We won't win with civil unrest, political violence, or a fifteen percent unemployment rate.”
“In twenty years, robots will do maybe 1% of the plumbing. At most. It just takes a super long time to build, deploy, and then to get them to be lower cost, higher safety than others. But I think over fifty years it will happen. So that's still gonna be a great field for the next twenty years.”
“If I had a three year old today, I would be, like, doubling down on the emotional skills. Knowing yourself, interact with other human beings is gonna be the thing that sustains those kids, you know, through their working life. We’ll see a rotation back to the humanities and into understanding a combination of history and literature.”
“The last time I was in Europe was I guess a month and a half ago for the Munich Security Conference and spent a lot of time with European ministers, military leaders, CEOs, and I think their patients is wearing thin with US as somewhat justifiably. So I don't think it's very thick. I understand the president's point if he thinks European countries aren't pulling their weight or doing their fair share as it relates to investing in their military capacity, but poor execution hurts the relationship.”
“Satya made one incredibly ballsy, insightful decision, which is to invest in OpenAI back in 2018. He bet big on AI, and that catapulted them both reputationally and in terms of the Azure business. It was the workload that then has grown Azure into a monster and a big success.”
AI disrupts logic more than emotional entertainment
“Anything that lives in the emotional realm will be impacted not as much by AI because we humans react to these things emotionally. And so, again, I think we'll not watch robots playing basketball... things that are emotional, you know, will be—it's not that it won't eventually be able to add value, but that's certainly not the big thrust of the AI world.”
“If everything breaks humanity's way, it's because AI has unleashed human flourishing, and we find the political mechanisms to share that across within our country, across different income groups, and then between countries. The world as a whole is enhanced. A first step for that would be to realize how interconnected we are.”
China is hollowing out the European industrial base
“If you look at now what China is doing to Europe, it's it's terrible for Europe. The Chinese imports to Europe have surged, and the German industrial base is going to get crushed. This is China's play. They run the play over and over again. They subsidize, they dump cheap products into the global market. In this case Europe also Africa, distort the price and it makes it impossible to compete. That weakens our allies in Europe and that’s why the ice is thinning.”
Bipartisanship is essential for industrial policy success
“My biggest lesson from the chips program is when you do something like that, make sure it's bipartisan. It has mostly survived. Actually, now TSMC is making leading edge chips in Arizona the same way they are in Taipei, Taiwan, and they're going to expand, and this administration is helping, not hurting that. The same thing with Intel and all these other companies. It is surviving, and I think it's because it was bipartisan.”
