00:00 Speaker A
Chris, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll probably start with the comments Microsoft’s Brad Smith made to the FT, because Chris got a lot of attention. Basically what he’s saying is, “Listen, outside of the West, China is winning the AI race.” He spoke about the rapid adoption of China’s deep seek technology in emerging markets such as Africa. He said here that we need to realize that unlike a year ago, China now has an open source model and more and more competitive models. Big picture, Chris, do you agree to some extent with the comments that Brad Smith has noted and highlighted about this kind of Chinese AI momentum?
00:54 chris
I disagree that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t characterize it the same way Brad does. If you actually look at Microsoft’s report, you’ll see that the regions where deep steak has a lot of market share are primarily Russia, Belarus, China, Cuba, and Syria. Countries where our company clearly does not compete. Microsoft reports that in the countries where our companies compete, we typically have 90-95% market share. So, while I agree with the idea that China is rapidly advancing in the AI space and is a significant competitor, I don’t think China’s market penetration is as advanced or advanced as Microsoft has described in its comments.
01:45 Speaker A
Try it out, it was interesting that in the same interview, Chris and Brad Smith were talking about the role of the Chinese government. Well, I mean, Chris, in your opinion, do you think the U.S. government should subsidize the AI industry here the same way it does in China?
02:07 chris
We believe we need to provide some support to certain elements of the industry that require some type of long-term capital. I think in our financial markets, especially semiconductor manufacturing, advanced packaging, it’s a little bit difficult to provide that kind of long-term predictive capital. But when you look at data center construction and AI labs, I think there’s already all kinds of private capital going into this. That’s because we have very deep and liquid capital markets, and that’s a big advantage of our system. I think because the Chinese system is a state-sponsored system, they are forced to put money into this system to promote these industries. Um, but we, you know, the U.S. economy is now primarily driven by AI investments. AI investments in data centers are primarily for AI inference and are entirely privately funded. Therefore, when scaling methods are applied, data centers may become large enough to require government funding. I don’t think we can go that far at this point, but it’s something we can consider in the future.
