MWC Barcelona

USA and China decoupling: So, as the United States looks towards a future where the AI systems of the future are not just two, four or eight times better than today, but 10,000 times better than today – they're looking at a future that they don't want to invite China to.

Chip shortage dents US GDP: You know, just because of a shortage of many kinds of legacy chips, the US Department of Commerce estimated that that shortage shaved a full percentage point off U.S GDP. The US is an economy that in a great year, grows 3% - more typically 2%. So, to cut our GDP growth in half because of a shortage of semiconductors is a terrifying kind of an outcome. It really is analogous to oil in terms of the economic dependance of this technology.

Export controls impacts innovation: They (DeepSeek) are also reflective of the lagging impact of export controls. DeepSeek trained their model on the H800 chip. That was the chip that Nvidia designed to comply with the first tranche of Biden export controls, which the Biden administration admitted they got wrong. They set the wrong technical performance thresholds. They were not imposing the degree of performance penalty that they expected.

Who gains the most from AI innovation? Is DeepSeek going to continue developing new models and additional algorithmic innovations? Yes. But all of those innovations that DeepSeek came up with are now available to American AI companies. So, if they've got a way of squeezing five times the IQ points out of a thousand GPUs, they can do that for their thousand GPUs, the United States companies can do it for their million GPUs. Therefore, the impact of that intelligence efficiency multiplier gets spread across a much larger compute asset base. And the impacts are accordingly bigger. Chinese AI companies are in trouble.

Companies need stability and predictability: In this period of uncertainty, my question is, who either has stability and predictability, or can generate their own predictability and uncertainty? Because at the company level, most companies are going to be moving from a model of ‘just in time’ to a model of ‘just in case’, and usually that means less investment, even if it is more diversified.

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Keynote 8 highlights

Keyu Jin, Global economist and author, Harvard University, Visiting Scholar

Gregory C. Allen, Director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance Project: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

Jerry Sheehan, Director, Directorate for Science, Technology & Innovation, OECD