In short
BG2Pod Episode Summary: China Open-Source, Compute Arms Race, Reordering Global Trade
Podcast Details
- Title: BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley
- Hosts: Brad Gerstner (@altcap) & Bill Gurley (@bgurley)
- Episode Title: China Open-Source, Compute Arms Race, Reordering Global Trade
- Episode Description: A discussion on open-source models in China and the US, the compute arms race, tariffs, and the reordering of global trade.
Timestamps
- 00:00 - Intro
- 03:55 - Open-Source Models in China
- 17:54 - Future of American Open-Source Models
- 26:30 - Compute Arms Race
- 47:05 - China, Tariffs, and Reordering of Global Trade
Key Topics Discussed
- Open-Source Models in China
- Chinese Dominance:
- China is leading in the development and deployment of open-source models, with several high-quality providers emerging.
- The rapid growth of Chinese models, particularly those from Alibaba, with millions of downloads showcases their competitive edge.
- American Models Lagging:
- In contrast, American models such as Lama 4 are losing momentum and failing to capture international attention.
- Collaborative Advantage:
- Chinese companies are utilizing open-source models collaboratively, creating a compounding effect that accelerates innovation and reduces redundancy.
- Future of American Open-Source Models
- Need for Innovation:
- Discussions highlighted the necessity for American companies to revitalize their open-source approaches to remain competitive against Chinese models.
- Potential strategies included leveraging high-quality proprietary models and fostering a collaborative environment similar to China's.
- Demand for Accountability:
- Companies are looking for accountability from model providers. Successful open-source models in the US may need to establish trust and reliability, akin to the enterprise-level support seen in Linux distributions.
- Compute Arms Race
- Exploding Demand for Compute:
- An increase in demand for computational resources is evident, driven by the proliferation of AI technologies.
- Major players like Google are witnessing a massive spike in tokens processed, reflecting the unprecedented growth in AI applications.
- Investment in Infrastructure:
- Companies are increasingly investing in AI infrastructure, with projections indicating an aggressive expansion of data centers and processing power.
- China, Tariffs, and Reordering of Global Trade
- Economic Context:
- Recent tariff agreements with Europe and Japan were discussed, highlighting potential benefits for the US economy, including energy purchases and investments.
- Market Response:
- Initial fears of trade wars have calmed as markets respond positively, with the Nasdaq recovering significantly.
- The conversation pointed to the possibility of a major trade deal with China that could further reshape US-China economic relations.
Key Takeaways
- Chinese Open-Source Models: China's collaborative open-source environment is leading to faster innovation and could potentially outpace US models, particularly in AI.
- Tariffs Impact: Tariffs have not led to expected inflationary pressures; instead, the US has seen a rebalancing of trade that could support domestic industries.
- Market Sentiment: Despite earlier fears, the current market conditions are optimistic, and there's a strong sentiment that the US may continue to thrive through strategic trade relationships and technological advancements.
Conclusion The episode provides a critical examination of the current landscape of open-source technology, the compute arms race, and the evolving dynamics of global trade, particularly in the context of US-China relations. The discussions underscore the importance of innovation, collaboration, and adaptability in maintaining competitive advantages in an increasingly complex global market.
Show Notes
- [Artificial Analysis - Intelligence vs. Price](https://artificialanalysis.ai/)
- [Mary Meeker Bond Deck](https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelligence.pdf)
Hosts' Social Media
- Brad Gerstner: [@altcap](https://x.com/altcap)
- Bill Gurley: [@bgurley](https://x.com/bgurley)
- BG2 Pod: [@bg2pod](https://x.com/BG2Pod)
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:0015 % on all goods coming from Europe, 0 % on US goods going to Europe. So an opening up of Europe markets, paying us 15 % and on top of that getting commitments like $750 billion, almost a trillion dollar's energy purchases from the US or look at Japan which they announced last week, another huge market. Again, similar, they're going to pay tariffs to the United States, no tariffs imposed on the United States and they're going to invest $550 billion into the US in a way the president gets to direct. So I would, I would, I just think we need to give the president credit where credit is due. Everybody said this was going to lead to retaliation, to trade wars, was going to be disasters for the US and all we've seen so far is deals, deals, deals, deals.
0:54And I have to say if this was the CEO of one of our companies, right, let's say we had a board meeting at the start of the year and he outlined these plans and we said, hey, we're really nervous about this. You know, this is a high risk high reward strategy. It's either going to backfire and we're going to fire you or it's going to work really well and we give you a bonus. If we're measuring them halfway through the year, I would say that he's in line for a bonus.
1:31All right. The summer pods back in action. Good to see you guys. We have our good friend, Sonny Madra, the CEO of Grock joining from one of those sunny, it looks like some fancy hotel in Saudi Arabia in the middle of the night. Good to see you. You picked it up. You're a good, you have a good eye for the Middle East. And Bill, you got off your boat catching Bluefin tuna. You look like you're in some office somewhere. I'm going to see I am borrowing Mitchell Aske's incredible podcast set up in our Woodside office with the high, high -def SLR camera. Nice you're looking, you're looking good. Sonny, of course, our good buddy, Sonny is the CEO of Grock.
2:14I don't know, Sonny, probably a few hundred million of revenues, maybe doubling year over year. I just saw something, you're rumored to be raising 600 million or the six billion dollar valuation. Maybe that has something to do with you being over in Saudi Arabia. And of course, you're hosting all the open source models in your inference clouds around the world. Is that about right? Yeah, you got it right. You touched on all the key points. We don't comment on speculation, but you touched on some good points. Well, it was great to see you in DC last week. You know, our good friend David Sachs is really on the heater.
2:49First, it was the crypto summit a couple weeks ago. Of course, the Genius Act got passed, which really teed up these stable coins. And now the Clarity Act around market structures, making its way through Congress. And then, of course, last week was the AI summit where the president laid out a multi -pronged strategic plan for American AI that both extends the government's investment in the leadership, but also accelerates the distribution of the American AI stack around the world. Both of those things, both the crypto and the AI summit that he put together, I thought our key contributions really to the next generation of American technology leadership around the world.
3:32It's amazing to see that much progress in six months, congrats to Sachs. And the rest of the D. Cretzios, Dean Ball, Sri Ram, they really all kind of brought it, brought the heat with that. Yeah, for sure. Of course, the AI action plan was focused on maintaining global AI leadership, particularly over China. And I hate to say it, but we have really been our own worst enemy. You know, it seems like excess regulation on everything from energy production to model development, to semiconductor chip distribution. It's really been a bit of an unforced error by the US over the course of last 24 months.
4:10And handed a lot of momentum to China. And I think really threatened our leadership. So this is kind of a 180 to get America back on track. You know, we've underestimated Huawei and the Chinese AI development model development really had every step of the way. So I want to kick off today talking about recent developments with the base models and reasoning models coming out of China. Because, you know, we had this freak out moment earlier in the year with deep seek that we all remember, remember, Nvidia stock plummet everybody in Washington's talking about it. But since then, you know, people kind of forgot about deep seek, but the reality is China's been on a roll.
4:51I mean, they're dominating the global landscape for open source models. We've seen six to seven high quality open source model providers, many of the fastest growing in the world. And this at a time when American open source, right? Lama four has been sputtering a bit really losing its mojo around the world. So when the open source model out of Ali Baba has passed, I think 400 million downloads. Of course, that's released like these other models under the Apache 2 .0 open source license. So very open as Bill's talked about. But Sonny, you tweeted and one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the pod this week, because you tweeted, you know, that all of these open source models are really coming together in China.
5:36They're leveraging one another. They can distill and generate synthetic data on each other's work. And you went so far as to suggest this might allow them to pass the best proprietary models coming out of the US yet this year, maybe by Q4 of this year. So why don't we dig in there? What is your theory of the case? Why is China doing so well in open source and should US model companies like Open AI and the Anthropic be concerned? Yeah, so let's kind of tie it into, I think three important things that we see happening. The first one being the Chinese and the president addressed this at the AI summit.
6:17He addressed the point around using copyrighted work. And he says, he used a great example. If you read a book and you use it, you're not violating the copy right there. And so he addressed that concern. And that was one of the major things that a lot of people didn't talk about, but I think it's important for the model makers. And so the Chinese just have been able to work around that because of their position on IP. And what we're really seeing here, and I think Bill teed it up even better off of my tweet, which is, they're able to compound. So what you're seeing very quickly is both the open source nature, the open weights nature, allow them to basically compound on each other.
6:57So instead of working in silos and instead of having to create giant training clusters separately, they can basically take each other's work, build on top of it, almost consider it like a remix of someone's model K2, sort of a well known remix of what deep sea had done. And now we're starting to see that happen really fast. And we're seeing two dimensions of it going quickly. One, we're seeing the leading edge models getting quicker. And we're then seeing them distilled down smaller, turbo models really, really fast as well. There was a release today of a Quinn, 30 billion parameter model, which is performing as good as GPT -40.
7:33So think about that, right? And GPT -40 was world class, not that long ago. So those are the reasons that we're really seeing an acceleration right now. You know, I want to dig into this model development in particular. A year ago, we were talking about these models being these stochastic parrots. And we really had to compress the entire internet. So you go back to GPT -4 and compressing the entire internet. But now we really don't need to do it because we've trained them to use tools like the internet, right? They're true reasoning engines. When I ask a question today, it doesn't just spit out an answer immediately.
8:11It goes and uses the tool and it searches the internet. So if you don't have to compress all this Wikipedia information, I don't know, take a subject like World War II, you just need to know how to go out and use the internet to find the information, to summarize it in real time. How has that changed the pace of progress and the balance between open and closed? Yeah. And so it's spot on, right? Brad, we see now and you see it when you use these reasoning models. And what I suggest everyone do is when you're using your reasoning model, you can usually expand out its thought process. So when you ask a question and they'll say, oh, the person is asking a question about this, what should I do?
8:48Let me go and maybe search the internet. Let me go do a few different things that can have a lot of different tools. And so the push has been towards really, really strong reasoning models. And you know, I have to give credit. They're opening. I really started that with 01. That was really the first reasoning model that was put out there. But I think on the back of the research and the back of it, you know, everyone talked about, and you know, the pod's good friend, Noam Brown was the leader on that program. And everyone was able to look at that and say, let's reframe the problem. And this allows us to build stronger reasoning models that don't have to compress, like you said, all the internet's information.
9:21And once they're coupled with strong tools, you start getting these really, really incredible results that don't even just show up in benchmarks because none of the benchmarks really allow you to use a tool to answer the results. And if they did, we're going to see a whole bunch of new set of results that happen there. Hey, Bill, just in many ways, I think this validates what you were arguing over the last six to 12 months. You said this was likely to happen. Everybody knows you're one of the biggest proponents of open source in the world. And you were telling people, don't be, you know, the Chinese are going to use open source to their advantage.
9:55And now we're seeing that in a really profound way. Why is China so successful here? And what we, what, what can we learn from them? Well, we've talked about it in the past. I won't dwell on it, but China got excited about open source about 20 years ago. It's not a new thing that's happened. And you can imagine when most of the world accuses you of IP theft that embracing something like Linux and all the other software, open source products seems very appealing, right? And so I think it became kind of a common way of operating within China. And it's a country that hasn't prioritized IP protection the way we have around patents.
10:41And I can make an argument that there's way more prosperity if ideas are shared instead of protected. But I don't know. The one thing I don't know is in the current AI situation, was the government promoting open source and encouraging it or did it just develop through competitive forces? Right. But now you have a scenario where these companies are, first of all, there's new ones popping up. And so I almost feel like an idiot when Kimmy comes out and moonshot and then this week, I guess I don't even know how to pronounce it, Zippu, releases a model. And I go on pitch book and I look it up. And they've already raised $1 .4 billion.
11:29So it shouldn't have been a secret. But I didn't know about it. You know, and all of a sudden they're in the leader tables on over and router and like, oh my God, you know, they're coming out of everywhere. And what it shows you is just that when you have a competitive dynamic where every single player, and I think there may be seven or eight did pocketed players with open models in China, they all learn from each other extremely fast. And in this case, unlike software, you can use one model to distill the other and make it better. So it's almost like a accelerated, you know, form of that. And you just get massive quick co -evolution.
12:08And I came up with a, a little analogy for people. I'll try and do it quickly. But imagine you had two communities. They're both farming communities and let's say there's 10 to 20 farms in each. And in one community, they come into the farmer's market once a week and they just compete by selling their products, but then they go back. And the other community, when they come into farmer's market, they also, in addition to competing and selling, they, they're forced. I don't know who would force them, but they're forced to share all their best practices from that week with everybody and everyone does it and everyone shares their best practices.
12:44And then if you ran that exercise over two years or whatever, obviously the community where the best practices are shared across all farms is going to have a higher global output for the community than the one where you've just got proprietary ideas driving, you know, the end of it and just competition without the idea sharing. And that may, like, even me saying that may cause some people to scream, so that's socialism or like, you know, they may not understand open source or how it works or why. But I do think you end up with a higher fitness level for a community that's behaving that way. Overall, you may end up with a lot less chance of a breakout monopolist like we've had in many of the sectors in American technology.
13:32Well, I mean, let's just assume the Chinese government is in fact encouraging us in whatever ways. Right. I mean, if you look at the release of the AI action plan last week, the Trump administration, you know, had a section that did which is about encouraging open source and open weight models in the US saying that these could become standards in some businesses and academic workloads and it's important. They're built on the American AI style. So, you know, as an aside, the Chinese quickly followed, you know, the American AI plan. I think they released there's a couple days later where they called for the establishment of a global AI corporation organization, which I thought again is interesting.
14:17So, you know, Bill, how do you feel about, you know, like we haven't seen that much traction in the US labs on open source? Obviously, Lama has been probably the market leader there, but this is for both of you. You know, handicap for me, if you will, how do you think this plays out? First sunny, maybe you start. What do you see at GROC? Do you see a lot of demand for these Chinese open source models? And if so, what would it take for an American open source model to catch up? Yeah, one of the things that we should pull up is the chart of intelligence to price. And one of the things that you see with the leading open source models now, which are the Chinese is 90 % of the quality in terms of intelligence, but at a 90 % price discount.
15:09And I think whenever you offer that to anybody, you're going to see people want to use that, whether it's individual developers or enterprises. And so we're seeing. So, let me interrupt there real quick. So if you're looking at this chart, right, in the top right of that chart, you'll see a cluster of these Chinese open source companies, right? And the vertical axes here being really intelligence, the horizontal axes from left to right being the cost per million tokens. And so you really want to be in the top right of that model, high intelligence low cost. And what this model, what this chart shows is that you, you know, to Sonny's point, you can get 90 % of the intelligence, right, for 10 or 20 % of the cost.
15:57And the result I assume, Sonny, is that you're seeing huge demand at GROC and in Saudi Arabia, where you are right now for these Chinese open source models. We are. And then now just taking that forward, what do people want? They want some accountability. And that's what you'll get. That's what you sort of got out of Linux and say Red Hat, right? As great as Linux was and Bill was touching on it, the majority of the enterprise was using, you know, a distribution which they could go and, you know, point to someone if they needed something. And so I think the world wants models that they can get from companies that they can go to.
16:31And so to answer your question and what happens, I think if we look at Q4 this year or Q1 next year, I'd be willing to say, you know, the top three worldwide model will be a US -based open source model. And, you know, we've got two big efforts happening there. We know we have the open AI open source, which, you know, a lot of people have been working on, an open AI, and even, you know, Sam and self has commented on that. And it's released later this summer. And then we have all the efforts by Meta. And if you take, you combine both of those things together, I don't think you end up with something that ends up further down the list in terms of intelligence and or price.
17:11I, one thing I wanted to highlight about the China situation that I think might inform the US situation, I was having a conversation with this extremely young AI entrepreneur that I know. He was pouring over the zip, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, paper. And he asked me some information. I went on pitch book and sent it to him who had funded it. And he asked me, he says, why is Ali Baba funding all these things when they've got their own model? And because they're in several of the other competitive plays. And it reminded me of, you know, a lot of the points that I've made about open sources, like if you're not confident you're going to win on offense, you want to play defense.
17:59And so for any large tech company, commoditizing a potential threat is actually quite valuable. You know, you look at what Facebook did with the Open Computing Initiative inside of their data centers. And so, you know, it may just be very well be that that Ali Baba just wants to make sure there's no bite dance, you know, the equivalent in the ice space. And that would be pretty rational. And the reason I think that's an interesting data point when you think about the US. And, you know, there are several big tech companies that seem to be not on the bleeding edge of AI. You know, you got Microsoft, maybe, I mean, they have access to Open AI right now, but they wouldn't lose that or whatever.
18:45You've got Amazon, you've got Apple. You know, if I'm at any of those companies, I'd be funding a open source competitor, you know, rather than funding, you know, like Amazon with the Antropa. I think you're in a much better position to encourage open source. And so I actually think we may. But Bill, are there are there are there a bunch of open source startup models in the US? That's where I was going next. I think you're going to see new entrance pop up that that try to co -evolve with the Chinese models. You know, Len is Linux American is Linux Chinese? Like no one thinks of it as having a a domicile, right?
19:30And so this is just me predicting. I don't, you know, I just think you're going to see just like you saw Kimmy and and Jipu pop up. I wouldn't be shocked if you see other new entrance pop up that are trying to be like sanctioned or or are, you know, cleaned, you know, use Red Hat as an example, sunny version of these things. Because I think if you start with access to those Chinese models, it wouldn't take you long to move into a near place. And you wouldn't have to spend the kind of money the foundational model companies have. And then you may see a big fight around regulatory capture where someone tries to say that's not allowed or whatnot.
20:13But I do expect to see that. And if I'm the Mr. All team, if you're not distilling on these Chinese models, I don't know what you're doing right now. But I don't have any data on that. Open AI is rumored to be launched in their open source model any day. Sonny, what would they have to do? So to your point, you predict to go back to the intelligence and pricing chart, right? So if open AI was in the top right of that chart, i .e., if they're able to deliver something at the intelligence of, let's call it quen. And they're also able to deliver to market at, you know, 20 % of the cost. It would seem to me that actors around the world, certainly actor, it would be, you know, part of the American AI action plan.
20:57We had won everybody in the world to use that model. And do you believe they have a shot at out competing, being the upper right, you know, by the end of the year? And if so, do you think that will be the outcome? Like these companies that are using quen on GROC, do you think they would prefer to use open AI so long as it was equally capable and equally priced performance? So two things that we see is brand. And, you know, the US domiciled or, you know, someone that they can kind of point at, that wins. And so, if that shows up, it will win. Because if you're a company and, you know, at some point, you have to, you know, get your teams to sign off on what is it that you're using?
21:39What are the risks? We're going to see it with it. And like, you know, who is liable if something goes wrong? And so, I sort of feel like, with open AI's release and, you know, meta charges back, or even if some of these startups emerge that, you know, we can point at, I think we'll see a huge shift back towards those models versus the Chinese ones. Yep. And we really don't know at this point, unless you guys have some insight knowledge, like when, when meta makes their second push with all these hires that they've made, are they, are they going to remain committed to open source or even be more open?
22:16We don't, we really don't know yet at this point. Right. You've certainly seen some of those rumors out there. You know, I've seen rumors on Twitter that they were debating whether or not they should back away from open source. My hunch is that that's a misread. My hunch is that they're going to stay very committed to open source, but they may complement it with a proprietary model. That would be my guess as opposed to scrapping open source altogether. And Brian, can I throw one thing out there? I think part of the pitch to get everyone there is that it's open. Because everyone that they're pulling over are coming from closed places.
22:54And so if you're really passionate about the work you're doing and you're passionate about where this is going to go. And there's only one company that can fund that to that scale and do it open is those guys. So I think it's part of the pitch. Yes, some of the researchers like have a religious belief, which was evident in the interview with the deep seek founder. Like it's oddly like higher on their maslow, you know, hierarchy than the money. Of course, they're getting the money.
23:27This is I think a really important point I want to come back to, sunny is that you're seeing massive demand for these Chinese open source models today. Precisely because enterprises around the world can utilize them. They have 90 % of the capabilities at 20 % of the cost, 10 % or 20 % of the cost. So it turns out if you deliver something really powerful and really cheap, that's more important to these players than American values aligned. But if you gave them something that was super powerful and super cheap and aligned with Western values, right, that you think that would be the winning formula for an American open AI model to top the distribution leaderboards around the world.
24:18So I think on a place like open router, you know, where you can see what is happening. I see we would see it rise to the top in a few days. That's music to David Sacks his ears because, you know, clearly in the strategic plan, they're worried about Chinese open source models dominating globally. And we're, if you just watch the pace of releases, the quality of the releases out of China, the cycle time on the innovation and the open source community out of China, it's faster and better at the moment. So, and the only real big development, you know, we may see some of these new startups bill, we may see a reboot out of meta, but the the one that has, I think everybody really holding their breath and hoping that we see something really capable and powerful is this open source model that's been promised out of open AI.
25:14Now, of course, Elon says he's committed open source as well. Grock for is a great model is impressive what they put out there. Any idea, sunny about the open source plans out of out of X? Yeah, so I think like Elon's been, you know, pretty said it on Twitter that they'll always open source one generation back. And so whether on three, you know, they should have gotten to two and now they're on four. So I think the thinking is that they will get there, you know, my only guess would be is that, you know, right now if they were to open source two or even three, it's so far behind that, you know, what's the purpose in doing it?
25:55It may not even be utilized and you'll maybe end up having to deal with just a bunch of internet or Twitter fun. Just coming back to open AI, I will tell you, it's like one of those things that really you rarely see in the enterprise, it's almost like the demand for like a, you know, like a Tesla roadster or something or a model Y before it came out, everybody asks for it. It's like that's the model that everybody wants to use right now. And so, you know, we can't wait till it comes live and and it, you know, one, it's on Groc, one, it's all over the world. I think it's going to be a real big one for everyone.
26:28Well, while we have you, Sunny, you know, there's really just been this explosion in the compute arms race, right? There was a big debate. You were on the pod a year ago. We had with Bill, you know, had we topped out on compute demand, you know, were we entering an overbilled a la Cisco 2000? And it's really been remarkable. I think now that's very clear, but just a couple of tweets out of Elon and Sam Altman the last couple weeks on this compute demand has really caught my attention. If you look at this one out of Elon talking about the x .ai goal is 50 million in units of H 100 equivalent and Clark Tang on my team tweeted something that broke that down, which showed that that reflected something like, you know, four million total GPUs and an energy footprint of like 11 gigawatts, right?
27:25And then Sam Altman comes out and talks about their deal down in Abelene for four and a half gigawatts and the fact that they were going to come in well above the $500 billion estimate that they had promised to the government. So these compute clusters now that are being talked about, being built over the next five years, these are massively bigger than what we were even talking about a year ago. And I think they reflect this move toward inference time reasoning agent to agent interaction, reasoning engines, you know, Jensen's comment on the pod last year, the inference was going to 1 billion x and the consequence, you know, what we're going to need in terms of compute power to power all that.
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28:10Maybe just reflect, you're in the middle of all this, you're building out your own inference clouds around the world. Is this a lot of hyperbole and chest pounding or do you actually see the dollars going into the ground in places like Saudi Arabia and around the US? Yeah, I'm going to just quantify it with Google for a second. So, you know, in the, in the, in the Mary Meeker bond deck, you know, they have a slide there that shows Google went from 5 trillion tokens a month to 480 trillion tokens a month. And they had just put some press out that they crossed like, you know, 800 trillion. And I saw something today that crossed a quadrillion.
28:50And I had to look that up. That's a thousand trillion. And so in a course of a year and a few months, they've gone from 5 trillion to a thousand trillion. So that's 200x right there. I mean, that just shows it to you without having to look at anything else. Every single search query on the planet today is now an inference transaction. Correct. And so, you know, and you see it, you know, an entropic with, you know, their continued fundraisers going, you know, through the roof. That's happening because they're seeing the amount of token consumption. And so anywhere we lay infrastructure, we fire up a rack.
29:31It becomes fully consumed within a few hours. You're talking rock. It was a huge demand. Fire out stripping supply, even at Grock. We do. So Bill, you see these fundraising announcements that are being discussed. Just CMBCs reporting tonight. I think that iconic is going to lead a $5 billion round into an entropic at 170 billion. In the case of anthropic, it's, you know, $170 billion on rumored $5 billion in revenue. X has been rumored to be raising at $150 to $200 billion. So, you know, you've never, in the history of venture, you've never seen fundraisers like this. One of the topics that is being hotly debated on the Twitter is that there's massive intervening deletion in these rounds, Bill, because of the employee option grants or the employee RSUs that are needing to be granted to keep the employees, you know, in these businesses.
30:34So just observing this a little bit from a far, I don't think you guys, you're a direct investor in any of these major labs. What do you see? What do you observe? What are your warning signs, you know, about the size and the demand that you see in these rounds? Well, I've never seen anything like it. I mean, I saw, you know, through the Uber and Lyft situation, I saw a precursor to this, but these dollars are even bigger. And the amount of money that these companies are willing to lose in a year, you know, I still think it's particularly interesting that Google has to compete with OpenAI because OpenAI is going to lose $7 billion a year and Google won't.
31:16Like they would never allow themselves to do that. And this started back in that previous era where for the first time ever, you saw private companies have a competitive advantage in that they can be more risk -seeking with capital than the public companies are allowed to be. But I think in the past 12 months, we've seen OpenAI, Meta, and certainly X, you know, move into this place. I call them the cost is no object, the Ceno group, where they're just putting out press leases, press leases, and opening data center after data center.
32:01And, choosing not to extend their CapEx budget, you look at that Amazon example when we spoke to the the Levant brothers at Cotou, where they're not keeping up with the Nvidia purchases relative to their AWS share. And so there are a few companies that are back on their feet and there's a few companies that are really pushing the gas pedal. And I can't, there's a few in the middle, I can't tell whether Anthropic has the audacity and the means to raise enough money to start building data centers themselves they haven't so far. But it's a sport of kings, you know, it's a sport of kings. Like there's never been this amount of money spent right now in video and others building in the stack like like Dell that we spoke to a few weeks ago, like they're the winners in a pick and trouble game that's got this amount of aggressiveness.
33:01It's a maybe maybe SK Heinix too, I don't know. It's sunny sunny. Do you see, you know, going back to the well -worn cliche that every glut or that every shortage ultimately ends in a glut. Do you have any evidence on the horizon where you see supply out stripping demand? No, I mean, I was going to ask this to Bill, as he was just saying, Bill, like on a daily basis, are you consuming more tokens or are you consuming more, you know, just traditional, you know, web lookups, right? And I'd be willing to guess you're consuming more tokens. Oh, it's insane. And and tokens are increasing. Like when you're using those reasoning models, you don't see all the tokens, right?
33:50They don't publish it, but they're, you know, this is where totally, yeah, 10 to 100 X more than you're very first day eye search. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. The one thing, the one thing I will, so you're right, I'm doing, go ahead, you finish. No, no, no, no, no, no, and I just wanted to say, even yesterday and then I got to put this, you know, press release plus, you know, product change up saying, hey, we got a throttle, everybody, right? And this is like, because we have all these people using way too much of our services. So I think, you know, if you have intelligent models, right?
34:26And you have the capacity for it. It's one of those things people are consuming, Givens, paradox or whatever, yeah, sorry, go ahead, Bill, you're just going to offer one caveat to this super exciting line of thought, which is because of the amount of venture capital out there, companies are not pricing to cost. Like no one, no one, none of the model companies, I don't think anyone even in the verticals, like no one's pricing to cost because they're pricing to take market share. And, you know, you and I, Sonny, we had a previous discussion about the unlimited pricing and inference has variable costs.
35:07So is that even sustainable, right? And even when people say to me, oh, we're going to run out of power, you wouldn't run out of power if you just took the price up. Like, like the thing that throttle's demand is price, but no one here is raising price. Like Anthropic doesn't need to throttle. They just raise price, but they're not willing to do that because they're afraid to lose share. And so everyone's pricing to share, that means they're pricing under cost. There's rumors of even some of the best known brands in AI having negative growth margin. And so I don't know when that settles out, but that that will create a bump in the supply demand curve if that ever has to be fixed.
35:50But for now, because because. Can I ask a question there? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, which is going back to the point that we made an open source. But if you know in the back of your mind that there's something that's 90 % is good, but it's 90 % cheaper, how does that factor? Because we've also never had that factor as we're going through this growth curve. I mean, since almost since we started the pod, I've routinely highlighted the steepness of that price curve on, you know, as it kind of becomes less cutting edge is something I've never seen before. I've never ever seen it. And I'm sure that a lot of people sit around and say, well, it's okay if I'm losing money here because, you know, six months from now, I'll just use the older model.
36:42And we also talked in the past about how in the internet age, all the startups began with Oracle and Sun. And eventually they all moved to Linux and mySQL. And so there was a, there was a, we got to win at all cost phase. And then there was a phase where you started worrying about cost and optimization. And so one day, one day will likely, you know, make that, make that move. And, and I, a few of the companies I've talked to that are running inference at scale, they are already starting to think that way. Like they're looking, right. They're looking at it, you know, from that, from that lens. But I, but it was, and I think that's why Grock and Cerebrus are doing so well.
37:25But Sunny, give us, give us an example. I would imagine that the wind surfs of the world and the cursors of the world and all these folks who are building these, you know, these coding agents, they've got massive, you know, demand for their applications, right. But they're paying through the nose to anthropic or to these underlying proprietary model providers to be able to do that. So what's the dynamic that you see there? Do you see them running to implement Klen or some of these cheaper models? Yeah, without kind of getting in this specific, any one of them. But like, you know, multiple folks are building their own models, based off open source.
38:07And right. So they could just go distill any one of these models. Right. And, you know, given that they're these very lenient Apache licenses and eliminate the entire cost of Sonnet that sits under it for 70 % of use cases. Yeah. And like Bill said, turn that into a premium offering, right. Say that's the, you know, the gold and, you know, the silver and the bonds are built off, you know, something that's like I said, one tenth the price. That seems to me, Bill, you know, if I had to forecast, you know, if I'm opening eye, I'm running a consumer business with really high gross margins, right. Because consumers are less sensitive to what they're paying their their their their their intensity of use is lower.
38:58Whereas when if somebody's writing code, you know, there's the variable intensity is high. And so, you know, for them, it would make sense to launch an open source model back to where we started the pod and price it really low to, you know, drive share knowing, you know, reminds me a little bit of Amazon back in the day. Amazon had this monopoly retail business. They could use to subsidize AWS, gain share for a decade and then begin to take price. That would be a rational strategy for open AI to follow. So, you take the profitable consumer business, you use it to subsidize, you know, the the market sharing other applications that you hope to build.
39:42That is certainly a reasonable strategy. I, I, I, I'm not inside that company. You have way more knowledge than I do, but, um, you know, I pay the $200 a month and I do every one of my searches on four five. And I'm probably probably negative. I would think. And so I do think there'll be some rationalization where these models, um, kind of self -pick, which one they're running based on what you need. I probably don't need to be using. And move to more of a consumption logic. Yeah. Move more to more of a consumption logic. There are already, uh, they're already doing that in, in parts of their enterprise business.
40:20Um, and, and, you know, as they've transitioned to more of this consumption logic, I think it's led to some real unlocks, uh, you know, you know, for the business. I think that makes it harder if you're in the, the lab game and you don't have a consumer product and you don't own an application that you can drive high gross margins. I think then gets back to this question. How long can you run the, your business for share, right? Hoping that someday because, you know, they all exist at the beneficence of the capital markets and the capital markets are willing to provide an incredible amount of capital to these businesses today.
40:59Sure are. Um, but, but you and I have, we've lived through these periods where that disappears quickly. And can I, can I put something there just to kind of hear your feedback on it guys, which is look at Google and the TPU. And Google is clearly, you know, by these numbers that we're seeing, right, putting out more tokens than anyone else, right? Do they, do you guys believe they have a strategic advantage because they have their own hardware, they're not having to pay, you know, 80 % margin on something that they can generate tokens with. Like, how do you guys look at that business and say clearly they look to be sort of the largest, at least openly saying, the largest processor of tokens?
41:38I didn't look the key data point in that case, which I don't have the data, but I'd be glad to repeat it if someone shared it with us is how many non -Google applications are running on the TPUs? Like, how many third -party customers are using? Because I would have heard or with the, you know, the general perception is, is that that most of their proprietary TPU transactions are their own applications. Yep. But that's probably where most of their tokens are being processed anyways at this point, Bill, right? Like, transcribing YouTube videos and, you know, all, you can Google meet, you can turn it on and all those searches.
42:16I was just inferring in your question, maybe I shouldn't have been, that they'll have an advantage for Google Cloud. And in order for that to be true, they need to, to have this cross -over moment. One quick thing, Brad, on OpenAI, you know, I've been writing a book which I've talked about frequently and I've been quite, although I guess there's some privacy things now you need to be worried about, but I've been quite open with OpenAI about the book and doing research, you know, along the way. It knows a tremendous amount about my book right now. And I can ask follow -up questions without having to put the whole book back in the prompt again because of that.
43:01And so I can, I would, I would continue to believe that OpenAI's most likely chance to long -term success comes from switching costs and lock in more than it will come from staying on the edge of the model race. Because I think, and the pricing, and the pricing power that comes with that brand, don't know that, right? No, that's right. Because the fact that matter is you said you're paying 200 bucks, you're getting more than $200 in value. I don't know what the price is, but I know that if it was variable, you would pay a hell of a lot more money to use that service too. I would, but the lock in once one of these systems starts to truly understand you and have all your historic knowledge.
43:46I think the switching costs will be very high at that moment in time. Sunny, back to your question about the TPU and the advantage of that vertical integration to Google. I think it's too early to know. What I would tell you is that they've absolutely made some changes. I think over the course of last three to four months to accelerate the business. You've seen the news about OpenAI, leveraging TPUs for some of the inference demands that they have. Ultimately, what I've said all along about Google is that many ways the best position company in the world, but a lot of their advantage is no longer much of an advantage.
44:31They were the dominant place where the consumer started every single query. We know today that's just not true. When people are looking for answers, Bill's book is not in Google. Bill's book is in chat, G -P -T, and that's the thing. Actually, it's in Google docs, but you're right. The knowledge of it. The knowledge of it and the interaction and the token generation. My only point is this. The battle for the consumer is ultimately where the value of a cruise sunny, not who runs hardware. Google's dominance, it's been the greatest business in the history of capitalism for 20 years because they owned the consumer, they owned the verb, in something that was extraordinarily high margin.
45:18All I would say is the first real threat in 20 years came about in the chat G -P -T moment. It's continued to accelerate. I think chat G -P -T will cross a billion weeklys, like maybe this year. Probably this year, I would guess. That to me has always been the case for OpenAI. When you look at the rest of these frontier labs, the case you've made throughout this pod about seven of these models in China being able to open source to still off one another, drive up intelligence, drive down costs. What that tells me is the model layer is being increasingly commoditized and that there's not going to be a lot of intrinsic value in that intelligence layer, that operating layer.
46:03You're going to have to build applications that guys like Bill Gurley and you and I are using every day. That's where the battle is on the consumer side. You're going to have the exact same battle when it comes to coding agents and general enterprise applications. I've said there, I think it's going to be more of a heterogeneous world. I think there are going to be lots of players that compete. I think the margins will be lower in that world. It may very well be that the tide is going up so much here. The whole world is transforming so much around this that you're still going to have lots of players who do incredibly well.
46:39I have to say I'm surprised. If you would have told any of us a year ago or 18 months ago, right, that the combined enterprise value of open AI and anthropic together would be over half a trillion dollars and you throw x .ai in there, it'd be a trillion dollars across the three of them roughly. It's bigger and faster and the compute demand is higher than any of us I think anticipated. Sunny, hopefully we can keep you on here for a bit. We're just going to wrap up with a topic that I think has dominated really the conversation in the markets over the course of last year. That's been about tariffs and the reordering of global trade.
47:21Bill, I know you had some questions, some thoughts about it. I'm happy to dig in and talk about it as well. Well, I would really just love to hear from you, Brad. The markets got very nervous when was a liberation day, when the unpredictable ability of how big some of the numbers were and what that might mean and whether we were walking away from the notion of comparative advantage and I think the markets got spooked. I think you turn around and look at where the markets are today and we've really gone through a evolution of how the Wall Street is interpreting the both the initial launch of the tariffs and the reality of where they're landing.
48:12How would you describe that and why do you think the markets are getting very comfortable with where they're landing? I mean, not only comfortable, but where at all time high? April 2nd, I was going on CNBC saying the nuclear Navarro was going to be a disaster and I'm out. The amazing thing about this administration is there's really, it's a team of rivals within the White House and you had a lot of people who were basically outlining this plan for, let's call it 10 to 15 to 20 % tariffs across the board. That would amount to about $300 billion in total tariffs up from $75 billion in 2024. But you had Navarro who was basically saying we're going to replace the internal revenue service.
49:02We're going to get rid of the income tax and we're going to have 2 trillion of tariffs. Okay. And I was very clear and I think the market was very clear. We all voted with our wallets and we said until the president tells us whether it's door one or door two, we're out. The market shot first and asked questions later and that's where you saw that huge drawdown in the market. The Nasdaq was down 21 % right at its trough this year. Now the Nasdaq's up over 10. It's a 30 % move in about 60 or 70 days, which is extraordinary even by the historical patterns that we've seen over the course of the last five years.
49:40But let me back up here for a second. I think the consensus view of all economists, right? 90 % of economists, is it tariffs are going to be bad? They're going to be attacks that gets paid by the US consumer. There was a small group led by, you know, Scott Bessent and Kevin Hassett at the National Economic Council that said no, it's actually going to be different this time. And the reason it's going to be different this time, their theory argued, was that the world had become dependent upon exporting to the United States. So that the total trade deficit to the United States of goods and services was about 915 billion last year, a $1 .2 trillion goods deficit.
50:29And that basically met that China was selling a lot more to the United States than they were buying of US goods. And so what Bessent and Hassett postulated was that these countries have no choice if we impose a tariff on them. So long as it's not draconian 70 % 80 % what Navarro was talking about, if we impose a 15 % tariff on them, they have to eat it. The producers have to eat it because otherwise they're going to end up laying off millions of people in Vietnam in China and these countries. And politically they can't afford to lay these folks off. So that was their theory of the case. The consensus economist said no way is that true, you're going to see massive inflation.
51:14But what have you seen? You have not seen the inflation percolate through. I will caveat this by saying yet, okay. So here we are in July, the consensus economist said it would have already happened. And the National Economic Council was out with the paper last week that deconstructed core PC. So that's the best proxy to Fed watches for inflation since the start of the year. And it showed this was really interesting. Import prices have been going up at a slower rate than domestically produced goods. Okay. So this is the exact opposite of what you would have expected from tariffs. Of course, you would have expected the imported prices would have been going up more than domestic goods.
52:02And so we'll show these charts. And we'll put the link to this paper. People ought to take a look at that. But to me, when I look at the president's, the deal is he's landing. The deal he just got announced yesterday with the European Union. 15 % on all goods coming from Europe, 0 % on US goods going to Europe. So in opening up of Europe markets, paying us 15 % on top of that, getting commitments like $750 billion, almost a trillion of energy purchases from the US, or look at Japan, which they announced last week, another huge market. Again, similar, they're going to pay tariffs to the United States.
52:45No tariffs imposed on the United States. And they're going to invest $550 billion into the US in a way the president gets to direct. So I just think we need to give the president credit where credit is due. Everybody said this was going to lead to retaliation to trade wars was going to be disastrous for the US. And all we've seen so far is deals, deals, deals, deals. And I have to say, if this was the CEO of one of our companies, right, let's say we had a board meeting at the start of the year and he outlined these plans and we said, Hey, we're really nervous about this. You know, this is a high risk high reward strategy.
53:25It's either going to backfire and we're going to fire you or it's going to work really well and we give you a bonus. If we're measuring them halfway through the year, I would say that he's in line for a bonus based upon the trillions of dollars that are going to be coming into the United States and the fact that we now have a 300 to a $350 billion recurring, you know, stream of revenues into treasury in the form of these tariffs, which are being paid. And I think Besson said last week in the month of June, we had our first surplus in the United States monthly surplus since 2015, right, because of the tariff revenues that are coming in.
54:08So I will say this, I was on the fence, I knew the nuclear tariffs, the trillion or two trillion, I knew that was a disaster. I said, if we landed the plane where Besson wanted to come in at 300 billion, I thought there was a decent chance that those prices could be passed on in the home countries and so far it looks like that's the case. Do you have any concerns with what's the anything you're watching out for? Well, I think the number one thing is core PC had did bottom last year and it started to tick up and so we have to keep our eye on inflation. And of course, I think it's almost impossible to conceive that we would have totally reordered the entire global trading system on the first pass with zero mistakes.
54:52So we're going to have some some goods and some products that, you know, consumers or US consumers are going to end up paying the taxes and we're going to have to go back and fix some of these things. But I will say that it's turning out massively better than consensus criticisms. I mean, remember Larry Summers at the Co -2 event. I mean, this was just a few months ago and he was saying, this is the biggest economic disaster of his career and I don't think you can describe it that way. The markets are the voting machine is telling you and these are a lot of sophisticated investors. The voting machine is telling you that no retaliations, no trade wars, all these deals getting done works for the US economy and I will tell you that the Atlanta now Fed tracker, which tracks real -time GDP has now ticked up back to 3%.
55:40So after going down a lot in April, it's bounced way back up. So economic activity appears to be going up. And then one final thing here, remember, one of the key reasons for doing this, right, wasn't just because we were, you know, there was, I mean, the EU conceded in the trade negotiations that our relationship was unfairly balanced in the direction of the EU. I mean, they said that's the starting point. So we have to rebalance it. But on top of that, a key reason for doing this was to support the domestic production of critical national industries and to make our supply chains more resilient.
56:19Chips, data centers, energy production, at Altimeter, we just led the series A in a company, I don't even know if we've announced it, but I'll announce it here, which is an all -American producer of rare earth magnets, right? So these are now viable investments because of the tariffs and the resolve of the government to re -enshore these critical supply chains. So I mean, that's a huge benefit that you would be willing to pay something for, but we're getting the benefit. And on top of that, we're getting paid. Yeah. Can I add one thing, guys? Like, not on the economic side, but like, you know, running the supply chain, you know, I broke and look, we're fortunate in that like, the majority of our supply chain is US -centric, including our chips.
56:58But, you know, we still have small discrete components. And Brad, exactly what you were saying is happening is that the producers of manufacturers of those things are coming and you're negotiating. And we've had pretty, you know, significant negotiation with those folks. And that was, I think, like, not like you said, wasn't anticipated. The other thing is, it hasn't been static. The one thing, again, I'll go back to this administration. They moved. Like, we've seen, you know, our tear of schedule move around probably six to eight times since this all has started because they keep evaluating the understand they listen.
57:31And I think that's also a function of how this administration operates. And we want to give them credit for that. Like, people can go and share with them, hey, like, these things are not available. We can't replace them right away. And I think that that's also helping with that last thing you said with the investment you're making is companies get established on short to take advantage of what these tariffs are causing. So he has your supply chain planning. Then that dynamic nature is that started to settle down. Do you see this, you know, are we reaching the end of the tariffs negotiations such that everything can kind of settle down in operate?
58:07It's gone from week to week or even day to day, what it first started and trying to figure what happened to like, now we're looking at it monthly. So it's definitely settling. And Brad, we still have a big thing looming with a China discussion. Correct. Yeah, you know, listen, so we landed Europe, we've landed Japan, we're going to have, you know, the long, the long list is going to be coming up. But when you look at our big trading partners, the EU, we do, I think, $900 billion of trade with Emma here, with China, it's about $600 billion. But we have about a $300 billion good trade deficit with both Europe and China.
58:44So they were the the two big ones. China is the big enchilada because it's not just trade with China, right? It's strategic, it's national security and it's trade and it's the AI race. We know that, you know, the rare earth ban on Chinese magnets was devastating to US industry. We know the retaliation that, you know, where H20s were cut off in terms of Nvidia chips back to China. Read the tea leaves. I'm going to, I'll go out on the limb and I'll say, the consensus still believes like that the China thing is going to be a problem or that it will be small. I think this president wants to do the biggest deal ever done with China.
59:26I don't think he's dogmatic at all. I don't think he's some big China hawk. He said at the AI summit last week, I'm a deal junkie. I like to do deals. You can't be the biggest deal maker in the world without doing a big deal with China. All right. Right. And I, and I, you know, if you just look at today, the Chinese reciprocated in a way, I think the US government was looking for. They said, hey, we'll postpone all of our retaliatory tariffs. They've invited the president to China. The president has suggested he's going to go to China the first week of September, sometime between September and November.
1:00:02I think there is a very, very big deal that's going to get done with China that's going to reorient the relationship in a big way. And let me just like tease this. The president said earlier this year, something that caught all of our attention. He said, you know, if I could wave a magic wand, I would cut the defense budget in half for the United States for China and for Russia. We've never heard a US president in history or anything like that. That is what I would call an extraordinary flexible mindset. And if you go into this deal negotiation with China, with that sort of flexible mindset, I think it could include all of the above rare earth chips, maybe even military cooperation, certainly a rebalancing of trade.
1:00:50I think China's, listen, we entered the year with China paying 15 % in tariffs. That was pre -Trump. They were paying 15 % to the United States and tariffs. So I don't think we're going below 15%. I think they're going to pay. in Trump. Trump won. In Trump won. Right. So I think that they will continue to pay at least 15%. But I think it's going to be much more structured, much more nuanced. You know, Besson's been very clear. China has to rebalance to domestic consumption and away from an export economy that's really sticking it to the US in terms of the trade deficit. I think China gets that.
1:01:27I think they want that for their own country. I think they're willing to do that. I think the United States understands that can't happen overnight. It has to happen over a period of years. I think that there's going to be a big Chinese deal done before the years out. So, so let's close with this, Brad. You've, you've often on the pod been willing to speak about your own temperature for the US markets and whether you're net longer than that short. And you've on this podcast been more enthusiastic than I've ever seen you both about about AI. But, but this, this China theory that you have, I think, would cause the markets to rip if you're correct.
1:02:09But you also said we're at all time highs. You know, and so you want to buy low and sell high. So where, where's your head hanging? We did a pod, I think, around May 2nd. Well, we did the pod in March. And I said, we're out of the market. Right. I remember. Right. And you said you're early and liberation day came and we were happy to be out of the market. On May 2nd, I said, we're out. We're all back in because the bests and consensus is one. It's going to be 300 billion. We're going to land the plane. And I outlined a flight path. I said, you can land the plane. No inflation. You get rate cuts and, you know, and it's kind of off to the races and we're up 30%.
1:02:46You know, off of that bottom in the Nasdaq since then. So 30 % as you move. But when you, when you tell us go about, we're up 10 % for the year. Okay. And if I had told you guys on day one of this year, here's what's going to happen. We're going to rebalance global trade and we're going to land the plane around 300 billion. We're going to have the economy grow at 3 % accelerating. We're going to, you know, have no inflation heading toward rate cuts by the end of the year. You know, that is the backdrop, you know, that I end we're going to have all of this AI demand and accelerating demand for AI compute.
1:03:28I would have said the market can be up at least 15 % for the year. I think we've captured a lot of the return for the for the year bill. I will tell you this though, we see tons of opportunities. And so I would say that we're also bullish on what we see happening in AI. Sonny's going to raise a huge new round here. We're happy to be investors with Sonny as well. And it's extraordinary to watch watch what Sonny's no, it's. Just close that he can edit it. He has a good weekend. Thank you, Sonny, for coming on with us today. Thank you so much. I know it's thanks. Thanks guys. Take care guys.
1:04:16As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.
From the publisher
Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week, they discuss open-source models in China and the US, the compute arms race, tariffs and the reordering of global trade, and more. Enjoy another episode of BG2!
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(3:55) Open-Source Models in China
(17:54) Future of American Open-Source Models
(26:30) Compute Arms Race
(47:05) China, Tariffs, and Reordering of Global Trade
Show Notes:
Artificial Analysis - Intelligence vs. Price
Produced by Benny Beausoleil
Music by Yung Spielberg
Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com
Follow:
Brad Gerstner @altcap
Bill Gurley @bgurley
BG2 Pod @bg2pod
