Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Transcript preview
Preview only
Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp customers grow revenue 3.2 times faster than the average American business. Visa, Vercel, Kursor, Stripe, Notion, ElevenLab, Shopify, and 70,000 other businesses all now run on Ramp. Mine does too and so should yours. Learn more at ramp.com/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities l
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
So, Ben, if you can believe it, how long it's been since we last did this, world was very different. No AI at the time. We talked about aggregation theory mostly. I thought a fun place to begin since the world has changed so much is to hear what you think it would mean for The US to win the AI race.
I think it would be very problematic for The US to win. Let's say we take the most sort of fantastical scenario where if you control AI, you basically your military is better than anyone else. Somehow it fixes their manufacturing, all these things that I don't think AI is necessarily going to do because they sort of deal with the real world. But in this world, what is the game theory optimal response of China? To blow up TSMC, game theory can get very sort of convoluted and complex. To me, this one actually isn't that complicated. There is a fundamental disconnect that I have with a lot of the
But in that state, how much does it extend beyond TSMC being blown up? Because in that state, would assume we figured out how to build fabs here in The US, you know, to some degree and are less reliant on that one choke point.
I think there's a little bit of magical thinking, which I just invoked in terms of manufacturing and whether it be fabs, whether that be actuators, all these precursors. I think the degree to which we are dependent on China is underappreciated and is not something that is going to be fixed outside of a conflict. Just because fixing so many of these things is going to be dramatically dumb. If your competitor is sourcing from China and you're gonna start sourcing or eating things from The US, you're gonna be at such a disadvantage relatively speaking that you're just not gonna do it. So you do i
present in these conversations. Put yourself in their shoes. Like what do you think the motivations are?
Everyone can use a good bogeyman. I think from the AI trade perspective, nothing works better than we have to beat China. And I do think we need to beat China. We need to be competitive. I despair at the extent to which over the last few years in particular, so many of our responses, particularly from a political perspective, has been to like, try to be like China. I think we should be going the other direction, more openness, more innovation, less top down control, less restrictions on speech and things along those lines. America succeeds by being on the leading edge and by leading into that.
You said probably The US being purely dominant in AI is not the right end state for the world. What is your ideal equilibrium for how this goes worldwide?
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.