AI, Supply Chains, and the Future of Economic Power
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Our models need to be superior than all the other models on Earth. We need to have the world's best AI innovation on a qualitative basis, so we need to have the most market share. If we have exquisite models that no one uses, we're kinda irrelevant. Americans are positive thinkers. We don't see the world as a finite pie that needs to be subdivided into smaller slices. We see a world where the pie expands, which is the lifeblood of starting a business.
What does it take to win the AI race? At the A16z American Dunamism Summit, I sat down with Jacob Helberg, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, to discuss AI, manufacturing, supply chains, and the new geopolitics of technology. Drawing on themes from his book, The Wires of War, we discussed why hardware, industrial capacity, and secure supply chains are now essential to both economic strength and national security. Jacob also unpacks what it means to lead in AI, from model innovation and global adoption to energy, compute, tariffs, and the reindustrialization of The US.
Jacob, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
We're gonna get into a lot of exciting conversation about the future of the economy, AI, manufacturing, supply chain. But I wanna start at some of your intellectual origin. You wrote a book, The Wires of War, came out in 2021. Why don't you briefly explain the high level thesis of the book? And then I'm curious if you wrote an addendum today about how the last five years have played out, what you might have write.
Yeah. So first of all, it's great to be here, and it's great to see you. I'm excited for this conversation and then have the opportunity to lay out some of the things that the administration's been working on. In 2021, I came out with a book called The Wires of War that was basically proposing a thesis that at the time was somewhat controversial but has become common wisdom since then, which is that the technology world is really in the grips of a two front geopolitical technology war. There's the software end and the hardware end. On the software side, at the time we were seeing the emergence
started your career on the software side at Google. Right? That's right. And then you realize that hardware, now you're spending more time there in your new role. I want you to flesh out exactly what were the sort of key risks you identified on the hardware side, and how have they played out? How have they changed or stayed the same?
Yeah. So, I mean, really what we're talking about is if you have a foreign government that controls, that can instrumentalize its tech companies that operate the hardware of the Internet, it fundamentally challenges our traditional conception of sovereignty. Because it raises a question of what does it mean to be sovereign when you have a foreign power that knows all the deepest, darkest secrets of all the judges, journalists, and jurists in your country and politicians in your country? And the definition of sovereignty starts to look very, very different in a world like that. And so the first
Yeah.
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