Jensen Huang and Arthur Mensch on Winning the Global AI Race

**Jensen Huang** (0:00)
This is the greatest force of reducing the technology divide the world's ever known.

**Arthur Mensch** (0:07)
It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years.

**Jensen Huang** (0:13)
Nobody's going to do this for you. You've got to do it yourself.

**Arthur Mensch** (0:16)
It's up to organizations, to enterprises, to countries to build what they need.

**Anjney Midha** (0:22)
The stakes at play are basically the equivalent of modern digital colonialization. AI isn't just computing infrastructure, it's also cultural infrastructure.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:32)
The race for AI dominance is not only constrained to companies, but is increasingly capturing the attention of countries. That includes the infrastructure spanning every layer of the stack. The chips, the models, the applications, plus the energy required to run these quote AI factories, the talent needed to produce them, and well-designed policy that helps not hinders this entire ecosystem.
And all of this together is turning critical.

**Jensen Huang** (1:02)
Setup is always hard. This is no different. The only question is do you need to do it? If you want to be part of the future, and this is the most consequential technology of all time, not just our time, of all time. Digital intelligence, how much more valuable, how much more important can it be?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:21)
In today's episode, we explore sovereign AI and this regional race for AI infrastructure across countries big and small. And there is truly no one better to discuss this than our guests, Jensen Huang and Arthur Mensch. Jensen, of course, is the inimitable co-founder and longtime CEO of Nvidia, a company known for its constant reinvention and ability to place critical bets like the GPU or graphics processing unit that has propelled it to be one of the largest companies at over $3 trillion in market cap as of this recording. Of course, the products that Nvidia makes, like the GPU, are also the background to so much of our digital world today. Arthur, on the other hand, is the co-founder and CEO of Mistral, a leading AI lab that focuses on customizable open-source frontier models, but also a growing number of tools to help companies and even countries engage with AI. Today, Arthur and Jensen sit down with a16z general partner, Anshani Mehta, as they explore the role of digital intelligence at the nation level, and how countries should think about ownership, codifying their culture, and the role that open-source should play. All right, let's get started.
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**Anjney Midha** (3:04)
Today, we're talking about Sovereign AI, all things national infrastructure and open source. So, let's just start with the first question I usually get from nation state leaders, which is, is AI actually a general purpose technology? In the history of humanity, we've had maybe a handful of these, 22, 24 economists call these specific technologies that accelerate economic progress broadly across society. Electricity, the printing press, and the question everybody's asking right now, is that the right way to think about AI, or why isn't AI just another important, but ultimately narrow technology?

**Arthur Mensch** (3:41)
I think it's a general purpose technology, because it basically revisits entirely the way we are building software and the way we are using machines. And so in the same way that internet was a general purpose technology, AI is a general purpose technology here. It allows to build agents that are doing things on your behalf. And in that respect, it can be used in any vertical of the industry. It can be used for services, for public services. It can be used to change the life of citizens. It can be used for agriculture. It can obviously be used for defense purposes. So it covers everything that a state needs to worry about. And so in that respect, it's very natural that any state makes it a priority and makes it a dedicated national AI strategy.

**Jensen Huang** (4:23)
By the way, everything Arthur said is 100% correct.
It is also exactly the reason why everybody's given up. And it's precisely wrong. And the reason for that is this. If it's a general purpose technology and one company can build the ultimate general purpose technology, then why shouldn't everybody else do it? And that is the flaw. Right. But that's also the mind trick to convince everyone that intelligence is only something that a few people ought to go build. Everybody ought to sit back and wait for it. I would advise that everybody engage AI. And it is not just a few companies in the world who should build it. Everybody should build it. Nobody's going to care more about the Swedish culture and the Swedish language and the Swedish people and the Swedish ecosystem more than Sweden. Nobody's going to care about the ecosystem of Saudi Arabia more than Saudi Arabia. And nobody's going to care about Israel more than Israel. Despite the fact that the technology is general purpose, and absolutely true, how could intelligence not be general purpose? It is also hyper specialized. And the reason for that is because, let's face it, I don't think I'm waiting around for a general purpose chatbot to be an expert in a particular area of disease. I still think that I would prefer to have somebody who is hyper specialized in that field to fine tune, to train and post train, if you will, an AI model that's going to be specialized in that.