AI, Middle East, China, Tariffs, Recon Bill, Invest America | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod

“The market, which was down 20% for the year, has now bounced 20% in the last 20 trading days.”

“The Trump administration just repealed the Biden diffusion rule in May of 25.”

“In the first five months of this year, we would have gotten a trillion dollar deal signed with Saudi in terms of their investment in the United States, another trillion dollars with Qatar. Another trillion dollars with the UAE. Those are all investments into t…”

“In Abu Dhabi, they announced a five gigawatt USAI, you know, it's a UAE USAI campus. It's an incredible architectural campus. It's in collaboration with NVIDIA and OpenAI and Oracle. And think of it as almost like a global Stargate. So to put that perspective,…”

“If we had continued down the path that we were on one year from now, this would have been largely, they would have made commitments to build on Chinese AI stacks because they couldn't afford to do nothing.”

“All three of these countries are going to invest aggressively at a level that really no other sovereign on a global basis is investing at to ensure that this part of the world becomes a center for technology and AI.”

“I think we were headed towards a path where we were going to have a wall around America and there was going to be America AI and then China AI was going to have the rest of the world, the opposite of the internet.”

“I expect that the president's lifting of the sanctions on Syria probably gives way to the Saudis signing the Abraham Accords and other positive developments in this part of the world.”

“Once you invest in something, you just start to adopt the mouthpiece for it and make a lot of arguments that are central to that company's success. And I think that's happening now that we have a large number of VCs in the military space.”

“We're a big investors in Andrew. You know, we're big investors in ByteDance.”

“That's what sent the markets down 20%, because we knew two trillion dollars in tariffs is probably a 600 to 700 basis point headwind to GDP.”

“And if you put China at 30% on strategic at 15% on non-strategic and the rest of the world roughly at 10%, you come up with about three hundred billion in tariffs, okay? I just told you that last year tariffs were seventy seven billion, so that's still a forex…”

“So I think what the market was saying is, okay, three hundred billion, half of that will show up as increased prices and taxes on consumers and on businesses. Half of it will get eaten by the producer of the product in China, in India, wherever, you know, that…”

“I think that we could still see as part of the negotiation over the next 90 days, I would not be terribly surprised to see NVIDIA allowed to sell some form of deprecated chip into China”

“My opinion, and I think you share this, is China already has frontier AI. Huawei is already there. We have demonstrable evidence of that. And their models are already there. Arguably, their open source models might even be in front of the United States at this…”

“Are we better off selling to those countries, those companies, keeping companies like ByteDance and Tencent, et cetera, in the CUDA ecosystem, rather than allowing all of that data, all of those profits to flow right into the Huawei ecosystem and benefit the C…”

“But I suspect when you look at this package, right, and again, I'm just saying based upon how the Congressional Budget Office will score it, and this is kind of arcane scoring, but it will probably increase the deficit, and at best it would reduce it by a hund…”

“Well, I think the Defense Department budget goes up by about a hundred and fifty billion dollars as part of this package. And it's about a trillion dollars for the year.”

“In the House version of the bill, they renamed it the MAGA account, which stood for Money Account for Growth and Advancement.”

“What he found was he compared a bunch of Delaware judgments with a bunch of judgments in the federal courts. And he looked at a bunch of different breakings, but one of the breaks was, you know, what's the frequency of awards seven times or higher? And what ar…”

“In the 20 cases where you have this super high multiplier 55% of the cases are just two of the judges, and there's something else that, that I learned in reading this, which I didn't know, but the chancellor who is one of the two, gets to pick who the cases ar…”

“I read this, and I think, you know, any company that I'm involved with, I'm gonna encourage to leave because this is radically different Then why I was told we were supposed to go to Delaware.”

“The second thing they did was the, they put a limit on opportunistic legal claims. Some of that has to do with the multiple point that we talked about, but the big thing they did was, and you can, in your corporate docs, put up a minimum threshold of up to thr…”

“Because the genius bill the genius act, as it's called, which is pretty historic legislation, which effectively crossed a hurdle in the Senate last night that I think now puts it on a fast track to being signed into law.”

“Baidu is scheduled to release the latest version of their model on June 30th. They've Pre-announced it for one reason or another, and they've switched to open source.”

“Deep Seek, Led to Quinn. Led to Xiaomi has a, has their own model as well. They've all gone open source. And so this will be the fourth deep pocket funded model in China that are all open source.”

“I do think you're going to see the open AI open source model. I mean, Sam's talked about it many times. I think you're going to see that in the next 30 days or so, certainly by the end of summer, but I would guess sooner rather than later.”

“I'm no longer A GP on the new funds at Benchmark, which means I'm not involved in new investment decisions. So I didn't, I wasn't part of the decision to invest in Manus and I, you know, found out about it after the fact.”

“So, first of all, they've only operated on U.S. Models. They're a wrapper company. They don't have a foundational model, and they've only operated on top of U.S. Models, so they've actually never operated on top of DeepSeek or any of the other models we were j…”

“They host all of these on us hosting services. And so they're not actually operating any of their customers workloads in China at all. And the data is all resident on those us hosting companies servers. And so there's no customer data in China either.”

“I saw a stat the other day. I think 50% of researchers, AI researchers in the United States of America are Chinese.”

“And I've said, you know, for a long time, the number one thing we could do would be to open up our border for skilled immigration from China as wide as we possibly can.”