China

“So we're not going to outbuild China. That's not an option. On these large, you know, very expensive platforms. It's just, it's not going to work. It's a bad strategy.”

“You know, you don't want necessarily to give Taiwan the ability to strike deep into mainland China, that Ukrainians would a hundred percent be doing that if we gave them tools to do that into Russia.”

“China has been able to modernize and build new technologies and sort of like they're pretty decisive advantage in countering the way that U S fights the longer range of their missiles. Like all of these things are pretty substantial. So there was a degree of l…”

“It actually really favors the defender. Now, if you can operate in this new way it would be immensely hard for any sort of successful invasion of, you know, Taiwan to actually play out because of You know, what we've learned and what we've seen and how the US …”

“I do think that if China cannot get A-one-hundreds, H-one-hundreds, top-of-the-line hardware, like, GPUs with good interconnect to train models, like, They will invest heavily in solving that problem. And so one of the things that has been quietly happening is…”

“I do think that AI will play a role in manufacturing and sort of 10 exiting or even a hundred exiting manufacturing so that we can actually outperform humans in other countries. I think that's the way it's going to look. Okay. So we will not have to reduce lab…”

“I think even though they may be doing a lot of teleoperation and other things there, I do think that China is still years behind, behind the best US companies for self-driving.”

“And in an environment like this, There's almost like a mass extinction event going on, unfortunately, as we speak for a lot of these single asset companies accentuated by the recent bets that China has made both centrally, governmentally, and in the form of re…”

“China can have AIs that are totally aligned with them. The U S can have AIs that are totally aligned with them. You still are going to have a strategic competition between the two. This is going to they're going to need to integrate it in their militaries. The…”

“If you turn the pain dial all the way up for China in export controls and if AI chips are the currency of economic power in the future, then this increases the probability that they want to invade Taiwan.”

“So you can restrict their intent, which is what deterrence does, but I don't think you can reliably or robustly restrict their capabilities.”

“Even so, I still think if you really tighten the export controls, you made it so that China can't get any of those chips at all, and this is your, one of your biggest priorities, they're just going to steal the weights anyway.”

“If a Chinese party is willing to buy it for more than you because they will accept less margin, that makes it much harder. It's much harder to underwrite a project like that. And so that has, it has it's had a, you know, deterring effect on just private commer…”

“The reason that rare earths get, get noise besides the name rare, and is that at a concentration of downstream processing capacity in China.”

“The autonomy stuff, you know, we go to China regularly and we test drive these vehicles. Super impressive. And better than Tesla to be like very, very clear.”

“There are going to be catastrophic consequences if Chinese models are running on every robot, Every camera, every car, every device around the world.”

“We have 90% reliance on critical minerals that are refined in China, on semiconductors that are manufactured in Taiwan.”

“China only emerged as a rare earth mining superpower about 10 years ago. It came out in twenty-fifteen with its Made in China twenty-twenty-five plan, and from that date onwards, we actually saw China's refining activity of rare earth materials skyrocket.”

“The solution to help put the genie back in the bottle is, I think actually the DoD's deal with MP Materials offers a good template, which is you need an anchor buyer and an end customer, and you need a price floor. So you need to agree with the supplier, in th…”

“It's supply and demand. It's because they built out a massive amount of supply, and it's all of the above, right? They built nuclear reactors. They built solar farms. They built wind farms. They built a ton of battery storage. They have, you know, tons of high…”

“I think that later on, it becomes so destabilizing that China just says, we're going to do something preemptive, like do a cyber attack on your data center. And the U.S. Might do that to China.”

“We've seen this huge uptick in pharma going to China and buying molecules that they typically would have bought from American biotechs.”

“It feels to me like Optimus or some form of like Tesla robot will be one of the winners, most likely, right? High probability... The most likely global winners in robotics will be some subset of China plus Tesla plus something else, right?”

“I am optimistic that, that our relationship with China will improve. That President Trump and the administration has a really, really grounded and common sense attitude about and philosophy around, around how to think about China.”

“No country in the world contributes more to open source than China.”

“The buildup, the military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history.”

“A brushless motor goes into a drone. We're dependent on China for brushless motors.”

“I think there's more than one, less than five companies outside of China that have The necessary ingredients to do this, the capital, the GPUs, the car park with, you know, enough vehicles generating enough data. I say more than one less than five. It's probab…”

“U.S. Is the world's largest economy, China's number two, and cybercrime is number three. It's a one trillion dollar a month problem.”

“It is Chinese workers, Chinese companies, you know, and a lot of the times it's Chinese equity because the debt converts to equity if, you know, the host country defaults. They do a lot of the times.”

“Alison Graham wrote this book years ago called The Thucydides Trapped, where he kind of characterized America as the established power, and he characterized China as the rising power. And I actually think, you know, one of the really big flaws in that whole li…”

“There is, there's a lot of waste in the Belt and Road Initiative, and, you know, mainly it's because whenever you have you know, central planning and really government bureaucrats effectively, you know, Allocating large pools of capital. There's a lot of waste…”

“What's actually really rare is the refining process, because the number of refining, or the number of processing facilities for these minerals is very, very limited outside of China. They exist, but in very limited, you know, quantities.”

“I assure you, when in China, they're not having that same thing about, oh, AI is bad, and we shouldn't do it. That is not what's happening there.”

“You know, my personal view is that it's an infinite game, I believe, first in terms of the race, that there's not going to be a winner, the race is going to be over, but you could get to a situation where a lot of the critical technologies are not U.S. Based, …”