Jacob Helberg discusses European economic stagnation and missed technology waves with Elad Gil.
Assertion Partly supported
Helberg: DeepSeek lied about compute capacity and distilled ChatGPT weights
“The main takeaways of how DeepSeq achieved the performance its performance was Incremental efficiency gains. They lied about their compute capacity because they have a billion dollar cluster, and they distilled ChatGPT's model weights.”
Assertion Contradicted
Helberg: Belt and Road countries frequently default, yielding equity to China
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Helberg: Philippines is granting 4,000 acres for forward-deployed industrial base
“We made this arrangement with them where they are granting us 4000 acres, which is obviously very substantial. It's a third of the size of Manhattan. To do a very large industrial build out that's one of a kind that, that helps combine the predictability and c…”
Opinion
Helberg: Pax Silica's private-sector model is more ethical than state-led alliances
“And because we're approaching it by putting our companies in the driver's seat it's actually, you know, in, in a lot of ways, it's much more ethical because the deal is structured in a way that's really meant to be you know, a true joint venture and one that w…”
Assertion Supported
Helberg: AI is driving over a third of US GDP growth
“You know, the American economy has been proven incredibly resilient, and a big part of that is AI being this incredible, you know, incredibly strong economic force that is already fueling over a third of our economic GDP growth right here in the US.”
Opinion
Helberg: Replicating Semiconductor Fabs Abroad Makes No Sense Before US Completion
“There's a whole host of reasons why it wouldn't necessarily make sense to try to replicate that elsewhere because it's highly technical. The global talent supply of talent available in that area is very finite and limited. And it's also extremely capital inten…”