Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:17:19 · S0
[00:17:19] S0: ahead. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think the core problem in AI regulation is this thing you point out of you need to coordinate between The United States and China. I mean, I know we're in Europe, and I'm a European, but brutally, if The US decides that we're going to have AI regulation, Europe is going to just have to go along with it, because all European AI connected companies, they want to sell to America, they want to raise money in America, they want to be able to visit America, so you have to kind of pay attention to American law. ASML may not want to go along with the American chip export controls on China, but it has to. Right? So I think what this means is that Europe is going to follow, other parts of the world will follow, but China is the only country that cannot be coerced into following. So China and The US have to talk to each other about a joint approach to some of the safety stuff. And at the moment, you know, I go to The US a lot. I spend maybe more than half my time in The US. I lived there for eighteen years. I work at an American think tank. I have all these friends who do geopolitics and national security in Washington and New York. These are my friends. And so I talk to them all the time about, you know, we need to talk to China. And they're like, Sebastian, you don't understand. We've tried to talk to China. We can't talk to China. It's impossible to talk to China. And I say, you're wrong. I just went there in March. I talked to all the AI leaders. You know, they care about safety too. They don't want cyberattacks from criminals and terrorists either. You know, if you think it's difficult to talk to China, what about speaking to Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union in the nineteen sixties? We had the Nonproliferation Treaty for Nuclear Weapons in the nineteen sixties, and we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. So don't tell me that you can't talk to China. You can talk to China if you want to talk to China. So we have this fight all year. I say I'm winning a little bit. Like, you know, Trump, you know, met with Xi recently. He's meeting him maybe two more times this year. There is a special dialogue between the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and his Chinese counterpart about AI safety.
00:19:29 · S0, Calin Fabri
So we are starting to see the beginnings of the conversation, but we're a long way from a deal where China and The US agree that, you know, there are certain things about controlling GPUs that we both should agree on. It's just not happening soon. [00:19:44] S1: One last question. It's like, if we focus on Europe, we know that DeepMind sold to Google. We know the reasons. You mentioned them in your book why that was just inevitable. What do you think is the opportunity in Europe for the entrepreneurs in Europe in AI? Because we clearly can't compete at a model layer, but arguably the model gets commoditized.
00:19:44 · Calin Fabri, S0
[00:19:44] S1: One last question. It's like, if we focus on Europe, we know that DeepMind sold to Google. We know the reasons. You mentioned them in your book why that was just inevitable. What do you think is the opportunity in Europe for the entrepreneurs in Europe in AI? Because we clearly can't compete at a model layer, but arguably the model gets commoditized. [00:20:04] S0: Well, I think you made the point to me that resilience in Europe is a huge investment thesis across a lot of different areas, and one of them is AI. And in Europe, our own data centers. I believe this personally very strongly. I wrote a small full disclosure, a small check-in to one of the neo clouds in Europe, because I think it is so obvious that Europe needs this. And once we have the data centers, we can run open weight models insofar as they're not being suppressed by regulation. We can run open weight models. They might be from Mistral. They might be from Meta, they might be from a Chinese lab. I think Joe Tsai was here yesterday talking about this, and I think he's right that for European security, running an open weight model on a European cloud is the way to achieve it. You need to do something about energy costs. This is why Scandinavia with lots of hydropower is great. But across Europe, we have a problem with high energy costs, and we need to address that because basically, artificial intelligence is energy plus GPUs plus algorithms. Yes. So I think that's what we need to do in Europe. Wonderful. [00:21:17] S1: Sebastian, thank you so [00:21:18] S0: much. Terrific.