Chris Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t think either of those is right. No, I think the twist I would put on it is, AI tends to be centralizing. It tends to be consolidating power. I think you’re making that point, which is, the people that produce these things, if they’re very powerful things that manage much of the world, being one of the countries and companies that produce them seems to give you immense power. I think that’s what makes the China move into DeepSeek thing very interesting. There’re a number of interesting things about that. One is the fact that they are so competitive so quickly and with a relatively small team and all the other things. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. There’re a lot of brilliant people there. The second one is the strategy, taking this counter strategy of doing open source, and we’ll see if that lasts. Look, we haven’t seen yet. I would expect India is going to have some interesting stuff, Russia, too. There’re a lot of smart people in the world, and the fact that DeepSeek was — what is it — like 150 people. I think there’s another thing which we may be trending towards, which is, AI is incredibly important, but it’s also just a commodity. The foundation models — it doesn’t mean there won’t be businesses. There’ll be businesses at the . . . I think, actually, the emerging consensus — at least the people I talk to — is that you’re going to have cloud providers like AWS and such, and you’re going to have, of course, end-user applications like Cursor and whatever. Some lawyer will have their law firm thing, and every vertical will have their product. It may just be the foundation models end up being like PyTorch or whatever, like math libraries. Essentially, it’s large-scale statistics. It requires heavy engineering, of course, to do the training, but the tricks and secrets end up propagating, and a bunch of people know them. It becomes very large-scale statistical analysis of data source sets, and just a lot of people have it. It may be. If that comes about, what do you think is the dimension that determines which companies dominate? One argument could be Meta and Elon. They just have a lot of resources. They can be in this for a long time. Another argument is OpenAI has the most powerful brand name with ChatGPT and so on. What’s your commercial intuition on what other factor steps into play?…

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