Reid riffs on NVIDIA's chips, China’s AI ambitions, and the push to pause AI

This week Reid and Aria break down the global AI race from Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation and the U. S.–China chip rivalry to what happens when AI starts reshaping industries like medicine. Reid explains why the future of innovation depends on how we deploy AI, not just how we build it, and why doctors, scientists, and creators will need to redefine their expertise in a world of intelligent tools. Later in the episode, Reid responds to new calls to “pause” AI development and shares why he believes safety and progress must advance together. The conversation ends with a look at the future of healthcare and why, in Reid’s view, AI won’t replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace those who don’t.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As Americans should be focused on, and how do you make artificial intelligence into American intelligence, 10 years from now, we will still have doctors and doctors deploying expertise. Now, the expertise will no longer be, well, I spent years memorizing everything, and I am the walking oracle. It's the, no, no, I am the expert thinker and navigator of these set of tools. One of the more subtle ways to think about where's AI today is it's an intelligent group of experts consensus opinion is what it broadly does when it has enough data to do that. That's when AI is broadly at its best right now.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Reid, great to be here today. Excited to hear your reactions and riffs on what's going on in the world. And last week, Nvidia's market cap crossed $5 trillion, which is greater than the GDP of India, China, and the UK, according to the IMF. Jensen Huang says Nvidia went from 95% market share in China to 0%. And he says, and I quote, "I can't imagine any policymaker thinking that that's a good idea." And the reason for that was the combined impact of US export restrictions and Chinese countermeasures. And so obviously, as the CEO of a company, you're not going to be excited about your market share going from 95% to 0%. The US

• 1:17Speaker 01

  did this because of national security issues. They want to make sure that the US is strong in AI. Would love to hear what you think about this. Like, is this an appropriate course of action? And should we be reversing this decision?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Well, if the entire game of winning, or the most important part of the game were, like, sale of chips, then obviously it's a bad idea. But actually, in fact, that's only a small part of the game. I mean, it's an important but small part of the game. And what's really important is, is the development of the AI software tech, of how these models do everything from accelerate science, you know, in, in the case of Sydney's Monis AI, help cure cancer, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it's, it's those outputs. And that, I think, is the thing where the, the chips are the driving determinant for being able to do that.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And when you want to say, hey, we want to maintain the competitive edge for our risk investment, our multi-decade investment, our companies and doing that, actually, in fact, you know, kind of keeping the compute to us and our allies and whatnot is actually, in fact, a very good way to do that. And that's the important part of the game. So, you know, I think, not surprisingly, given that, you know, what, you know, Nvidia and Jensen's business is, we want to sell as many chips at as high a price possible to as many people as possible. His answer is, I should be able to sell chips to everyone. And that's not actually, in fact, the whole game. Now, that being said, I do think that

• 2:51Speaker 00

  the, like, these questions around, like, will you have a Chinese internet and a, or actually, you have a Chinese internet, English internet, and everything else internet, you also have Chinese AI, US AI, and hopefully, like, European AI and all the rest as, as kind of, as a way of playing this out. And I think that's a, actually, I don't think that's a problem. It's a natural thing that's going to happen anyway. And I don't think that's per se a problem. Now, I do think that the, the really key thing that is, as Americans should be focused on, and how do you make artificial intelligence into American

• 3:31Speaker 00

  intelligence, is how do we have this AI revolution most help, like, the entire swath of American industry? How do we get it deployed? How do we get productivity amplifications? How do we get entrepreneurial success with it? And all of that is, I think, what is actually, in fact, most important from an American policy perspective. And, you know, frankly, when you line up the, the kind of, where does China have strengths and where do we have strengths? The compute infrastructure is one of the few areas where we actually have, you know, a decisive edge. The Chinese have much looser data privacy things, can can throw on the

• 4:17Speaker 00

  They kind of like they don't care about Hollywood IP. They don't care about, you know, private data. They don't care about like all that stuff can be thrown into that. They have an amazing large population that acts with the vigor of immigrants and they produce more, you know, STEM graduates than the rest of the world combined. And given that, you know, we as US seem to be determined to try to persuade all of the smart Indians from now no longer coming here, or even more disadvantaged in the STEM arena. So like when you, when you, when you list out the advantages, the compute advantage is one of our very few advantages that we need to hold on to in the

• 5:00Speaker 00

  the competition for creating AI, remaking industry, et cetera. And, you know, the other thing that I think is also a unfortunately by default Chinese advantage that I think we want to try to make up ground as much is adoption and deployment. I think actually, in fact, one of the really key things is not just scale compute, scale data, scale teams, but also scale deployment. And it's one of the things that we need to happen now by natural action, that will be new blitzscaling companies that will start small and get very big using it. But we also, of course, want as much of, of traditional experienced, established American

• 5:43Speaker 00

  industry, you know, adopting this curve really well and effectively. And I think that's where kind of

• 5:53Speaker 00

  you know, the, the other kinds of things we need to be doing in order to get US industry ahead. And that's part of the reason why they have the compute most oriented towards helping US and Western democracy industries.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Well, some people might say that this is sort of the same thing as a lot of people have been talking about how US soybean exports, for instance, to China have recently gone to zero. So people are sort of feeling bad for the soybean farmers because they have this huge market that they can't export to anymore. Jensen's sort of saying the same thing. I had this huge market that I can't export to anymore. Do you think those are the same? And sort of what does like our government owe these US companies when they're saying we're actually gonna sort of disappear one of your main markets?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Well, like I said, you know, $5 trillion company that has no problem selling its entire book at very high prices, that's different than the soybean farmers. So I think the general establishment of tariff warfare will in fact harm a variety of American businesses. And the problem is, is well, who else is gonna buy the soybeans? And, you know, what you have is, well, we established tariff warfare. The soybeans are not being sold overseas. Then you have to have government bailouts, which is, you know, the, you know, your taxpayer, the person who is, you know, kind of working two jobs to make things, you know, ends meet,

• 7:19Speaker 00

  paying for the soybeans that otherwise would have been sold overseas, bringing in, you know, kind of commerce money to make things happen. So the soybeans, they're not at all the same case. But I do think that the, you know, if, for example, it was the, hey, we're establishing this, and there wasn't already, frankly, infinite demand for Nvidia chips, then that would be a different thing. But there isn't infinite demand for soybeans. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, I think that one of the, the, you know, our business success comes from our international trade relations. Like, basically prosperous countries have good export regimes.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  And it's true that our tech industry, one of the things that's underappreciated, generally speaking, in the company, is one of our industries that we get massive amounts more revenue from the rest of the world than we do here. That's part of what creates prosperity for us. And by the way, Nvidia can still sell chips to many other places other than China. And so can still do that. But it's also like, like there's, there's, you know, for the foreseeable future, there is just massive demand for Nvidia chips. So not selling them to China actually in fact, doesn't create any real dent in any US business interest, including Nvidia's.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I was about to say, every, every tech startup we talk to seems to want to get their hands on more Nvidia chips. So they have willing, willing market, that's for sure. If you look sort of long term, does this decoupling of the US and China lead to sort of two incompatible AI internets? Like, are there long term harms that could come from this? Sort of of us separating out from one of our trading partners?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Playing the, the world industry competitive game by restricting chip flow to China is do they build their own native chip industry? And then suddenly do we have, you know, no longer the advantageous leads with chips that we have. Now, China already has that as a top mission anyway, and has had it on a number of different fronts since at least 10 years. I think it's like 2014 or something.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  I do think we will have a bifurcated technology industry. And I think that bifurcated technology industry has all kinds of complications to it. Mostly kind of geopolitical and in economic might and geopolitical influence and all the rest. And it's one of the reasons why I think it's important for every country, including ours, to say, hey, it's a good, it's a good thing for us to actually have our tech industry have a lot of global reach, global customers, global, you know, platform establishment. And it's one of the things that we actually

• 10:10Speaker 00

  benefit enormously as a country, all of our industries. From that, and I think it's one of the things that everyone should have that as a kind of intrinsic strategies, like how do we succeed as a, you know, kind of a global industrial and economic power as part of doing it. Now that being said, there's all kinds of natural geopolitical things that tend to go to, you know, kind of technology sovereignty, digital sovereignty, et cetera, to breaking up the internet, to saying, hey, I don't want to use your AI, I want to use my own AI. And I think that's, you know, that that's part of the Russell. Now, the thing I worry about in, you know, kind of

• 10:53Speaker 00

  the anti-globalist and isolationist tendencies in the US is that we are much better off the more our partners and friends and world, you know, the world uses US tech. It gives us enormous amount of economic power, enormous amount of soft power. It's a good thing. And if you're driving them to say, okay, don't use us, use the Chinese, use others, you're losing a competitive race. And so I think the issue is not so much, I think we naturally bifurcate it in various ways, you know, just go ask DeepSeek about Tanneman Square. You know, there's a, you know, a highlight, highlight point of people trust our ecosystem more than the other available ecosystems to them. Because then you both,

• 11:38Speaker 00

  you know, we as the world, but also we as broad American industry benefit from that a lot.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Not to be flippant, but every year since ChatGPT was released, a group of scientists, technologists have gotten together to put out a pause letter saying that AI has gotten so good that we need to pause now and look at safety concerns. I know you are someone who cares about safety, but you also care about AI development. A few weeks ago, we had over 800 public figures, including AI godfathers like Geoffrey Hinton and Joshua Benjio, also the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, other business, political, cultural figures. They put out this letter that says that, again, we should pause before we have super intelligent AI because we have to think about the safety concerns. Is this just a retread of previous letters? Or is something different this time?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  What do you think about this recent open letter?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Well, on the earlier pause letter, as you know, I thought that one of the things that was a mistake about it is you say, hey, we issue a pause letter, then the people who care about the values, say, say, uh, human alignment, risk, et cetera, pause and slow down, the people don't do not. And therefore you've just increased the level of risk that the AI systems are developing. And you have to account for that level of, of, that possible outcome in calling for a pause. And then they say, well, but the other people understand that they should do that, too. And it's like, no, no, actually, if I understand human beings at all, as we divide into groups and we compete with each other. Um, and so other groups say, hey, um, great, you pause and I won't.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Um, and, uh, and matter of fact, there were original signatories of the original pause letter. They're like, yeah, everyone else should pause. Well, I don't in order to, uh, to, to, to, to, you know, build Grok, uh, you know, kind of as a, as an, as an example. And I think that the, uh, so the important thing is to say, like, the pace of development will continue afoot and we are not going to get to a collective agreement. I mean, just take, for example, climate change, where you could see, you know, impact on weather, impact on temperature and other kinds of things. You can't even get to a global agreement on that. And then the intangibles of where, where the stakes of like, who develops, you know, AI, call it super capabilities,

• 13:59Speaker 00

  early, uh, are huge, that that will continue afoot. So I think it's a, it's a wrong strategy for this. It's like, let's wait till we have global committee decide that it's okay.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  I don't think people are gonna bind into that.

• 14:16Speaker 02

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• 14:46Speaker 00

  The question of contributing, what are risks that we should try to mitigate? What are ideas for mitigating those risks to make those ingrained in what we're doing? You know, I think actually, in fact, one of the things that's frequently mistaken in this dialogue is that actually toolsets for increased safety and increased, you know, management are also possible in the future. Like, one of the things that we, when you just study the evolution of GBD3, GBD4, GBD5, they actually much more naturally aligned to training, to being aligned with our societal and human interests. It's one of the things that comes out of the scale, so you get increased toolset for it. And then, you know, the other thing is, like, you know, the classic thing is,

• 15:29Speaker 00

  well, what do you mean by super intelligent, right? GBD4 was already super intelligent. Right. That no individual or group of individuals had, not the least of which was speed, but also breadth of knowledge and so forth. And so they say, well, but you know, it's when it's like, you know, kind of, you know, deity intelligence. And you're like, well, okay.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  By the way, one of the things I think is useful is, and then it's an exponential curve, so it should, it could show up next year and we wouldn't know, because exponential curves lead to magic. And it's like, okay, you know, I understand the concerns there. I've helped build exponential curves. I, you know, at least understand that much math. Now, usually it's an exponential curve to what? So, for example, of an exponential curve to increasing superintelligence capabilities that are like savants, which is what we're seeing, you know, happening now, that's actually not necessarily, you know, that deeply alarming. I do worry much more about AI in the hands of human than AI by itself. I tend to feel that the worry and the focus on, you know, the robots are coming, is like, actually, in fact, how we navigate,

• 16:35Speaker 00

  you know, the artificial intelligence being amplification intelligence across a whole bunch of human beings, like what happens with, you know, rogue states, terrorists, criminals, etc., you know, those ways of doing that. And so, like, first thing on what this means for human, you know, deployment and use, I think, including, by the way, stupid human use. It's like, for example, if someone said, hey, we should take the nuclear defense grid and we should, we should make it all controlled by the AI. And I was like, there have been movies about this, all the way from Doctor Strangelove into The Terminator and all the rest. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, let's not do that. Right? It didn't work out too well. That being said, obviously, You know, a number of these folks, you know, Yashua, Benji and I have talked about this a number of times.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Enormous respect for him, deep thinker, um, you know, is correct in that kind of that metaphor of people holding different parts of the elephant, you know, the trunk and the tusks and legs and the tail and da da ears, like, hey, there's an issue here. He is correct. There's an issue here. And then what tends to happen is, well, does a precautionary principle mean that you should do nothing? Until the issue is there is like, actually, in fact, you should do the most intelligent things to navigate the issue. And the question is whether the most intelligent things are try to wrap ourselves in knots by pausing for, you know, massive committee group think, or by trying to be as smart as possible in navigating the path

• 18:03Speaker 00

  and making sure those intelligence gets into the things that are building it. Um, and, you know, like people say, well, the, the, the Chinese are only excited by our own race conditions. And I was like, well, no, many years ago, um, you know, Xi Jinping said by 2030, he wants to be AI, wants China to be the dominant AI country in the world. This is before that, it just, that's just, um, it's, it's, it's not clear data seeing and reasoning and thinking target. That's just how these things play. So, so I think that the issue is to say, hey, let's pay attention to what are major risks.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Let's try to generate ideas for how we navigate them. The ideas may not be perfect. Um, uh, but navigate them within the time envelope, uh, that we are kind of building them to, which obviously, you know, if you could wave a wand and just make everyone move two thirds more slowly, you know, that might be the right outcome. By the way, it also means that many more people will die because the AI driven medicines won't be there, the AI. You know, doctors won't be there, et cetera. But, you know, maybe that's better. But the, um, but like, that's a, that's a, that's the kind of experiment that says, hey, what if I waved a wand and world, you're like, wow, like, you know, like that one doesn't exist.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  It's a fun thought experiment, but it's not going to happen. I think one of the areas that we can all agree that sort of magical superintelligence would be really positive is with healthcare, medicine, doctors. And you were actually recently invited to speak, actually to debate at a conference recently. And the debate was whether in the future, doctors will even exist because of the rapid improvement and transformation of AI. So, uh, the conference was Chatham House rules, so we can't play video, but I would love to hear your, your point of view. Do you think that, you know, doctors are going to exist in, you know, three, five, 10 years with the rapid advancement of AI?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Well, for people who read super agents, say, they probably wouldn't be surprised to understand that I was arguing on the, doctors will continue to exist. And what's more, doctors will continue to exist, not in what people assume is like, oh, they're the emotional hand holders. So sure, the AI does all the thinking and the doctor now goes, so Aria, how are you feeling? Does that, does that, does that feel right for you? You know? No, no, actually as, as thinkers, as diagnosticians, as experts. But doctors' jobs will have to change a lot. We are already in many domains in a place where the majority of doctors, if they have an instinct that's different than the AI diagnosis, the doctor is likely to be wrong.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Because they don't have the, the, the compute capability of, I looked at a trillion and a half words. I did an intense amount of synthesis on them. And I'm doing that retrieval, looking at databases and cross checking things as I'm doing it. However, that doesn't mean that the AI is perfect. Um, and actually in fact, I think part of what doctors as experts and diagnosticians end up becoming is the

• 21:19Speaker 00

  The, the, the, the dance partners, collaborators, directors, you know, tool users of AI to help get to the right outcome, both for translating what the patient actually, in fact, like helping a patient discover what they really need and how to articulate that, parsing the information that comes back. Like, one of the examples we use in the debate is to say, you've got somebody who says, "Well, you have this cancer, you should start chemo, you know, tomorrow." And it's like, "Well, actually, in fact, my, uh, my life's goal is to walk, you know, my child down the aisle, um, in, in, in, in, in the, in the wedding that's happening in two weeks." And I was like, "Okay, great. We will start it the

• 22:00Speaker 00

  day after, or two days after the wedding, depending, and we will try to do everything possible to set up before then." And that's the right way to understand this, even though, from a medical out points point of view, like, the right thing is to start chemo tomorrow, as, as an instance. And, you know, part of it, um, you know, I've been advocating for years now that governments should try to get a medical assistant that's available 24/7 on smartphones to all of your citizens. It's enormous elevation of human quality of life and, and, you know, is doable now in, in, in, in very straightforward ways, that you should use ChatGPT or your favorite frontier model, you know, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, et cetera, as a, as a second opinion, um, to cross-check things. I actually know of

• 22:44Speaker 00

  people whose lives have been saved by doing that, because, again, it's this, this diagnostician expert. But the, the thesis that, um, that it will completely replace doctors is, I think, um, incorrect on a number of things. One, yes, it'll be, if you had human or AI already on radiology film, you choose AI, but actually, by the way, it's still better to have AI plus human, right? So, AI plus human is better. Then you say, "Well, but the economics won't say." It's like, actually, in fact, there's always a role for an AI plus human for something as urgent as medical care. So, now, by the way, in many areas,

• 23:25Speaker 00

  like impoverished areas, there may be no room for, for AI plus human because of the, or very little plus human because of the cost, but that means we're massively improving those areas by having AI be there. Right. And, uh, look, how is AI trained? AI is trained through a lot of of human expertise in terms of doing that. It's one of the things that doctors bring in is like, OK, you know, like, one of the more subtle ways to think about where is AI today? This is a little bit counter to some of the super intelligent thing is it's it's an intelligent group of experts consensus opinion is what it broadly does when it has enough data to do that. That's that's when AI is broadly at its best right now.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Now, that's good for medical things because that's what you want your very first medical judgment to be. But by the way, the consensus opinion misses things. And one of the things that, you know, in talking to doctors is like, actually, in fact, like, this goes, it reads the whole chart. It reads thirty other parallel cases. It brings all and it brings in pair questions and and connections that a doctor doesn't have the individual compute for and will make it happen. And sometimes it's that outlier case of recognizing that that's actually, in fact, you know, kind of really important. And that's part of the reason why I think, you know, you know, ten years from now, we will still have doctors and doctors deploying expertise.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Now, the expertise will no longer be, well, I spent, you know, years memorizing everything, and I am the walking oracle. It's the no, no, I am the expert, you know, thinker and navigator of these set of tools to getting great health and healing outcomes for people, working with them and working with the tools in order to make it happen.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I was going to say. I think a generation of med students just breathed a sigh of relief. But if you are in medical school right now, what advice would you give them for what to focus on because their job is going to change?

• 25:29Speaker 00

  So, one, start using it, right? There's a general thing for everybody, medical students, journalists, you know, scientists, accountants, managers, software engineers, lawyers, you know, educators, start using it like, and more or less, I think that If you're articulating an opinion on it and you actually haven't been using it, and I mean using it with some seriousness, not like, oh, I did a query once. Right. Right. You don't have intellectual integrity in terms of how you're thinking about it, however smart you are and everything else. Cause it's like, it's like a person who's never driven a car saying, well, I have a certain amount of point of views on how one should drive a car. And you're like, no, no, you gotta have some of the experience, some. Yep.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Um, so I think that's one. Two is the medical institutions themselves, which tend to want, not want to change. Another way, oh, like for example, you begin to learn is like, oh, actually, in fact, when you're doing coding, the combination of G P D five for reasoning and Claude code for the detailed coding, that combination is the current Pareto best optimum for all coding stuff. Um, and, and you don't really know that unless you're actually in fact engaging in it in some kind of systematic way, talking to each other and so forth. You know, where, you know, um, Claude is better at creative writing than, you know, chat G P T. Gemini does certain kinds of science queries better than any other model.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Um, you know, Copilot is kind of better integrated to the, the, the, the set of things you're doing in the enterprise. You know, all of these things, you know, kind of, uh, matter for understanding what the toolset is. And, and, you know, like, I think today, if as a doctor, like for example, I was saying as a patient, you should use G P T or your favorite frontier model as a, as a second opinion. Doctors should do that too. Like, I actually think the question is you should be thinking of, if I'm not doing that, you know, like, do I have, like frequently this, cause of this thing, do I have 100% confidence in my diagn- diagnosis? Right.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Have a hundred percent. It's like, okay, well, what's the, what's the cost of using? You know, kind of co-pilot Gemini, et cetera, you know, as my second opinion, and the answer is not high.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Close to zero.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Reid, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Always a pleasure. Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tefadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Ralas.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hey folks, Stephen Johnson here, co-founder of Notebook LM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built Notebook LM as an AI-first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and Notebook LM instantly becomes your personal expert, uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it at notebooklm.google.com.