Anjney Midha from Andreessen Horowitz explores the strategic choices facing countries as the US and China dominate AI's fundamental inputs of talent, data, and compute. The conversation examines "Sovereign AI" from both enterprise and national perspectives, discussing how regulatory concerns are driving new competition from national champion AI companies in France, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. They analyze what countries should do across the talent, data, and compute dimensions, debating whether nations are better off partnering with frontier developers or building local capabilities. Midha brings valuable empathy for diverse national positions and a practical build/buy/partner framework to help understand how governments worldwide are navigating these complex AI dependency decisions.

Sponsors:

Labelbox:

Labelbox pairs automation, expert judgment, and reinforcement learning to deliver high-quality training data for cutting-edge AI. Put its data factory to work for you, visit https://labelbox.com

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

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Shopify:

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NetSuite by Oracle:

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(05:14) Introduction and Sovereign AI

(06:20) Defining Sovereign AI

(10:29) Enterprise AI Perspectives (Part 1)

(20:07) Sponsors: Labelbox | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

(22:43) Enterprise AI Perspectives (Part 2)

(22:44) Build Buy Partner Framework

(29:00) National Talent Strategies (Part 1)

(38:14) Sponsors: Shopify | NetSuite by Oracle

(41:34) National Talent Strategies (Part 2)

(41:40) Data and Cultural Values

(54:00) Open vs Closed Models

(01:00:37) AI Infrastructure Distribution

(01:08:57) Country Infrastructure Strategies

(01:16:05) Recent Middle East Deals

(01:29:08) US Benefits Analysis

(01:36:54) Security and Governance Issues

(01:42:50) Closing Thoughts

(01:44:29) Outro