I found Dwarkesh’s line of questioning around Chips<>Uranium a bit crazy but his raw interviewing mechanics is absolutely insane. Even in heated discussion, he didn’t talk over his Jensen even once and stops the exact second he start speaking. The level of intense focus this requires, especially when navigating tough pushback from someone like Jensen Huang is next level.
Jensen here is frustrating and wrong. The man wrote off billions so of course he opposes controls.
1. Mythos is a ~10T parameter model trained on Nvidia Blackwell. Despite Jensen's best efforts, China doesn't have Blackwell chips thanks to export controls. Huawei's best chip delivers 1/3 the per-chip performance, at 2.5x the power cost, with yields >12x worse. Jensen calling Mythos "fairly mundane capacity" that's "abundantly available in China" is just plainly false.
2. Dwarkesh is right that the compute ratio matters geopolitically. Maintaining a capability lead during the critical window — even 12-18 months — is the whole point of controls. The difference between China running a thousand vs. a million offensive AI agents is huge. Jensen dodges this entirely.
3. Jensen can't simultaneously argue "controls failed because China innovated anyway" (DeepSeek) AND "we must sell to China or they'll leave our ecosystem." If they'll innovate regardless, selling chips doesn't buy the loyalty he claims.
4. Jensen's ecosystem stickiness point (x86, Arm) is his strongest argument, but it cuts against him: the world is already locked into CUDA. Selling Nvidia chips to China doesn't deepen that - it just gives China better hardware while they build Huawei alternatives regardless.
@chamath This has to be the dumbest thing you have said in a long time. Anyone who has worked in debt and knows how these are priced understands none of this is true.
@QwQiao that's not what makes him the goat. Having a permanent capital structure that allows that sort of staying power is the reason. 99.99% managers can't sit on the sideline for 3+years, they have to consistently beat the benchmark and stay invested. Same applies to Druckenmiller