Benioff says China can build competitive models without top-end chips

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:07

   100%. I agree. Three hard questions, Mark. Should we be selling the latest chips, yes or no, in your mind? I think it's irrelevant at this point. I think that the Chinese models are as competitive as these U.S. models, and they've learned to make these models without having the highest end chips. I think the highest end chips is kind of more of an ego gratification for us. We have Blackwell, we have this, we have that. But when you look at their models, their models are excellent. They fast follow us. The best models we had six months ago, should we just sell it to them since they're figuring it out anyway, Mark?

2. 20:44

   We probably should just sell whatever we can at this point. And I think that, as I said, I think the more economic cooperation and collaboration is better. And if you want peace, I think that this, I think Taiwan, it's kind of a nonsense story. Freeberg, your take on chips, should we sell them the latest chips? And then Chamath, I want to get the answer to that question from each of you. I think it's inevitable that they get there. By the way, I do think this is one of the key aspects of this deal. I've said this before, but maybe Taiwan becomes less relevant to the US and to china as both china and the u.s um mainland fab so as we build out our own manufacturing capacity here in the u.s and i know we've struggled and there are fits and starts and issues with it and whatnot but the tsmc facility in arizona is running their printing and if it works and they figure out

3. 21:36

   how to scale it there'll be other facilities in the u.s and then china's main landing with huawei standing up a lot of facilities they've got a multi i think i talked about this on one of the shows, a multi-deca billion dollar government investment in ensuring competitiveness, not just with fabs, but also with semiconductor manufacturing equipment, so that they don't get cut off on the supply chain with companies like ASML, blocking sales into mainland. So as they build out their own semiconductor capital equipment systems and their own fabs, does Taiwan really matter? Is there really that much of a security risk to the United States and to China in that sense?

4. 22:12

   And perhaps what everyone's focused on, which is this pivot point around Taiwan, maybe it's not that the US is selling Taiwan down the river, but it's just that no one gives a shit anymore. So, you know, there may be this kind of cultural moment for China where they want to, at some point say, hey, by 2040, which I think is what I've heard, they want to be able to kind of, you know, bring Taiwan fully into the sphere. Maybe the US shouldn't care that much at that point from a economic and security perspective. So I think that's, that's one of the things that's happening that.

5. 22:41

   so you're in the camp of sell the chips to them and it will demotivate the tsmc or the capture of those facts by the chinese put it this way i think the more the global productivity index can climb the better off all humans will be so the question is do you really want the west to see their productivity index climb and then you're effectively forcing conflict and forcing issues with the East, or if we all grow our productivity index, we all make more stuff, everyone benefits, everyone has better jobs, everyone makes more money, everyone has access to more stuff, the cost of goods comes down for everyone. Doesn't that make the world a safer and more secure place? Sure. So I think this idea that like technology should be held to one side of the world and not given to the other side of the world is inevitably going to lead

6. 23:30

   to conflict or increase the probability of conflict. Whereas if you let technology defuse and proliferate everyone benefits and conflict indices go down it's because it becomes commoditized you know and everybody has access to it so then it becomes give everyone a higher