There's a race underway and the stakes are basically what is the world going to run on? Don Valentine had this old rule of thumb. He said more startup style of indigestion than starvation in terms of the amount of money you put in. And his point was like scarcity does spark ingenuity. All of the science fiction novels basically have AI either being like super utopian or super dystopian, but they never have this incredible sense of humor aspect, which is what we're actually getting, People are just using everything as a fighter for memes.

The world will either be running on American AI utopian or super dystopian, but they never have this incredible sense of humor aspect, which is what we're actually getting, where people are just using everything as a fodder for memes.

The world will either be running on American AI or be running on Chinese AI, and I think it's

very important which one wins for a bunch of reasons. For 50 years, economists have tracked a strange

pattern. Rapid technological change paired with historically low productivity growth.

Since 1971, productivity has flatlined even as computing reshaped daily life.

In 1880, productivity growth ran at three times today's rate.

By 1930, it had slowed to twice as fast.

Then came the regulations and the restrictions.

We said no to nuclear power, faster cars, and a space program. What we got was hyper-acceleration in chips and software and stagnation in nearly

everything else. American labs lead for now, but Chinese open-source models follow months

behind at a fraction of the cost. The world will run on one system or the other, and the values

baked into that

system will matter. This conversation looks at what's actually happening in AI investment,

where value might accrue, and why the regulatory response could determine which country wins.

Gitu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, speaks with Mark Andreessen,

co-founder and general partner at Andresen Horowitz.

Mark Andresen needs no introduction. He invented the browser. He built the internet. So I'm really

excited to have you here. I apologize for nothing. All right. So before we get started, you had a really interesting conversation that I wanted to actually start with just a couple of days ago with Lenny.

And you were talking about this notion of, in the history of time, when has productivity really spiked?

And what's happening right now.

So can you just talk a little bit about your perspective

...