Today, I launched Manas AI –– a full stack AI company setting out to shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years; bringing life-saving treatments to patients faster than ever.

Several important questions/comments come to my mind as I read more about DeepSeek. Listing them here: 1) Let’s give 1% probability to all the conspiracy theories upfront so we can address it and move on. If it is possible for China/Chinese companies to use shell companies in Singapore or other countries to be a “beard” to buy otherwise export controlled chips from Nvidia and use them for AI training, this likely needs to be investigated and adjudicated. 2) The battle of usage is now more about AI inference vs Training. We always knew this day would come but it probably surprised many that it could be this weekend. With a model this cheap, many new products and experiences can now emerge trying to win the hearts and minds of the global populace. Team USA needs to win here. To that point, while we may still want to export control AI Training chips, we should probably view Inference chips differently - we should want everyone around the world using our solutions over others. I can explain my reasoning as follows: we should never export our knowledge of enriching uranium to be weapons grade to other countries but we should export our ability to build nuclear energy (which requires far less sophistication) if it can help advance American priorities and leadership abroad. Training and Inference can be roughly equated this way. (Disclaimer: Groq, of which I’m a shareholder, is in this game so this benefits me tbf.) 3) We need to cooperate with our allies (especially those in the ME) to stand up the necessary infrastructure to enable Inference - Data centers, subsidized energy etc. all around the world ASAP.. They pay to build it, we supply the Inference hardware and the software to run the clouds. We need this buildout to happen ASAP. This is clearly our version of Belt and Road and we need to take it as seriously as China took their version, similarly named. 4) There will be volatility in the stock market as capital markets absorb all of this information and re-price the values of the Mag7. Tesla is the least exposed, the rest are exposed as a direct function of the amount of CapEx they have publicly announced. Nvidia is the most at risk for obvious reasons. That said, markets will love it if Meta, Microsoft, Google etc can win WITHOUT having to spend $50-80B PER YEAR. 5) The innovation from China speaks to how “asleep” we’ve been for the past 15 years. We’ve been running towards the big money/shiny object spending programs (AI is not the first and it likely won’t be the last) where we (Team USA) have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at a problem vs thinking through the problem more cleverly and using resource constraints as an enabler. Let’s get our act together. We need all the bumbling middle managers out of the way - let the engineers and the brilliant folks we have actually working on this stuff to cook! More spending, more meetings, more oversight, more weekly reports and the like does not equate to more innovation. Unburden our technical stars to do their magic. 6) Startups need to realize that they are “default dead” companies. This means that they must, by definition, grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. Meanwhile, VCs are asleep at the switch - massively overfunding marginal ideas. We need to get better at taking huge shots on goal and allocating capital to the best of these ideas. I worry that in this current melee, we’ve overspent billions on dumb features which these next-gen models will roll over in the next 12months or earlier. Lots of capital losses are coming. Crazily, I initially posted about DeepSeek a month ago! Comments/reactions appreciated.

Chamath at the Inauguration: A+ for Access, F- for Everything Else 😅🤣 @Jason, seconds after @chamath misidentified @jakepaul: "We're off to a strong start here. Our field reporter has no sense of pop culture or how to operate a camera." the guests were incredible, but the interviews and camera work... let's just say there is room for improvement! sorry jake! 😬😬😬