Invariant Perspective

A single bird has completed a journey covering nearly one-third of Earth’s circumference, without stopping to eat, drink, or rest. A five-month-old Bar-tailed Godwit, set a new record for the longest nonstop flight ever documented in a bird. It traveled from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia, covering about 8,425 miles in just over 11 days. This remarkable migration took place entirely over the Pacific Ocean, with no opportunity to land. What makes the achievement even more striking is that it was the bird’s first migration, yet it navigated thousands of miles of open ocean with extraordinary accuracy. The journey is made possible by extreme physiological adaptation. Before departure, the bird builds up large fat reserves, nearly half its body weight, to serve as fuel. At the same time, some internal organs, including parts of the digestive system, temporarily shrink to reduce weight and conserve energy. Unlike seabirds that rely heavily on gliding, this young godwit maintained continuous flapping flight for the entire trip, enduring changing winds and weather conditions along the way. Researchers at the Pūkōroro Auckland Shorebird Centre say findings like this are reshaping our understanding of what migratory birds can achieve. Their endurance, navigation, and energy efficiency highlight biological capabilities that rival even advanced human engineering.

Distilled recap of the back-and-forth with Jensen on export controls: Dwarkesh: Wouldn’t selling Nvidia chips to China enable them to train models like Claude Mythos with cyber offensive capabilities that would be threats to American companies and national security? Jensen: First of all, Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount of it by an extraordinary company. The amount of capacity and the type of compute it was trained on is abundantly available in China. Dwarkesh: With that, could they eventually train a model like Mythos? Yes. But the question is, because we have more FLOPs, American labs are able to get to this level of capabilities first. Furthermore, even if they trained a model like this, the ability to deploy it at scale matters. If you had a cyber hacker, it's much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them. Jensen: Your premise is just wrong. The fact of the matter is their AI development is going just fine. The best AI researchers in the world, because they are limited in compute, also come up with extremely smart algorithms. DeepSeek is not an inconsequential advance. The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation. Dwarkesh: Currently, you can have a model like DeepSeek that can run on any accelerator if it's open source. Why would that stop being the case in the future? Jensen: Suppose it optimizes for Huawei. Suppose it optimizes for their architecture. It would put others at a disadvantage. As AI diffuses out into the rest of the world, their standards and their tech stack will become superior to ours because their models are open. Dwarkesh: Tesla sold extremely good electric vehicles to China for a long time. iPhones are sold in China. They didn't cause some lock-in. China will still make their version of EVs, and they're dominating, or smartphones, they're dominating. Jensen: We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand another day is easy. Computing is not like that. There's a reason why x86 still exists. There's a reason why Arm is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace. Dwarkesh: It's just hard to imagine that there's a long-term lock-in to the Chinese ecosystem, even if they have this slightly better open-source model for a while. American labs port across accelerators constantly. Anthropic's models are run on GPUs, they're run on Trainium, they're run on TPUs. There are so many things you can do, from distilling to a model that's well fit for your chips. Jensen: China is the largest contributor to open source software in the world. China's the largest contributor to open models in the world. Today it's built on the American tech stack, Nvidia’s. Fact. All five layers of the tech stack for AI are important. The United States ought to go win all five of them. in a few years time, I'm making you the prediction that when we want American technology to be diffused around the world—out to India, out to the Middle East, out to Africa, out to Southeast Asia—on that day, I will tell you exactly about today's conversation, about how your policy ... caused the United States to concede the second largest market in the world for no good reason at all.

The Jensen Huang episode. 0:00:00 – Is Nvidia’s biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains? 0:16:25 – Will TPUs break Nvidia’s hold on AI compute? 0:41:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia become a hyperscaler? 0:57:36 – Should we be selling AI chips to China? 1:35:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!