Artificial intelligence, digital economy and remote work applications and vice chair of the World Government Summit.
Gentlemen, it's an absolute pleasure joining you on stage today. I'd make a quick introduction. Chamath is a legendary investor. He runs Social Capital and he's recently done very well with Grok. Your investments there I think have paid off dividends, but well done on that. Joe is a friend and the chairman of Alibaba. Last year on the stage we were talking about AI and where it was going and I must say all your predictions came true with regards to how fast China is moving when it comes to artificial intelligence and as well the ability of companies to iterate, to innovate and to move forward. I'd like to start off by maybe talking about an interesting shift. We've always been used to seeing the US being the champion of open source, Silicon Valley leading that charge and the rest of the world focusing on trying to have their own advantage and focus on building closed source systems. With AI, we're seeing a complete shift. China's championing open source. The US is trying to push for open source but are working on closed source systems. How do you think that's going to affect the way that governments pivot, the way that people choose the AI models that they use? We'll start with Chamath and then we're going to go to Joe.
Well, I'm actually quite surprised by it as well. I mean, I do think that there are a handful of American open source models that are quite good. I think Nvidia's models are excellent. But in fairness, the Chinese open source models are just superb. So I think what it means is that every country probably in the next three to five years will be forced to make a very important decision which is around the sovereignty of their own productivity and GDP because to the extent that these AI and in that realm I think the open source models provide the clearest path because it just gives you total transparency into what's happening underneath the hood. Now there's a lot of work and we can talk about this later that has to happen for a country to be able to embrace an open source model. But I think the future is open source.
Well, I totally agree with Chamath about different countries, you're better off with open source model if you are focused on sovereignty and having control of your own data. But just going back to history a little bit, why China has evolved and why most companies in China have taken an open source approach is that software, in terms of application software like SaaS industry, has never developed in China. So the idea of users coming to an API to use an AI model and pay for it has never been a primary business model and it's not. And the judgment by all the model developers is that they're not going to make a lot of money providing a closed source through an API. So all the model companies have decided that why don't we just open source first and let the model take care of itself in terms of adoption of usage and proliferation. And fortunately, various governments have taken notice and because they care about the sovereignty aspect and care about their data privacy. You could take an open source model and deploy it on your own infrastructure. You can do it on premise. You can do it in a virtual private secured environment. And whatever you do to post-train the model or running inference will have nothing to do with the original open source model maker and thereby you basically claim sovereignty and claim ownership of the model. But it remains to be seen. It's still a very big question how economically all the model companies are going to make it sort of sustainable with an open source approach.
Don't you think the issue is the economics? You're spending billions of dollars to build this model and if you open source them you're not really monetizing it in the way that you can potentially monetize it. So that's why most of the companies are focusing on closed source to try to generate as much profit from the model and then open source the older versions. We've seen that with Grok for example, we've seen that with even Llama and other models in the US where the frontier ones are closed source until they're able to generate some revenue or at least some advantage whether it's getting market share or otherwise. Do you think that is the main reason or is there more of an ideological shift and can China sustain making all these models open source especially the frontier ones?
So I would make a distinction here between companies that develop the frontier models plus an infrastructure business like cloud computing versus those companies that actually just only do the model. I think the companies that only do the model will have to think about how do you generate economics from open sourcing. The companies that actually have a cloud infrastructure, for example in the United States you have Google that has a full stack of the model and the cloud infrastructure, they also have chips, can monetize in other ways from the usage of the open source model. Obviously Gemini is not an open source but if you look at China, look at the example of Alibaba, we have our Qwen model is open source but we also run our cloud business and today we're monetizing because people are training and also developing their models, running inference on their models on our infrastructure and thereby generating the economics. But I think it remains to be seen how in the future how can you get especially consumers to pay for a monthly subscription and generate economics there, that remains to be seen. That's the biggest challenge in the Chinese market.
I mean, I think the reality is that when you adopt an open-source model, you're going to need, as Joe said, all of these other things. You're going to need power, you're going to need infrastructure, depending on the solution that you use. You're going to need a lot of natural resources, specialty chemicals, you're going to need battery systems, and then you're going to need all the know-how, and then on top of all that, you're going to need the capital and the financing. And so I think the reality is that the business model becomes more at the governmental level almost because if you take an open source alternative but then the infrastructure of the government can come in and help you with all of these other things you're going to take it. And so I think that is yet to play out but I think that's the real opportunity. Similarly in the United States it's all private. So the alternative is, you know, you can't really take a spin of Grok or take a spin of Gemini and implement it on your own for the needs of your own population. But yet you still have to bear the cost of all of these other things. So if all of this was packaged and financed and turnkey and in a box, I think that's the ultimate best solution. That's probably where international finance organizations and development banks probably need to play more of an evolving role over these next 10, 20 years.
Many of the conversations that I currently have and interviews that I would do and I'm sure that you guys would go through the same thing, people talk about the AI bubble and the bubble in a sense of is it sustainable? Can we keep seeing the numbers that we're seeing? We've recently seen the issue with memory and memory availability and not being able to produce memory enough. And when it comes to bubbles I think there are two types of bubbles. There's the tulip mania bubble which was completely made up. It blew up. People lost their money and there was nothing left except the legacy of the bubble. And then there's the train and railway bubble of the UK of the 19th century where people went and invested in railway tracks which gave the UK the legacy of being one of the most connected places on earth through railway. So there was actually a tangible legacy that was left behind. In terms of tangible legacies for artificial intelligence, if and I'm not saying it is a bubble but let's assume that there was a set of bubbles along the way of the progress of artificial intelligence, do you think that energy infrastructure is the safe bet? Investing in energy infrastructure is the safe bet? Investing in chips?
It's, I think it's very much a TBD and the reason is that the capability of these models can actually disrupt the underlying asset that you may think is safe. So the example that I would give you is we are one or two generations of models away from a model demonstrating that there's a certain chemistry that can effectuate for example an ultra high storage battery or that can effectuate a room temperature superconductor. If any of those things come to pass we all would collectively have to underwrite what the actual value of our natural resources collectively as a world means. It would change how we use oil, it would change how we use natural gas, it would change how we build SMRs. So I think the honest answer is this is why it's such a profoundly interesting moment, all of the things that we've used to underwrite productivity and GDP will get requested because this super intelligence allows us to see things that the frailty of the human condition we can't quite see at today and I think we should just be open-minded and prepared to deal with that as a community because I think it's going to be complicated. So there's no bubble in that context.
Yeah. Chamath just raised a very interesting point which is there's no bubble. If you take these models operate on the current path of trajectory and if but there's some breakthrough change then the underlying, the energy infrastructure, all that stuff is going to, that becomes a bubble in itself. It's sort of a bubble that happens because conditions have changed. That's a, I think that's, I wouldn't call it a corner case but that's something that people should think about.
Yeah, but I think if you look at right now the massive amount of capex investment that all the hyperscalers, all the model companies are making. I mean the latest quarter of reports that people are doubling their capex. It used to be last year these hyperscalers are making 60 to 80 billion per company per year of capex and now it's doubled like 120 to 150 billion per year. It's astounding just within a year. But here's the thing, I think a few things are driving it. Number one, people still believe in the scaling law. And now also the idea that inference time scaling is important because more compute resources will be allocated to inference and inference is where everybody that uses AI will touch inference as opposed to the few model companies that only do training, right? So a lot of capex that's going toward inference. And then finally, you have people making multimodal models that deal in generative rich media, videos, images, that will burn a lot of GPU resources. So people seeing this scaling law and multimodal world and we haven't even talked about world models yet and that's the validation that there will need to be more compute that need to be invested in. I don't think these trends are going to reverse or veer off in the future. People will still continue to, for example are people going to consume less videos? I don't think so. And so in that sense there's no bubble but having said that people are investing anticipating future demand as opposed to, I think there could be in certain sectors you see like memory, you see shortages today. But the just the massive amounts of investment it's kind of hard to think about ROI. I hate to be the CFO of one of these companies because they have to face having to explain ROI to investors. They can't do that.
The theme for 2026 for those of you who've gone to Davos and for some of the other conferences and some of the other discussions is AI agents and agents are the name of the game. And people have to actually try to work with agents, deploy, develop and utilize the different agents that are going to do different tasks. We have a number of heads of state and heads of government in the room. The question that you're going to get when you say that is we haven't started with deploying AI already and you guys are now moving into agents. So if someone wants to leapfrog, someone who hasn't done anything yet, whether it's a nation in Africa or a nation in Latin America or a nation in Southeast Asia, what would your advice be? Should they go into the generative AI model side of things? Should they try to do a specific thing with agents? What would be your advice if you were advising them?
Neither. I think you have to pick a model and I think you need to deploy it inside your own borders with your own power and roughly your own people and be able to use it for a handful of very useful and practical solutions to everyday problems whether it's public health or whether it's governmental services or frankly the most important and valuable one is education which is being able to create a system that teaches the young people in your country how to learn in this new world where this supercomputer will be available to everybody. All this other stuff I think is very speculative. It's exactly what Joe said. Every frontier has a new language that it uses to justify further investment. And I think today because there isn't a super clear ROI, agents are the next vernacular that we've chosen to justify the next two or three hundred billion dollars of investment. The more practical solution, I think, is to be one generation and one step behind that and say, let's go and educate our kids, cure some disease, and make it easier to renew our driver's license. And if you just do that, I think you're going to have a happy population.
So quality of life improvement.
Joe, I totally agree. I think governments have to think about what is the application where the use of AI will be productive and useful in education, in healthcare, and you should start with the use cases first. What is the right application for AI? I think the idea of building up the full stack infrastructure, everything is a game for large economies. It's like building up a military industry. It's not for everybody. So once you've identified the use case and the applications then the question is all right whose technology are we going to leverage on? And on that front I believe that open source is the best way, is the most secure way where you can have most control of your own AI.
Gentlemen, that was a great discussion. I know that we could have gone on for so much longer, but thank you for your insights and thank you for being here today. Thank you. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, our next panel discussion is titled, 'Is the next decade African?' This session is moderated by Tucker Carlson, founder of the Tucker Carlson Network.
Gentlemen, thank you for doing this. It's awfully nice of you to do this. I'd just like to go right down the line. And first to you, President Mnangagwa. Again, thanks. In as clear terms as you can, I wonder if you would contrast your experience with China versus the Western powers. Do you think that Zimbabwe and other African countries, to be totally blunt, get a better deal from Chinese investment than they have with Western powers over the past 150 years?
Well, my view is that initially as we became independent, most of our development thrust was from the west. But as we evolved, we have also benefited from investment and cooperation from countries like China.
But what are, I mean the basic structure seems the same? Foreign powers extract mineral wealth from various African countries. But do you think that the arrangement that Zimbabwe and other countries currently have with China is better or worse for Zimbabwe than it was under say the Brits?
I think the premises upon which you construct your question I don't think is perfect.
Yes. Zimbabwe is a sovereign state. You understand? And we move on the basis that gives us the best results of our resources. Whether it is relation with the west or the east, what is primarily important is what we ourselves as a country are satisfied with. We don't need to please the west or please the east. We please ourselves.
Good. That seems like a good model for every sovereign country. President Boakai, thank you for this. Do you think that there is a substantial difference? I'm just trying to understand from a Western perspective how the East does business in Africa versus how the West does and it may be too sensitive a topic really even to talk about out loud, but to the extent you have a view you can share, would you?
I'm sure relations cannot be measured country by country. Relations depend on the historical background of countries between one country and another. That's the base on which relations grow and are nurtured. For us in Liberia, yes, we are a former American colony but we are very happy with the relations that have now developed with say countries like China and so on.
Yes, despite being a former American colony. I think this may be one of these topics that's too difficult to talk about in public. So let me just ask you, President Bio, about one of the strengths of your country and in the continent which is its birth rate which so far surpasses that of any other region in the world and that seems like a strength. How has your country Sierra Leone but also many other countries in Africa been able to maintain a birth rate at replacement when Europe, the US, Canada, lots of other parts of the world have not been able to?
Thank you very much. I think we are hard workers and we work both in the day and at night.
That is such great advice.
It is essential to have young people and to keep the birth rate at the right level so that there is sustainability in development. What we do today as leaders, we provide the enabling environment, provide them with the tools, the young people to navigate the world which is extremely tough, complicated and evolving and changing all the time. So it is our responsibility to bear that in mind. We have to plan ahead, be ahead of the curve to be able to replace accordingly so that we don't have a gap in our development process. So we have been busy producing as much as we can a lot of good people and we are investing in their education so that they are fit for purpose for a world that is becoming digital and of course going extremely to the edge of technological advancement.
If I can just ask a quick follow-up to you, Mr. President, do you keep track precisely of how many of your young educated citizens leave and how many stay? Are you thinking hard about how to retain the smartest, most energetic people?
Definitely. In fact, what my administration did was to make sure that we provide basic primary and secondary education free of charge to the citizens. Every child born in Sierra Leone can go to school and finish high school without paying a penny. We don't just provide tuition. We also make sure that we provide other essentials to make it possible so that nobody has excuse not to go to school because in the 21st century without education definitely you can't make it. And we do not just want to make it at the personal level, family level. We want to grow as a nation. We want to be useful citizens of West Africa, the community that I chair today. But we also want to be useful citizens, global useful citizens that can contribute to the world. So we are taking stock of that and we are educating them, equipping them. In fact, I call education as an equipment, a navigation equipment in a world that is becoming very, very complicated and complex.
Thank you, President Bio. If as you look at young people in Botswana who are educated and energetic, what's your pitch to them? What's your argument to them to stay in Botswana, not go to South Africa, Europe, the United States?
Young people are generally innovative. They are entrepreneurial. They now have become digital natives and that presents immense opportunities to them. These opportunities mean they can pretty much operate wherever they are and they must as a matter of course remain within Botswana so that they can then spread their reach and influence to every part from Botswana. And so the opportunities that there are in Botswana, the training, the education, the acquisition of skills, the support, the environment that nurtures them and feeds and fuels their vitality is what Botswana offers and what will power Africa. Africa generally is a very young continent with a median age of 19.3. Botswana's median age is 25. And so with such a population, Africa is poised to rule the world.
So what are your plans for the world once you rule it?
To make it fairer, to make it more equitable, to ensure that intellectual property is internalized in every part of the African continent, that innovation serves humanity, not just a predatory elite, and that everybody can partake equitably and benefit from the fruits of the economy and the vast opportunities that are available in the world.
Well, I look forward to being treated fairly under your rule. Thank you. President Mnangagwa, I wonder what lessons, you've been in the government of Zimbabwe for decades in various roles, including through a very turbulent period where your predecessor famously kicked out the whites and then the economy tanked and now it's rising again. I wonder if you would summarize the lessons that your country has learned from that experience.
I'm not so sure what you have in mind, but let me say our economy has faced challenges. I'm sure you're aware. Zimbabwe has been under sanctions for decades as a result of us claiming our land from the British and making ourselves independent. We seized the land and gave it to our people. So sanctions were imposed on us. But in spite of all that constraint we have developed and we are happy that we have developed on our own and we feel very independent.
Well some of the land was seized from people who were born there. So I wonder if there's a lesson about targeting people on the basis of their skin color. Do you think, well people had their land seized in Zimbabwe who were born in Zimbabwe and they were targeted on the basis of their race and I wonder if you think that's good or bad.
No, land did not belong to a race, to Zimbabweans. So when the colonialists took land from us, time came when we asserted ourselves, take back our land. And those who wanted to have land at the same basis as the African people of Zimbabwe remained. But those who felt they were superior left.
Okay. President Bio, it does seem like the model of government around the world seems to be changing and people seem to have lost confidence in democracy at least in the west people aren't quite as keen to promote democracy. Do you notice this? Do you think democracy is in retreat around the world?
