YouSaid · the spoken record

Sriram Krishnan

lines on the record: 33
first: 2025-07-31
most recent: 2025-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A lot better than a very small safety team inside a large lab. So I'm a big fan of open source sometimes being a lot more secure than closed source as well.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I think there's a, I think there's a few things going on. One is that people pushing for regulatory capture. Second is obviously the schools of thought from effect to altruism and a lot of people kind of worried about this all kind of mixed together. Here's my rebuttal to that. I think one of the things that open source software has shown us on the internet is that by default, open source is just safer and more secure. What does Linus Law say? More eyes make every bug shallow. And over the last 20 years, what is the security industry learned? More scrutiny you put your libraries to, the more scrutiny you put your browser renderings engines to, the safer it becomes. If you have seen that time and time and time again, and I think the same holds true for open source and open weights, where I sort of, you know, if you have a model up on hugging face and somebody downloads a 500 gigabyte file and the thousands of students and researchers just kind of pounding away on that, I think there's a good chance they're going to find issues.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just by themselves, and it's actually American models which were far behind. So immediately I think that argument got refuted. On the PDOM question, I think that's a perfectly fair question. And I think we need to be vigilant about it in the action plan talks about it. But we have to remember we are in a race with China and there are going to be catastrophic consequences if Chinese models are running on every robot, every camera, every car, every device around the world, and we just got to face that reality.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at the action plan, it's kind of a manifestation of how we think about things. We do talk a lot about risk, we talk a lot about having systems in place to identify cyber risks, biorerisk, et cetera. I think the difference from the Biden administration or the folks who talk about PDOM a lot on Lesrong is that we are just inherently more optimistic. If folks haven't seen it, I encourage them to watch the vice president's speech in Paris where he talked about, look, we want to embrace AI with optimism rather than fear. And I think one of the things which happened is that there was such a lot of fear. I would say mistakenly placed on open source. I think there are two kinds of fears people talked about. One was what you talked about, which is, hey, what are the risks these models could do really bad things? The second was, hey, are we actually giving away our secrets to China? And what DeepSeek showed us is that China actually building these models just”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure I would think of it that way. The way I see it is America has been blessed to have the leading technology ecosystem of the world. And that is an ecosystem which is in an intense competition right now. And I think we could have easily lost that competition and it's still a very, very close race. And we need to do everything we can to protect, preserve, and extend our lead. But at the end of the day, if you look at this administration, we are still trying to make sure that we serve the American worker, the American workforce. If you look at the action plan, that is at the heart of everything we do. So I don't think I see maybe exactly the way you.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of great people in the administration protect industry, not just in AI, but for example, you have Emil Michael as the Undersecretary for R&E, who's running DARPA in the Pentagon. You have many, many others. One of the things I think about is we just bring a understanding of how the tech industry works, what is possible, what isn't, we bring a sense of urgency. We also just really deeply understand the technology. Like you'd be shocked at how often I've seen David Sachs in a meeting explain how inferencing works, you know, what high bandwidth memory is, how the world has shifted from a pre-training context to a post-training context. And so we can just really mix it up on the technical details. And we obviously also have a lot of strong social ties to the industry. So we can call upon them to help us out. So I think it just adds a very different flavor of understanding of AI where, again, to go to my other point, I think DC kind of just suffers from a lack of”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no plan B. We're going to get this done. And I think one of the things about the Trump administration you will see is that the administration moves really, really fast, which is why the first week we had a bunch of executive orders. Look, we already work in all of it. We had three executive orders signed yesterday, one for infrastructure, one for export, which kind of ties to a lot of things we talk about, and one to stop ideology and wokeness in DEI. And I think you're going to see a lot more. We are already at work on pretty much all of it. There is no plan B. We're going to go get this done. And the other part I would say from yesterday is I've been inundated with just great response from the industry. A lot of folks at UNI know, which is really excited to see the government actually maybe understand AI and is actually happy to make sure that American companies can go build American AI. So I think they're also very excited to go partner with us. So it's go, go, go, no time to waste. We're getting it done. There is no plan B.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Action plan actually has a section in it of making sure we are set up for robotics. I think it's obviously that's going to get super key within the next 18 to 24 months. I would say it ladders from everything else that we talked about, both in the US and internationally. The first is making sure that our model companies can actually build as fast as they can. Our startups can go innovate as fast as they can. The second piece I would say is we want to make sure that the world is using our robotics companies and our models and not say Deep Seek or Quant. And that's actually one of the things when I was talking to a bunch of robotic startups, you're seeing a lot of distal deep-seek, a lot of distaled Quinn out there. And what we want to do is to make sure that we have an open source response, an American response, which pushes our products as a standard out there. But it is a focus. I think it's going to increase in the next, say, six months to 12 months.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're Lisa Sue to really kind of get your GPUs out to other countries. Even some of our allies who are really enthusiastic about AI and they want to help us out, but we're not actually giving them GPUs. So we listened to that order. And one of the things we talk about is how do we make sure that we get all of our allies around the world using the American stack. So that means how do we make sure, and we just did this in the Gulf with the American AI Accession Partnerships, how do we make sure we are getting our GPUs over? And one of the advantages of doing that is we get our GPUs over. We probably get them to run our models as opposed to models from another country and we go from there. So having this sense of an American stack that we can export and the world standardizes on, that's, I would say, is the third part of the action plan.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I say that America needs not just engineers, but it needs people up and down the stack. It needs electricians, technicians. We need to get construction going. And we need to get these jobs and this whole ecosystem back in the US. So if you look at the action plan, there's a bunch of stuff in there about this. I think I mentioned two parts of the action plan, which is building and then innovation on cutting out red tape and open source. And the president also talked a little bit about copyright yesterday. The third piece of the action plan, which I also think is a pretty dramatic switch away from how the Byron folks thought about it, is around making sure the world uses our standards and our technology. So just for context, and again, this is something unless you are a policy wonk, you may not be super familiar with. Under the Biden era, there was something called the Biden diffusion rule, which basically was a 200-page document, which basically made it illegal for America to export GPUs. It was really hard for, you know, if you're Jensen or”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we see our role as get rid of the red tape. Let's make sure the permitting on these things are super easy. Nuclear, that's another case where I think for decades and decades, the climate lobby and the doomers that kind of stop any real efforts over there. So I think we're seeing a lot of effort to get the red tape out of the way. Let's get construction going and see where we get.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also have something called the National Energy Dominance Council, which works very closely with Secretary Bergham and Secretary Wright for Interior Energy. And I think you're going to see a lot more from us on that front. The short answer is it's complicated. I think we're taking a very, very strong approach to this, but there's going to be more to”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, until two years ago, was just fine because you and I were not dramatically using more energy than what we were doing 10 years ago. Now, that obviously changed. The scaling loss arrived and everybody is trying to build new things. And I think the way we are trying to attack it is at every single step of the way, which is one is how do we make generation better. Second is how do you make sure we make constructing these data centers better, making it easier to kind of these regulations and kind of get these red tape out of the way, making sure we put focus on the right energy sources and making sure we have those lined up. So we are trying to take an approach to all of this, but it is a complicated problem just because there is so many different players, so many different states, and so many different patchwork of laws and regulations involved. But I think what, you know, I encourage folks to look at the executive orders today, which the president signs on infrastructure, which I think is going directly at this.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing I would say is it is a system. And this system was one that wasn't really battle tested for decades. Somebody showed me this number. I think the United States basically had like 1 to 2% of power usage growth for a very, very long period of time. And so you can imagine this whole system of everything from gas turbines, coal, renewable energy. There was a regulation which kind of really stopped nuclear. And then you had these per state utility companies, which often didn't have the incentive to innovate. You basically kind of ran the state. You weren't really getting new demand or competition. You had a grid which wasn't really pushed because, again, you didn't need to. And then you have essentially a patchwork of environmental laws, regulation, everything from water to emission to a whole other sort of things, which I'm sure I'm forgetting, right? So somebody kind of explains me as kind of this tangled spaghetti mess of things.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think you make a profound point, and you're already seeing that where when somebody's using DeepSeek or Quen, that's an expression of soft power. And I think I would much rather have them using a model built by somebody who kind of agrees with us and has our values. That's number one. The other issue I would point to is that these models, we don't know what's inside them. Interpretability is still a nascent field. And you could very easily see ways where you plug a model into a cursor or Windsurf and you generate a piece of code. And then two years down the road, it turns out that code had a little if statement saying if I'm running in some piece of critical infrastructure, go do something else. And we don't have ways to validate all that. And so a lot of reasons why we want to make sure that our American models or Western models wind up winning. And this is something I think we were going to put a lot of focus on.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inilard has our talking points better than I have because that is absolutely right. One very fundamental difference I think we have with the Biden administration is the Biden team really looked at AI as something to be centralized and controlled. Everything was about how do we make sure that we regulate these three or four companies and only three or four companies can build AI. They got to submit their models for testing. It was all about control in a centralized fashion. Now when I moved to DC, one of the things I realized is that's kind of the way DC thinks, which is control and centralized in one place. You and I know that's not how Silicon Valley thinks. And one of the reasons Silicon Valley is the envy of the world is because anybody any day can go to a Y combinator seed round or raise or just go off to the races and they could just build something amazing and it catches everyone's imagination. And I think what we want to do is enable just that rather than say, okay, we want to centralize power within a 10 mile radius of where I am right now.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second part is open source. Now, I think we probably talked about this a bit offline. Open source is one of the big reasons I actually got into the policy world. The Biden administration really, really tried to scare people about open source, talk about how unsafe it was. SB1047 obviously tried to.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out. And a lot of states which want to do versions of this. And we think that AI is a national priority. And if you're going to compete with China, we need to make sure that these are things that we deal with at the national level rather than every single state, especially states which have ideologies that you and I may not agree on, try and set their own rules. And by the way, some people may not understand this and understand this. If you have a small state set rules, it can often become the de facto law for the country because if you're a company, you're like, well, I have to operate in the state or I have an office. So let me just do that for everybody. Just like the EU does that. So we want to make sure cut through red tape. Let's make sure there's regulation that happens at the federal level. So that's very, very key because I think that's going to enable not just the big companies, but every Series A, Series B, Act with hire companies, whatever the kids are doing these days, we make sure that they are off this. That's number one.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other countries are. And just an example, one of the things it talks about is to make permitting on federal land a lot easier for data centers when it comes to old environmental laws or other regulations which get in the way. So think of that of like let's make sure we are building the infrastructure to power these models as we scale up. So that's number one. The second pillar is innovation, which I would kind of say as let's make sure all these amazing companies, everyone that you know of and maybe companies which don't exist yet can build applications and models or anything they want as fast as they can. And what we are trying to do is a couple of things I would really want to highlight. The first is we want to cut through red tape. Until last a year and a half ago, I was in California along with all of you. California almost passed SB 1047, which if that had happened, it would have been the end of open source, by the way, in the United States. We would not have a llama. We would not have an Owen Mini coming.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the ways David and I try to think about this with some of the people we work on is it should make sense as a strategy for almost like a technology company. And I hope that please go read the document. It's actually pretty readable. And hopefully for those of you who work in the tech industry, it should kind of make sense. And we think if America is going to win the race with China, it needs to do three things. And they ladder up to the strategy. The first is we need to build infrastructure. At the heart of this, you can go back to the scaling loss. What do we need? We need computation. We need data. And in the United States, it's been really challenging with the grid we have, with kind of this crazy permitting that we have around constructing new data centers to get some of these projects off the ground. So the first part of the action plan really dives into what the president calls build baby build, kind of playing on drill baby drill, which is all about how do we make sure we are building infrastructure. Because obviously, you know, some”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kids use ChatGPT to answer everything, right? From history to geography to just kind of silly kids questions. And you can easily imagine a world where people inject their own cultural biases into this. And, you know, in the EO, we have a few good examples. We have examples of the pok being seen as a black person, misgendering someone being seen as worse than thermonuclear explosion. And a lot of it's meant to say that you can easily imagine a world where these systems, which are at the heart of so many things that the government is going to use, we're always going to use, we don't want them artificially injected with an ideology, at least without being transparent about it.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. I think in some ways that's for the industry and the ecosystem to answer a bit. You're right. I spent a lot of time at Facebook, now Meta, at Twitter. One of the things I saw when I was at Twitter was how easily you could inject cultural bias in your algorithms. I have so many stories about how if you pick the right kind of Twitter accounts, which then feed into the trending algorithm, which then feed into Twitter moments, and then which every journalist or editor will bake up. And next thing you know, it's like one of the news stories off the land. And Busbeed will write a piece saying, people on the internet are talking about this. I saw this over and over again. And it left me at this profound appreciation of how algorithms can shape culture. And one of the things I always say is Twitter or X is the memetic battleground upon which we fight a lot of these ideological battles. So when it comes to AI, I think it's probably going to be very similar.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do we want to call it in all parts of the federal government, right? And all kinds of propaganda. And what this EO does is actually very simple. It says that all models that the federal government will procure, aka your taxpayer dollars will be spent on, has to do two things. They have to be truth-seeking and they can't have artificial ideological bias added. If bias is added, you just have to be transparent about where you're getting that bias from. It should be very simple for both people. But to your point, that cuts to the heart of if you're seeing nothing happen in Tiananmen Square in 19, in the early 90s, that cuts the heart of that. It also cuts the heart of many, many other things from the culture wars that we have now been trying to fight against.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly something we are actually addressing. And you're absolutely right. Like, I grew up in India, and a lot of my exposure to Western culture was in the Internet and Google. And obviously a lot of the internet was American. And that kind of introduced me to Americana. And imagine if 1995, the internet was drawn by America, but run by one of our adversaries. And so in a similar context, you're absolutely like when Deepsea came out, I think that all these great examples of lots of stuff in there, which doesn't probably align to American values. Now, we are actually addressing this. President signed an executive order yesterday. It's called No Woke AI in the federal government. And what it does, and this is probably going to be one of the spicy bits for your audience, is that it basically says that, look, from the day one of the Trump administration, we have tried to fight back against DI wokeness, critical race theory.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of us. So that's the race. Now, one interesting question that we have been pondering which we can get it to is how do you actually measure what it means? How are we doing in the race? And one measure I've been playing around with, and maybe I'll get your take on, is I think Google just announced this morning that they inferenced one quadrillion tokens a month or quarter, I forget which one. And one of the measures I've been thinking about is, let's say the world inferences, I don't know, maybe it's called 10 quadrillion tokens a month. We don't know what the number is, right? What share of those tokens are being influenced on American hardware, on American models, right? And how do we maximize that market share? And that's kind of one of the mental models I've been playing with. And in a way, you can think about it as we are American.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm suspect you folks agree. AI might be the most transformational economic cultural force of our lifetime. And I believe that if the country or the ecosystem which winds up getting ahead is going to have these cyclic effects, right? Like you're going to power productivity. You're going to have drug discovery. You're going to discover new material sciences, new technologies, which then feed back into your infrastructure, feed back into your economy. And you're going to get this flywheel effect where whoever winds up getting ahead could wind up really accelerating ahead in kind of a classic network effect ecosystem way that all of us in Silicon Valley will understand. Now that is purely on the civilian economic context. You can also imagine a military context, right? Think about everything from drones to autonomous weapons. I'm pretty sure it's not in our best interest to have another country have that same economy of scale and flywheel and race it.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. I think I would say there were claims were inflated and the claims we take seriously. The claims which inflated was to your point of, I would say they put out the final training run and as to all the ablations and training costs. And I would look at the paper, by the way, I don't think they make the claim that the total cost was two million bucks. I think it's what the press imputed. But I do think they deserve a lot of credit. I always make a point to say, look, DeepSeek did some very, very good technical work. If you think about, they didn't have as good hardware as the American model companies do, what they do with KB caching, MLA, there's some multiple theories on how they actually got chain of thought. Maybe they did it themselves. Maybe they had some help from American companies. But there were some really novel new work there, right? And I think it told us that, okay, we don't have a lead that we can take for granted. They were definitely the best open source model. So that was, and I think even today, I would probably say the Chinese models, deep sea quin are the best open source models. But symbolically told us that we are now in a race, in a very close race, by the way.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reasoning model. It was very high up in the leaderboards. It was a bit unclear as to what their cost claims were and how they had gotten there. I think we know a lot better.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the catalytic moments which happened was the day before I started this job, I get a call and this was the weekend Deep Secret came out and there's actually some chatter that I've heard online that China timed it so it can come out right after the president got sworn in. And people were like, hey, we just want you to come in and brief a lot of people at the White House on DeepSeek because we were like, hey, what is this? Is it cheaper? Is it faster? Do they have some magic way of training these models which only cost a few million bucks and not hundreds of billions of dollars? What's going on? You folks might remember that narrative which existed that weekend. And so I got to go and me and David helped brief all of the White House leadership. But it was really a starting gun because I think that moment was profound because it immediately told us a few things. It told us that America doesn't have a huge lead on AI. It actually has a very, very small lead. If you remember at the time, Deep Seek was the only reasoning model which was not OpenAIs. I don't think Claude had come out of the reasoning model yet. I don't think Google had it. It was the only non-open AI.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many ways which we can get into. And then he signed a new executive order, which basically said that America should dominate and win on AI. And then he called upon a few of us to say, you guys need to come up with a plan within six months to figure out how America is going to dominate and win. And so that put us off the races. And I think everything that has happened since then culminated in the event that we had yesterday where we put together this long document, 28-page document on America's action plan. We had a bunch of exciting of history.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plexley Park, and this is kind of the peak of, I would say, the effective altruist versus the EAC kind of drama which is going on. And I got pulled into a lot of those discussions and I remembered thinking to myself a lot of people who are in very senior roles in governments in the United States back then and other parts of the world didn't know what they were talking about when it came to AI. I was convinced that they were doing the absolute wrong thing on many topics. For example, open source or helping startups. And it was just really, really bad in a way which I think the industry didn't really appreciate until much later. And that got me interested into just policy, which by the way was a word which I didn't even understand what it means. We can even get into what that means. But it got me interested in policy. When President Trump got inaugurated in the first week, he did two things. One, he rescinded the Biden executive order on AI, which was bad and awful.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't have to, but I will take it. But no, thank you. It's fascinating for me to be here talking to you in this capacity because I've known both of you for forever and ever. You know, we've had hundreds of interactions and also been such a fan of the part. Congratulations. Just a little bit of backstory. I've been in Silicon Valley for a long time. I feel very old. I did a tour of all the large consumer social media companies. And then I was at Andreessen Horowitz for the last four years competing actively for CDZA term streets with both of you folks, I'm sure. And all this while I had no real intention of joining government. I wasn't very particularly interested in policy. But what wound up happening is a couple of years ago I moved to England to head up all of Andreasen's international efforts. And at the time, the UK was kind of a hotbed of all the AI policy debates. They had this AI safety summit at”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you for having me. I'm long term fan. Never been invited before. I was always a bit sad, but no, thank you for having me for the very first time. And before I just have to point out for folks who are listening on audio that Elard has never looked as good as dashing, as handsome as he does. Now, Elad, you've dressed up for me. I'm honored.”
2025-07-31 · No Priors · America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT