“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
-Sun Tzu, Art of
War
When Nvidia convinced the White House to sell downgraded chips to China, critics warned it would undermine U.S. security and erode our AI advantage. In reality, it was a win-win, driving growth in both countries while protecting America’s technological lead.
Today, we enjoy the Groks, the new LLMs, the self-learning systems—the complete AI stack that makes us four to five times more productive. But our lead won’t last forever. Instead of defaulting to trade wars that weaken competitiveness, America should use targeted partnerships to lock in markets and turn competitors into customers.
Here’s the brutal math of the labor transition facing the American workforce: It takes 30 days for a 25-year-old AI-native college graduate to become productive. Meanwhile, I have employees with 20 years of experience who struggle to shift from their comfort zone to master the new tools.
In the debate about the impact of automation and agentic AI on the American workforce, there are two camps: those sounding the alarm on massive job displacement and those who want to know which specific roles will be eliminated. The difference is stark. Vague warnings will likely only lead to panic and bad policy responses. But, as a country, if we know which jobs are at risk, we can prepare, retrain, and adapt.
When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launched its R1 model requiring far less computational power than their American peers in January, it was only exposing the limitations Silicon Valley had already begun acknowledging. As millionaire investor Marc Andreessen noted, “we’re increasing GPUs at the same rate, but we’re not getting the intelligence improvements at all out of it.” That’s even before factoring in the supply chain challenge of providing enough chips to keep delivering the current rate of unsustainable growth.
