Sriram Krishnan

DeepSeek was the administration’s “starting gun”: Krishnan says America’s AI lead is “very, very small,” even though headlines claiming a few-million-dollar training cost excluded ablations and other costs incurred before the final run. He still credits its KB caching, MLA and reasoning work under inferior hardware, and calls DeepSeek and Qwen the best open-source models today. The strategic read-through is a close race, not a lead America can take for granted.

Krishnan proposes full-stack inference share as a scoreboard for victory: an “America Inc.” spanning NVIDIA/AMD GPUs, OpenAI/Grok/Gemini models and applications should capture as much global inference as possible. He floated the share of all tokens run on American hardware and models; Google had just reported “one quadrillion tokens a month or a quarter,” though he explicitly could not recall which.

Compute buildout is the core industrial challenge: after decades of only 1%-2% US power-demand growth, generation, grids, utilities, permits and data-center construction now form a “tangled spaghetti mess.” The response is “build, baby, build”—easier federal-land permitting, less regulatory friction and efforts to get nuclear construction going—plus electricians, technicians and domestic supply-chain capacity.

Open source is framed as both a strategic weapon and an answer to Chinese soft power, not merely a developer preference. Krishnan argues SB 1047 could have ended US open models, while Guo notes Western companies already use DeepSeek and Qwen; Gil argues closed-model incumbents may have incentives to push the anti-open-source narrative, while Krishnan identifies regulatory capture as one dynamic. Krishnan concedes cyber and bio risks but says Chinese models on “every robot, every camera, every car, every device” would carry catastrophic consequences.

The third pillar is exporting an integrated American stack so allies standardize on US chips, models and applications, reversing what Krishnan describes as the restrictive 200-page Biden Diffusion Rule. He points to the Gulf’s American AI Acceleration Partnership, then puts robotics on an 18-24-month horizon, with policy attention rising over the next 6-12 months as startups already use distilled DeepSeek and Qwen.

AI policy is also cultural policy because models increasingly mediate history, facts and everyday questions. The “No Woke AI in the Federal Government” order requires purchased models to be “truth-seeking” and free of undisclosed artificial ideological bias; Krishnan connects that rule to his Twitter-era view that algorithms can turn curated inputs into national narratives.

Execution is mapped to roughly 90 agency actions and three immediate executive orders on infrastructure, exports and ideological bias, with Krishnan insisting, “There is no plan B.” He rejects the label “technocracy,” says the American worker remains central, and acknowledges an AI “event horizon” beyond which reasonable forecasting may break down—making positioning for multiple possible AI futures, rather than one forecast, the stated objective.

🔗 Original source & video: America’s Plan to Dominate the Full AI Stack with Sriram Krishnan