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quick trip to Hill and Valley. Thanks to @jacobhelberg on building a needed, ever-stronger bridge between the policymakers and builders in tech couple off script notes below https://t.co/2mkm258fXy 1/ to start: I’m impressed by Karp’s composed handling of anti-Israel, anti-AI protestors — real belief in free speech as an American right. capitol police far too slow 2/ to believe in the power of AI is to believe the west must lead in AI. innovation (and meritocracy) is the root of America’s greatness, and we must re-enable that 3/ America’s strategic bottleneck in AI isn’t chips—it’s electricity. without abundant, reliable power, we can’t run the “AI factories” (datacenters) that will define the next industrial era. AI is now a power-constrained industry. that is a national security issue 4/ permitting reform is no longer a regulatory debate—it’s national defense infrastructure. You can’t run AI systems or reindustrialize without fixing the grid, re-enabling nuclear, and cutting multi-year build delays 5/ related: the US military’s most urgent vulnerability isn’t hardware—it’s procurement. we can’t deter an aggressive CCP with spreadsheets and a risk-averse acquisition culture. capability needs to move at software speed. tech is turning over faster AND matters more to dominance 6/ reshoring won’t come from subsidies alone. it will come from collapsing the cost of labor-intensive industries via AI and robotics. when software becomes the main driver of output, proximity and resilience matter more than wage arbitrage. don’t fight the markets, use them. 7/ real defense innovation comes from heretics. Rickover built the nuclear Navy by defying every rule that tried to stop him. today, he’d likely be fired. if we want to win, we have to change the system to protect—and promote—that kind of builder 8/ the national labs are already proving AI’s scientific value. researchers using frontier models are accelerating materials science and physics simulations. these aren’t hypotheticals—they’re happening now. we see it in startups too! 9/ the Pentagon won’t adopt AI because of a directive—it’ll adopt it because someone uses it to do their job 10x faster. first comes individual adoption (writing briefs, generating ops plans), then comes org understanding, then comes scale. A @conviction mantra: use drives change @conviction 10/10 rating for this summit. bigger group of policymakers than last year. was excited to hear about army acquisitions reorg, and to see friends, and the number of true American optimists swell 🇺🇸