Eric Schmidt scores US vs. China: Who’s winning the AI race? | Masters of Scale Summit 2026
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Bob Safian at the Masters of Scale Summit that the US-China AI race is the defining contest of our age, with China now about 6 months behind.
The gist
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Schmidt says China closed the AI gap to about 6 months, despite chip limits he expected to last 10 years, using about 1/10 the energy.
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He says the US needs 60 to 80 gigawatts of power through 2030-2031, roughly $50 billion per gigawatt, and should build its own power plants.
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Schmidt warns open-weight models like China's can have guardrails stripped for cyber attacks, though running your own cuts token costs three to five times.
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On a scorecard, Schmidt gives the US model performance, talent and safety, and China cost, energy, deployment speed and 10-year global influence.
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Schmidt's advice is to use AI; long chain of thought reasoning won him over, and he suggests letting AI produce financial reports for CFO discussion.
Eric Schmidt uses it
"You got to use this stuff. What really did me in was when I started having it do long chain of thought, deep deep reasoning. And I went, 'Oh my god, it has arrived.' It changed the way I thought about my life, the way I work, the way I invest, the way I run companies."
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Chain of thought reasoning
AI tools
"You got to use this stuff. What really did me in was when I started having it do long chain of thought, deep deep reasoning. And I went, 'Oh my god, it has arrived.' It changed ..."
Also mentioned
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Waymo
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Reflection AI
· "There are a couple of examples. One is called Reflection AI that's just released a 500 billion parameter..."
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