Zavain Dar, co-founder of Dimension and an early Hugging Face investor during his time at Lux Capital, joins Eric Newcomer to unpack NVIDIA’s open source strategy, the competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, and why his trips to China changed how he thinks about the future of technology.
They discuss China’s AI and biotech boom, the limits of US chip restrictions, and why American startups are building on Chinese models. Plus: Dimension’s Coefficient Bio exit to Anthropic, whether AI can make most human diseases treatable in our lifetime, and why human trials remain a bottleneck.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:00 Backing Hugging Face early
05:00 NVIDIA’s open source strategy
11:00 American vs. Chinese open source AI
15:00 Distillation and the US-China AI connection
18:00 Inside China’s tech and biotech ecosystem
24:00 Did US chip restrictions backfire?
28:00 Investing across the US-China divide
30:00 China’s growing role in drug development
32:00 Can AI make most diseases treatable?
35:00 Why human trials still take time
38:00 Aging and longevity
39:00 How AI drug discovery works
41:00 Building Coefficient Bio and selling to Anthropic
44:00 AI’s potential in math and science
46:00 Silicon Valley’s silence on immigration
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