GMF Transatlantic AI Conversations

Chris Schroeder, a global technology and communications entrepreneur and venture investor, has served on the German Marshall Fund's board since 2015. A leader in the global entrepreneurship, geopolitical, and economic communities, he is co-founder of Next Billion Ventures, an advisor and network partner at Village Global, and the author of Startup Rising, The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East. Previously, Mr. Schroeder led Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive as its CEO and Publisher, co-founded HealthCentral.com, and served on the staff of Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Deputy Secretary Robert B. Zoellick. He has also served on the boards of the American Council on Germany, the American University School of International Service, and the American University in Beirut, among others, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of YPO's Global Diplomacy Network.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. In 2003 he co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service. In 2009 he joined Greylock. In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI.  

Reid currently serves on the boards of Aurora, Coda, Entrepreneur First, Joby, Microsoft, Nauto, and a few early stage companies still in stealth. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, CZ Biohub, New America, Berggruen Institute, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change. He is the host of Masters of Scale, the first American podcast to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for featured guests as well as Possible, a podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. He is the co-author of five best-selling books: The Startup of You, The Alliance, Blitzscaling, Masters of Scale, and Impromptu. He is an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and a graduate of Stanford University. 

Recommended Reading:

• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
• The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
• Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Watch Reid's interview here.

Marc Andreessen an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. 

Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. 

Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, Samsara, Simple Things, and TipTop Labs. He is also on the board of Meta.

Recommended Reading:

• The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri
• History Has Begun by Bruno Maçães
• The Kill Chain by Christian Brose

Watch Marc's interview here.

Anu Bradford is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School. She is also a director for Columbia’s European Legal Studies Center and a Senior Scholar at Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School. She is an expert on European Union law, digital regulation, international trade law, and comparative and international antitrust law. Bradford is the author of “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World” (OUP 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her most recent book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023, and was recognized as one of the Best Books of 2023 by Financial Times.

Recommended Reading:

• Digital Empires – Inside the Global Battle to Regulate Technology by Anu Bradford
• Hire Wire by Angela Chang

Watch Anu's interview here.

Chris Miller is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on Russian foreign policy, politics, and economics; Russia and Ukraine; Russian-European relations; and Eurasia. He also focuses on semiconductors and the geopolitics of technology. 

His latest book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (Scribner, 2022) reveals the geopolitical history of the computer chip. It is a New York Times bestseller and a winner of the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award and won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. It was featured on many “Best of 2022” book lists, including in the New Yorker and the Economist. 

Concurrently, Miller is associate professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Before joining Fletcher, Miller did research at the Hoover Institution and Brookings Institution. Earlier he spent time in Russia at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the well-known New Economic School in Moscow. 

He has an MA and PhD in history from Yale University and a BA in history from Harvard University.

Recommended Reading:

• Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
• Chip War by Chris Miller

Watch Chris' interview here.

Arthur Mensch, Chief Executive Officer of Mistral AI, is responsible for designing and implementing the company’s strategic vision, and leading the product and sales teams. A graduate of École Polytechnique, Télécom Paris and holder of the Master Mathématiques Vision Apprentissage at Paris Saclay, he completed his thesis between 2015 and 2018 in machine learning for functional brain imaging at Inria (Parietal team). In 2018, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Applied Mathematics department at ENS Ulm, where he carried out work in mathematics for optimization and machine learning. In 2020, he joined DeepMind Paris as a researcher, working on language models, before leaving the company in 2023 to co-found Mistral AI.

Recommended Reading: 

• Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
• Scientific Papers on AI 

Watch Arthur's interview here.

Vijay Pande, PhD, is a General Partner and has been at Andreessen Horowitz since 2014. He founded and leads a16z Bio + Health, which invests in life sciences and healthcare through four dedicated funds with more than $3 billion under management. Vijay leads the firm’s investments at the cross section of biology and computer science, including applications in computation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in healthcare; digital therapeutics; diagnostics; and other novel transformative scientific advances applied to industry that take bio beyond healthcare. 

Vijay holds a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from MIT. He has been awarded the DeLano Prize in Computation, a Guinness World Record for Folding@Home, the American Chemical Society Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, and was selected for MIT TR10. In his teens, Vijay was the first employee at video game startup Naughty Dog, maker of Crash Bandicoot and The Last of Us.

Recommended Listening:

• Raising Health, a podcast by a16z Bio+Health

Watch Vijay's interview here.

Jen Easterly is the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). She was nominated by President Biden in April 2021 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate on July 12, 2021. As Director, Jen leads CISA’s efforts to understand, manage, and reduce risk to the cyber and physical infrastructure Americans rely on every day. She is a proud Mom, a mental health advocate, a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, and an aspiring electric guitarist. 

Before serving in her current role, Jen was the head of Firm Resilience at Morgan Stanley, responsible for ensuring preparedness and response to business-disrupting operational incidents and risks to the Firm. She also helped build and served as the first Global Head of Morgan Stanley’s Cybersecurity Fusion Center, the Firm’s center of gravity for cyber defense operations.

Jen has a long tradition of public service, to include two tours at the White House, serving as both Special Assistant to President Obama for Counterterrorism and as Executive Assistant to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. She also served as the Deputy for Counterterrorism at the National Security Agency.

A two-time recipient of the Bronze Star, Jen retired from the U.S. Army after more than twenty years of service in intelligence and cyber operations, including tours of duty in Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Responsible for standing up the Army’s first cyber battalion, she was also instrumental in the design and creation of United States Cyber Command.

Recommended Reading:

• CISA.gov
• CISA's Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence
• Foreign Affairs Article, "Artificial Intelligence's Threat to Democracy", by Jen Easterly, Scott Schwab, and Cait Conley
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Watch Jen's interview here.

Dragos Tudorache is a member of the European Parliament and vice-president of the Renew Europe Group. He is the LIBE rapporteur on the AI Act, former chair of the special committee on artificial intelligence in the digital Age (AIDA), and he sits on the committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs (LIBE), committee on foreign affairs (AFET), subcommittee on security and defence (SEDE), and the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States (D-US). Tudorache began his career in 1997 as a judge in Romania. Between 2000 and 2005, he built and led the legal departments at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the UN missions in Kosovo. After working on justice and anticorruption at the European Commission Representation in Romania, supporting the country’s EU accession, he joined the Commission as an official and, subsequently, qualified for leadership roles in EU institutions, managing a number of units and strategic projects such as the Schengen Information System, Visa Information System, and the establishment of eu-LISA.

Recommended Readings: 

EU - AI Act 

Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age

Nathaniel C. Fick was sworn in on September 21, 2022 as the inaugural U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Prior to joining the State Department, Ambassador Fick was a technology executive and entrepreneur.  He was CEO of the cybersecurity software company Endgame from 2012 through its acquisition by Elastic in 2019.  Thereafter, he led Elastic’s information security business globally.  Ambassador Fick spent nearly a decade as an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, working with management teams to build technology businesses.  In 2018, he was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business,” and Endgame was selected by Forbes as one of the “100 Best Cloud Companies in the World.” From 2009 to 2012, Ambassador Fick was CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a national security research organization in Washington.  Earlier in his career, he served as a Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance officer, including combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.  His book about that experience, One Bullet Away, was a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year,” and one of the Military Times‘s “Best Military Books of the Decade.” Ambassador Fick graduated with high honors in Classics from Dartmouth College and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Recommended Readings: 

Chris Miller Chip Wars

Jonathan Pelson Wireless Wars 

Robert B. Zoellick America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy 

William J. Burns The Back Channel 

Tsiporah Fried is currently a senior advisor to the Vice Chairman of the French Joint Chiefs of Staff. She also works regularly as an advisor to the Chairman on specific issues. She is particularly involved in the “preparation of the future” and general military strategy, for which she coordinates the main prospective and strategic studies and initiatives. Ms. Fried is a strategy analyst and thinker in military international cooperation and international relations, with a focus on European Defense, NATO and Transatlantic relations. She is in charge of the strategic dialogue between the French and US Vice-Chairman and is deputy director of publication of the Alumni ENA Review and president of the Club ENA-NAVY as well.

As a former senior project manager for military innovation, she created and piloted the French Joint Staff task force on artificial intelligence. Previously, she was a senior auditor at the Cour des Comptes (the highest jurisdiction in charge of public audit and budget control), where she became the expert on the Foreign Affairs department budget control. Ms. Fried conducted several important audits in the Foreign Affairs department and the Justice department. She served also in leadership positions at the French Navy Staff, as a political advisor to the French Chief of Navy, and among several missions, led the Strategic Bilateral Talks with the US Navy, UK Royal Navy and Indian Navy. She was awarded the medal of Chevalier (Knight) of the “Ordre national du Mérite.” As a Navy Reserve Officer, she has also awarded the medal for Voluntary Services.

Ms. Fried is a former student of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA—Class LS Senghor—with classmate, President Macron). Considered as one of the most elite French Schools, ENA selects and undertakes the initial training of senior officials. It stands as one of the main pathways to high responsibility positions in the public and private sectors. Ms. Fried has also a MA in Political Sciences and a degree in Russian language and civilization, from the National Institute for Oriental Language and Civilization (INALCO- Langues’O)

Recommended Readings: 

Technopolitique: Comment la technologie fait de nous des soldats 

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

A 1992 Naval Academy graduate, Cmdr. Juliane Gallina became the first woman to serve as a Naval Academy brigade commander in 1991. After serving in the Navy for 21 years and retiring as a Navy Reserve officer in 2013, Gallina then spent 10 years with the National Reconnaissance Office as a senior system engineer and program manager and later as deputy program director, and became the vice president of IBM. She currently works at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the deputy director for digital innovation.

Recommended Resources:
The Langley Files Podcast 

Risky Biz Podcast 

The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal - William Burns 

Elizabeth Kelly is director of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. As director, she is responsible for providing executive leadership, management, and oversight of the AI Safety Institute and coordinating with other AI policy and technical initiatives throughout the Department of Commerce, NIST and across the government. Prior to joining NIST, Elizabeth served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the White House National Economic Council, where she helped lead the Administration's efforts on financial regulation and technology policy, including artificial intelligence. Elizabeth was a driving force behind the domestic components of the AI executive order, spearheading efforts to promote competition, protect privacy, and support workers and consumer, and helped lead Administration engagement with allies and partners on AI governance. She previously served as a senior policy advisor on the Biden-Harris Transition Team and in the Obama White House. In the private sector, Elizabeth was Senior Vice President of Growth for Capital One Investing, which acquired United Income, a fintech start-up that she helped grow as SVP of Operations. Elizabeth holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. from Duke University. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Recommended Resources: 

Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

The Ezra Klein Show