Mo Gawdat says everyone except China and America is about to become third world in AI

Mo Gawdat thinks AI is about to redraw the world map into two real players, China and America, and everyone else holding a subscription invoice. On The Diary of a CEO, his bluntest claim was that countries like the United Kingdom and Germany are not just behind in artificial intelligence, they are drifting toward permanent dependency.

if we continue on that trajectory whether in the UK or in Germany or in you know uh Zanzibar welcome to Africa all of us everyone but the two competitors China and and America is going to be third world

That phrase is crude. It is also the kind of line designed to make a government minister briefly look up from a procurement spreadsheet. But the argument underneath it is sharper than the wording: AI power is not only about whose chatbot writes the cleanest email. It is about who owns the boring stuff, documents, payroll, CRM, ERP, government software, and the compute bills that quietly tax an economy every month.

Gawdat is not some random LinkedIn Nostradamus in a fleece vest. He is a former Google X executive, and that résumé gives him access, not papal authority. His forecast still needs separating into two piles: the plausible warning about technological dependency, and the apocalypse confetti he sprinkles over every hard number.

The job-loss number is the trailer. The sovereignty argument is the movie.

The clip most people will grab is his jobs prediction. Gawdat said AGI could be among us by 2027, and that the first symptom would be a split between people who plug into AI and people who get shut out of work. Then he went further.

30% of jobs would disappear by 2028 okay of some sectors not all sectors

The qualifier matters. He is not saying one in three workers everywhere is gone in two years. He is saying specific sectors get hit violently, especially call centers and graphic design, because AI eats routine white-collar work first. That is a serious claim, and a believable direction. The exact date and percentage are where the crystal ball starts smoking.

His advice to young workers was basically: learn the tool, then run toward work that still needs a human body, a human voice, or a human nervous system. Nursing, counseling, care, live music. The problem, as Steven Bartlett immediately pointed out, is that not everyone can pay rent by playing jazz. Gawdat knows this, which is why his real answer keeps swerving from individual career advice to national industrial policy.

The PowerPoint doctrine

Gawdat’s strangest and most useful idea is that countries should stop obsessing over building the ultimate frontier model and start replacing the dull software they already rent from American giants. Not beat OpenAI. Beat PowerPoint. Beat Word. Beat the monthly invoice.

replace Microsoft Word. Seriously, like how much intelligence do you need to build a software that writes documents?

This is both bracing and naïve, which is often where Gawdat lives. Replacing Microsoft Word is not just code. It is distribution, procurement, file compatibility, trust, support, and IT departments whose spiritual animal is the locked filing cabinet. Bartlett pushed him with the UK’s failed Covid app and the gravitational pull of San Francisco, where capital and talent cluster like Marvel heroes before a portal scene. Gawdat never fully solves that.

Still, he is right to mock the fatalism. Britain loves to narrate its own decline in a very expensive accent. Gawdat’s counter is almost offensively simple: if you keep importing all your core technology, you do not get to act surprised when the money, talent, and strategic control live somewhere else. In that sense, his third world line is less about poverty than dependence. The country is not starving. It is renting the operating system.

The contradiction is the point

Gawdat is trapped in the same bind as everyone else who talks seriously about AI. He thinks the arms race is dangerous, maybe catastrophic. He also thinks opting out means getting colonized by someone else’s models, chips, rules, and prices. His proposed middle path is ethical national AI: build enough local capability to serve your own community, but do not race blindly toward AGI just because a competitor might.

That sounds noble. It also sounds like asking capitalism to put on a bicycle helmet. China, in Gawdat’s telling, does not think small. He described government meetings from his Google days where the comparison was not China versus America or Germany, but China versus the world. That is the scale of ambition he thinks the West has failed to understand.

So the practical stake for the listener is not whether you should panic-buy a jazz saxophone. It is whether your country, your company, and your career are builders or renters. Gawdat may be early on the dates and overheated on the phrasing, but the invoice test is brutal. If all the essential tools come from somewhere else, sovereignty becomes a slogan printed on imported software.

the arms race of AI was won a long time ago.