Dylan Patel

Their words

Then all of a sudden, you've unlocked 20% of the US grid for data centers because most of the times that capacity is sitting idle and it's really only there for that peak, right? Which is a day or two, right?

Their words

Um DRAM gets released goes to AI chips who are willing to do longer term contracts, willing to pay higher margins, etc., etc. because at the end of the day, the margin that they extract is much larger from the end user or whatever. Um, and so this this this probably leads to like people hating AI even more, right?

Their words

As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.

Their words

But I don't know like I don't know what fast timelines means, right? Like I I like don't think you have to believe in AGI to have the timelines where the US wins.

Their words

So when you look at inference at let's say 100 tokens a second for deepseek and kimk 2.5 hopper versus blackwell the performance difference is on the order of 20x

Their words

Um in general the semiconductor supply chain has not right it's lived through the booms and bust and uh we can talk a bit more about it but basically no one you know some players as of very recently have like woken up but in general no one really sees demand for 200 gawatts a year of AI chips or you know trillions of dollars of spend a year in the semiconductor supply chain.

Their words

Um, and then you stack on 70 this year, 80 next year, growing to 100 by 2030. You're at like 700 EV tools by the end of the decade. Um, 700 EV tools, three and a half tools per gigawatt. um assuming it's all allocated to AI which it's not but three and a half tools per gigawatt gets you to 200 gigawatts worth of AI chips for the data centers to deploy

Their words

oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.

Their words

So to scale compute further right there's some different bottlenecks this year next year uh but ultimately by 2829 the bottleneck falls to the lowest rung on the supply chain which is ASML right ASML makes the world's most complicated machine i.e. an EUV tool.

Their words

Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck is compute and for that the longest lead time supply chains are not power or data centers. They're actually the semiconductor supply chain themselves, right? It switches back from being power and data center uh as a major bottleneck to chips.

Their words

Because Enthropic saw it before Google. And then Google had Nano Banano and Gemini 3 which caused their user metrics to skyrocket and leadership at Google was like oh and then they started making the statement of we have to double compute every is it 6 months or I don't remember the exact number that they said.

Their words

TSMC is much more excited to give allocation to Graviton than they are to tranium because they view CPU business as more stable long-term growth right and as a company that is conservative and doesn't want to ride cycles of growth too hard you actually want to allocate to the uh the market that is more stable and lower growth rate first before you allocate all the incremental capacity to the fast growth rate market.

Their words

Um I think at least this year we're going to see margins for the model vendors go up a lot, right? Because they're so capacity constrained, they have to demand destroy demand, right? there is there's no way they can continue anthropic can continue at the current pace without destroying demand.

Their words

A companies that have locked up, you know, and and don't have commitment issues, you know, have these 5-year contracts for compute, they've kind of locked in a humongous margin advantage because they've locked in compute for 5 years at a price of what it transacted at 5 years ago or three years ago or two years ago, whatever it is.

Their words

So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.

Their words

The important thing about, hey, is cost a limiting factor here? My view is that we'll have really awesome intelligence, like AGI, before we have it permeate throughout the economy.

Their words

There's this very good quote from Sam Altman who... He can be a hyperbeast sometimes, but one of the things he said, and I think I agree, is that superhuman persuasion will happen before superhuman intelligence, right? And if that's the case, then these things before we get this AGI ASI stuff, we can embed superhuman persuasion towards our ideal or whatever the ideal of the model maker is, right?

Their words

OpenAI has a fantastic margin. When they're doing inference, their gross margins are north of 75%. So that's a four to five X factor right there of the cost difference, is that OpenAI is just making crazy amounts of money because they're the only one with the capability.

Their words

It's an objective fact that the world has been the most peaceful it's ever been when there are global hegemons, or regional hegemons in historical context. The Mediterranean was the most peaceful ever when the Romans were there.

Their words

China, if they wanted to build the largest data center in the world, if they had access to the chips, could. So it's just a question of when, not if.

Their words

if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.

Their words

To some extent, training a model does effectively nothing. They have a model. The thing that Dario is sort of speaking to is the implementation of that model, once trained to then create huge economic growth, huge increases in military capabilities, huge increases in productivity of people, betterment of lives.

Their words

I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.