Patrick OShaughnessy

building @psumvc @colossusmag hosting @investlikebest

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My seventh conversation with @GavinSBaker.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss:
- Why old GPUs are getting more expensive
- Open source vs the frontier
- Claude as Wall Street's Walter Cronkite
- Whether the buildout gets funded out of cash flow or debt
- SpaceX as a data center company
- And more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:17 AI Selloff vs. Fundamentals
10:20 Financing the AI Buildout
18:18 GPU Prices Keep Rising
24:23 Claude Moves Markets
29:01 What Could Break the Thesis
36:59 The Memory Supply War
42:08 Nvidia’s New Playbook
50:14 China and Open Source
61:51 Data Centers and Regulation
71:11 SpaceX and Orbital Compute

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Dierdre is fantastic

Really looking forward to this

[TBPN @tbpn]

BREAKING: After 15 years at CNBC, @dee_bosa is launching her own live show covering AI

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Sam Altman: "I'm not a jobs doomer at all. I think there are gonna be tons of jobs."

"If we could go back to 2019 and show people our latest model, not only would they say that it's AGI, they would say that the economy would have been completely upended.

And that has not happened.

Anytime you're that wrong and that confident, which I think we were as a field, you have to update.

AI is just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, like dumb toddler in others. And people have, so far, extremely complementary skills to AI.

It's not taste…the world may need a new kind of word for the kind of judgment that people are very good at that AIs seem to really deeply struggle with.

You can go hire an AI consultant right now or talk to an AI sales rep or hire an AI engineer. And somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human.

I definitely would rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything.

Human values have value because they're human. We are deeply hardwired to care about people."

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My conversation with Sam Altman (@sama), CEO of OpenAI.

We discuss:
- Kimi, distillation, and open source
- OpenAI's compute bets
- The Hugging Face incident
- What happens after AGI
- Raising kids in an age of abundant intelligence
- And much more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
4:10 The Race for Compute
14:24 A Sci-Fi Cyber Incident
16:14 The Promise and Risks of AGI
23:27 How AI Will Change Jobs
29:38 Sam’s Vision for a Personal AI
35:02 Robotics, ChatGPT, and What Comes Next
44:39 The Weight of Leading OpenAI
51:36 OpenAI’s Biggest Lessons

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

First order shortage effects: memory, wafers

Second order: pcb, cpu

Fifth order: monkeys

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Lab monkey prices in China have reportedly surged to roughly $26,000 each, as the biotech boom overwhelms supply.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Every Gavin Baker pod is always so chock full of alpha about compute it's insane.

I aim to never miss any of these.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@bgurley We broke in

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Gavin on SpaceX’s compute ambitions:

“A Substack writer, @FundaAI, thinks that SpaceX is going to bring on eight gigawatts of compute over the next 18 months.

I will never bet against Elon. But I mean, that would be a truly incredible feat. And rates have gone up since they signed those last contracts, not down.”

“To this day, the only companies that have brought on more than 500 megawatts of power in a year are the hyperscalers, CoreWeave, Crusoe, and SpaceX.

SpaceX has brought on the most, the fastest, at the lowest cost.”

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My seventh conversation with @GavinSBaker.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss:
- Why old GPUs are getting more expensive
- Open source vs the frontier
- Claude as Wall Street's Walter Cronkite
- Whether the buildout gets funded out of cash flow or debt
- SpaceX as a data center company
- And more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:17 AI Selloff vs. Fundamentals
10:20 Financing the AI Buildout
18:18 GPU Prices Keep Rising
24:23 Claude Moves Markets
29:01 What Could Break the Thesis
36:59 The Memory Supply War
42:08 Nvidia’s New Playbook
50:14 China and Open Source
61:51 Data Centers and Regulation
71:11 SpaceX and Orbital Compute

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@jordihays @GauravSharma Haha

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@ciaomack @kevinakwok @AmbrookAg Congrats!

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Gavin explains why companies cutting their AI spend is not bad for AI demand.

With open source models and inference clouds, AI spending can decrease even as token usage and GPU hours increase:

“You're literally just shifting tokens from really expensive tokens with like 90% gross margins to tokens with maybe let's call it a 30% gross margin. And that's where the savings are coming from, but the tokens cost the same amount of compute to produce.

All these big public companies are like, ‘Oh my god, my AI spend is 20X'd. I've burned my budget in three months.’

So they set up a router and that cuts their AI spend, but it may actually increase the amount of tokens that they are generating just by shifting them to cheaper open source tokens, and that's just more compute.

A company getting smarter about which model to use for which task, that may lead to a destabilization of their spend or even a decline, but it has nothing to do with the amount of GPU compute hours they are effectively consuming.”

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My seventh conversation with @GavinSBaker.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss:
- Why old GPUs are getting more expensive
- Open source vs the frontier
- Claude as Wall Street's Walter Cronkite
- Whether the buildout gets funded out of cash flow or debt
- SpaceX as a data center company
- And more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:17 AI Selloff vs. Fundamentals
10:20 Financing the AI Buildout
18:18 GPU Prices Keep Rising
24:23 Claude Moves Markets
29:01 What Could Break the Thesis
36:59 The Memory Supply War
42:08 Nvidia’s New Playbook
50:14 China and Open Source
61:51 Data Centers and Regulation
71:11 SpaceX and Orbital Compute

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Gavin on why the hyperscalers are under-earning:

" I literally spoke to a company this morning who rented a cluster of several thousand Blackwells at somewhere in the mid $2 per GPU hour,  and this is one of the sexiest startups that people want to be in business with.

They're renting the exact same cluster, and they're hoping 7 months later to pay just under $4.

That's pretty crazy because a really gentle decline in prices would be bullish. Instead, we're up, depending on the starting point, 50 to 60% in six or seven months.

And there have been so many anecdotes like that. One of the inference clouds, I think it was Baseten, they went on a podcast and essentially said, "We are planning to pay 100% more for Blackwells when our contract expires.

And that just means that essentially all the hyperscalers are under-earning.

My main mission out here this week is: tell me something negative."

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My seventh conversation with @GavinSBaker.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss:
- Why old GPUs are getting more expensive
- Open source vs the frontier
- Claude as Wall Street's Walter Cronkite
- Whether the buildout gets funded out of cash flow or debt
- SpaceX as a data center company
- And more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:17 AI Selloff vs. Fundamentals
10:20 Financing the AI Buildout
18:18 GPU Prices Keep Rising
24:23 Claude Moves Markets
29:01 What Could Break the Thesis
36:59 The Memory Supply War
42:08 Nvidia’s New Playbook
50:14 China and Open Source
61:51 Data Centers and Regulation
71:11 SpaceX and Orbital Compute

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@flagspotting2 @GavinSBaker Last Wednesday

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

"Have you met anyone that's more bullish than you?"

Gavin: "Everyone out here is more bullish than me!"

"I look at what's happening in the stock market, and I feel like a foolish optimist.

But when I talk to anyone in this ecosystem, I'm bearish relative to essentially everyone. Which is just a strange state of affairs.”

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

My seventh conversation with @GavinSBaker.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss:
- Why old GPUs are getting more expensive
- Open source vs the frontier
- Claude as Wall Street's Walter Cronkite
- Whether the buildout gets funded out of cash flow or debt
- SpaceX as a data center company
- And more

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:17 AI Selloff vs. Fundamentals
10:20 Financing the AI Buildout
18:18 GPU Prices Keep Rising
24:23 Claude Moves Markets
29:01 What Could Break the Thesis
36:59 The Memory Supply War
42:08 Nvidia’s New Playbook
50:14 China and Open Source
61:51 Data Centers and Regulation
71:11 SpaceX and Orbital Compute

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@GavinSBaker One of these we need to do live though then we can have as much fun

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

@compound248 Last Wednesday

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Every screen on metro north train is people passing work documents into Claude/chat and then creating follow up.

Wild and grim at the same time.

No one is going to read/review complicated documents directly.

[Colossus @colossusmag]

Guinness used to be an old man's pint, poured in old men's pubs. Now the Irish stout is selling faster than ever. It's the fastest-growing imported beer in the US, and the best-selling beer in British pubs.

This resurgence has played out against the backdrop of plummeting alcohol sales worldwide and near-apocalyptic conditions in the hospitality trade.

We sent Alex Bilmes, former editor-in-chief of British Esquire, to investigate.

He drank at the London pub that sells 20,000 pints of Guinness a week, more than any place on earth. He drank five at the Dublin pub known for the best pint of black stuff in the world. And at 10:30am on a Friday, he drank at St James's Gate, where Guinness has been brewed since 1759.

Between pints he consulted TikTok influencers, authors, cemetery workers and Diageo executives, all to understand the revival of a 267-year-old beer that was decidedly uncool just a decade ago.

Nothing about Guinness turns out to be black and white. Including the drink, which held up to the light is dark red.

https://t.co/Xt0nfGqvmD

[JJ Watt @JJWatt]

Base told me they save people money on their electricity bills, keep the lights on during power outages and strengthen the overall power grid.

I couldn’t understand how that was possible or why everyone wouldn’t switch to Base, so I wanted to find out for myself.

I’m now a customer, investor & endorser.

I toured the factory, met the team, visited a home install and asked a whole bunch of questions.

I went on the Base website and typed in my address to see how much they could save me on my electricity bill and it said 35%. I switched right there on the spot. No special VIP pricing, no endorsement trick, I literally logged on and did it myself on the regular website right from my phone.

The one question I kept coming back to was “Save money, protect your home during outages, help support the power grid. Why wouldn’t everyone want to get Base?”

I still haven’t found an answer to that yet.

Today they're launching Base Core, a new home battery fully designed by Base and built right here in Texas.

Check it out here: https://t.co/nZzMUo0yfh

@basepowerco

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Based

[Base Power @basepowerco]

Thank you to @WSJ for covering the launch of Base Core and our $1B Series D.

The U.S. is undergoing a foundational shift in energy demand, and traditional power generation can't scale fast enough to meet it. Meeting demand this fast calls for new technology that works alongside the grid and adds capacity where it's needed most.

Base Core does just that: one of the largest home batteries on the market at 39.2 kWh, designed and built by Base in Austin, and engineered for rapid deployment at scale.

This new capital will go toward bringing Core to more homes, expanding nationally, and hiring exceptional talent.

The Series D is led by @RibbitCap, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and @jpmorgan’s Strategic Investment Group, with participation from @AltimeterCap, D1 Capital Partners, Sands Capital, @coatuemgmt, Layer Global, and @EnergyImpact_ . Base’s major existing investors are re-investing, including @ThriveCapital, @a16z, @lightspeedvp, Trust Ventures, @CapitalG, and more.

https://t.co/SSzoQkcXOr

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

That’s meant only as a funny punchline to what I said! Here’s what I said first

“Micky is one of the greatest investors of this era. Nobody embraces change like Micky. Wherever there is stagnation in the status quo you’ll find him pushing for positive change by backing renegade founders.

Hes also the person I’ve met who is the most joyous despite being wildly competitive. Amazing wife. Amazing kids. He’s funny and makes light of everything. He’s charming as hell. Maybe more than anything he’s an incredible mentor. He looks out for those he cares about no matter what.”

And yes he’s also a mfing moneymaker