AI predictions for next 6-9 months
-> Anthropic/ OAI fail to ban OSS in the US
-> Anthropic/ OAI continue to innovate product but stall on fundamental tech breakthroughs
-> SOTA Gemini 4 launches at 10x lower cost
-> Elon open sources Grok
-> Anthropic/ OAI ARR growth stalls as enterprises move from tokenmaxxing to rational token consumption/ OSS
-> slow realization in public markets that AI may not replace human labor in next 1-3 years/ has not had a fundamental tech breakthrough in over a year/ lacks ROI/ AI hyper and lab spend not durable
-> moonboy VCs/ hedge funds/ softbank continue to fund Anthropic/ OAI equity raises in private markets as public markets for them are now fully closed
-> CXMT, YMTC announce capacity expansions significantly above market expectations
-> hypers deliver good q326 results on first look but fail to show meaningful AI ROI, guide to "significant capex expansion in fy27"
-> broad realization in public markets the AI dream we got sold on is not anywhere close to realization
-> 10yr hits >5%
-> hyper bonds reprice >10%, CDS hit 3x current levels, and AI credit market dries up as market realizes GPU ABF was not a good idea
-> hyper equities reprice 30-50% lower
-> ORCL falls below $30 as rumors of bailout make the round
-> market realizes memory is cyclical and LTAs won't hold
-> 50% of korean traders get wiped within a week
-> hypers cut fy27 capex
-> semis reprice >80% lower
-> fed cuts >150bps to avoid recession
A few controversial things I believe:
1) A grown man with a family has no business getting on a ladder to put up Christmas lights.
2) a larger vehicle is safer than a smaller vehicle. Put your family in an SUV. Period. Crash ratings are a scam.
3) Pitbulls are a public nuisance.
4) politics is a total waste of time. Putting energy towards it is inversely correlated to happiness.
5) earning money is hard. $100k a year is a lot of money. Twitter acts like it’s easy but it isn’t.
6) sports betting is a disaster for society. Quietly destroying a lot of men’s lives.
7) waiting till 35 to think about kids is a huge mistake. These folks are all going to regret not having more, earlier.
8) SEC and Big10 schools are the new Ivy League. Wealthy families want to send their kids there, not Harvard or Stanford.
9) religion is making a comeback. And the people who get serious about it end up with better lives.
10) marrying a doctor or a lawyer is high status, but low enjoyment. These folks live stressful lives with very little flexibility.
11) vaping and weed are better for your body than alcohol, but worse for your career and life. They remove ambition and energy and make you less social.
12) giving our kids 75 vaccines is going to go down in history as a net-negative on society.
13) technology won’t actually advance a lot from here. Our physical worlds will largely be the same 20 years from now.
14) driverless cars are 20 years away. Waymo won’t make it out of the major cities with 25 mile an hour speed limits.
15) Virtual reality won’t become a thing. Nobody has any use for it.
16) 99% of people have no use for AI and it has reached 90% of its potential utility. Massive waste of electricity on the whole.
17) Web3 is a joke. Crypto is worthless. Bitcoin is a fad and is 100% speculative. Massive waste of electricity. Solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
18) electric vehicles will not become mainstream. They do more harm to the environment than good. Creating them and disposing of them is an environmental catastrophe.
19) Starlink is a miracle and ads 10x more value to society than the previous 5 things on this list combined. Elon needs a Nobel prize.
20) the fed has done a great job over the last 3 years with rates.
21) nuclear power is the only way forward. Solar and wind are not sustainable and are a total waste of money. Oil and gas is the only viable solution today and America should invest heavily in more production.
22) Silicon Valley influencers and Tech titans are out of touch with the true needs of Americans. They could benefit by spending some time in a Walmart. Most people are trying to figure out how to put food on the table. They don’t need another app for their meta glasses.
What’s something you believe that isn’t a common belief? Which one am I wrong about?
1) Trying again.
TLDR: Everyone can win. Open-source, frontier labs, infrastructure, applications and most importantly the American people.
I understand all of the jitters about Anthropic losing share, real rates, spreads and second derivatives. Still think the most likely future outcome is a hybrid, multi-model future where almost everyone wins, open-weight tokens are likely the overwhelming majority of tokens, the dominant frontier model companies still do well albeit perhaps not the outcome that seemed possible in May and AI infrastructure/applications benefit immensely from the increased fragmentation, competition and lower margins at the model layer.
Lower margins at the model layer mechanically drive higher compute demand as long as someone is willing to pay for the training. And Jensen is obviously willing to be the “trainer of last resort.” As below-market compute contracts signed in 24/25 roll-off and reprice higher, cloud and neocloud revenue should continue to accelerate which will help address financing fears; I think we may be near peak external financing for this buildout. Noteworthy that using data from 3Fourteen Research, B200 clusters will generate a 37% IRR *if* their rental price declines 40% per year. Prices are still going up, but that IRR math is too ridiculous to print. 37% IRRs available at scale should get funded.
Re: this weekends controversy about MOUs, Anthropic’s $413 billion of real contractual commitments sounds scary. Reality is that it works out to roughly $31 billion of annual cloud spend, which is easily internally financed given their reported ARR, and $161 billion of spend at Broadcom which will be financed by Broadcom and private credit.
Continue to believe fragmentation at the model layer is the best outcome for ordinary Americans and humans everywhere. As I have said before, do not trust any 5-20 individuals to make the best possible decisions about the direction of this technology. I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that they encompass the diversity of human values across the world and richness of human variation. And I want an AI that shares my own personal values. Safety, freedom and the maximization of human agency through democratization, distribution and diffusion vs. centralization. History has spoken on the dangers of the latter path.
Finally, from my perspective anything that slows this buildout down is net positive over the long-term as the biggest risk and worst outcome is an *actual* overbuild. We are structurally short watts, wafers and increasingly capital. That is all good. God forbid we were still in ZIRP, TSM ramped capex to 3x their current plan and we weren’t short turbine blades: there would almost certainly be an overbuild and a bubble. That would be terrible. Slower and smoother for longer is better both for investors and for the world. A terrible cyber event is the most plausible near term bear case IMHO, but AI cyberdefense ramping quickly and I was happy to hear Sholto say that cyber probably becomes defense dominant in the near future.
Longer, threaded version follows: