Stelian Balta

compute & SI
founder @ hyperchain capital

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

✈️SFO

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Anthropic is in talks to buy $45 billion of computing power from Nscale, the Nvidia-backed data center developer, per Bloomberg.

A deal could be finalized as soon as in the coming days and would bolster Nscale’s IPO prospects.

[𝐀𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐚 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 @Agrippa_Inv]

While neocloud investors got absolutely wrecked last week, GPU rental prices skyrocketed.

B300 rates are now up >20% over the past month.

Know what you own...

H/T: @matthew_sigel

$IREN $NBIS $CRWV

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

Sonic is in good hands🙏

[Matt Visser @MattVisser]

A reminder from the road: the most important business still happens in person. Online narrative matters, but sitting across from decision-makers, sharing vision face to face and making commitments eye to eye, is where things actually move.

@kbwofficial and @token2049 in Singapore delivered exactly that. It was a particular pleasure to sit down with @stelyb & I'm grateful for his continued support and guidance, and for the network around him.

This week: the UAE, and more of the same. Productive conversations with people building real-world use cases and genuinely supporting us, teams and businesses who want to use our tech & partner with us. If you're in the region and working on something real, my door is open to meet in real life.

Onwards and upwards.

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

once models are interchangeable, Super Intelligence is basically electricity. Super important, sure, but nobody makes trillion dollar margins selling electricity.

the real question is this: if intelligence trends toward zero cost, what’s the limiting factor?

find the bottleneck, that’s where the value is.

[Silicon Data @silicondata]

Allegedly “the most important chart” for understanding the current state of the AI economy. The model layer seems to be going through a period of commodification as non-frontier models saturate everyday use while frontier models compete fiercely. Compute layer sees massive increase in total demand for compute regardless of the source or use case.

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

@jock_rob @MattVisser Just getting started

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

"It always seems impossible, until it's done."

[Sonic @SonicLabs]

What matters most for Sonic right now?

Building durable revenue.

Consistent, sustainable business that compounds over time.

That’s the focus.

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

@MattVisser I agree

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

@MattVisser 🙏

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

positive, this is the right direction: "ship products, generate revenue, then route it."

[Sonic @SonicLabs]

https://t.co/OhaVQrVW8u

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

Developers are voting with their tokens.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

What Is To Be Done?

I propose a simple plan:

Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.

Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.

Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.

To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.

To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.

And that is how we use AI to save the world.

It’s time to build.

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

A year from now, everyone will have an AI in their pocket capable of solving the world’s hardest scientific problems.

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

Today, Figure is partnering with Nscale to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin Platform

We're committing $3.5 billion initially, with plans to scale beyond $6 billion

To ship a robot into every home, we need a massive amount of compute

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

Some thoughts

I believe a cambrian explosion of consumer ai startups is coming. AI should diffuse much faster than previous computing shifts: it runs on devices people already own and requires far less behavior change from users.

Now add the cost curve: glm 5.3 flash now matches the Intelligence Index score of opus 4.8, the #1 frontier model just 3 months ago.
opus 4.8: $5 / $25
glm 5.3 flash: $0.15 / $0.50
Both score 57 today, 30–50x cheaper tokens.

Frontier intelligence went from lab economics to seed-stage startup economics.

Faster diffusion + collapsing intelligence costs can unlock thousands of experiments that were uneconomic just 6 months ago. I firmly believe the app layer is about to explode.

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

@jietang great model, congrats!

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

*ANTHROPIC TO LEASE NSCALE DATA CENTER FOR $45 BILLION

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

$1T headline != $1T QE

[Stelian Balta @stelyb]

tokenization supercycle?