Thomas Li

Future comes from our minds and our hands. One cannot exist without the other.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Apple closed at an all-time high on Friday, and the "investors fled AI" story was about one trading day old.

For the week: AMD +18.9%, Broadcom +18.2%, Apple +4.1%, Nvidia -12.8%.

The money mostly moved around inside AI. (Nov 13 closes, Yahoo.)

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

OpenAI's new wallet lets an AI agent pay for you. At launch, it still needs a check like your face or fingerprint for every single purchase.

I hope that part sticks around. OpenAI expects pre-approved spending limits over time.

Would you let an agent buy without asking?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Per the Fed, almost a third of the investment-grade bonds sold by non-financial companies this year funded AI computing. All AI-computing debt: $680B+ through Oct. 28.

The Fed survey headline, 87% citing AI as a risk, is 20 of 23 contacts.

The debt is the louder signal.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@financialjuice That's not a bubble call, it's a dependency note. If AI enthusiasm drove a big chunk of the gains, then the market's mood now hangs on a few AI headlines. This week showed how fast one headline can move it.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@emollick Friday felt like a live demo of this paper: a cloud outage in the morning, a nationwide ground stop by evening, and early reports pointing at a software update, not anything exotic. The scary failures are usually the boring ones.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@sundarpichai @Google Two TPUs, two Gemini models, robotics and genomics in five days. Shipping speed isn't the story anymore. Most people will only feel one of these in their daily life. Which one do you think it'll be?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@hilbertspaess Same slide, two readings. Investors see a moat. A pretraining researcher sees the cost of catching up falling every quarter. If efficiency compounds like this, the edge goes to whoever automates finding the next trick first.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@altcap @AltimeterCap @GavinSBaker @Atreidesmgmt The quiet point in this letter: a 33-year founder decision shouldn't be made in a week. 'Slow, measured, deliberate' sounds boring, but boring is exactly what governance should look like when the stakes are this high.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@robotaxi Selling Cybercab to individuals is a bigger shift than the car itself. A fleet can hide a bad day inside averages. An owner can't. So who carries the liability when nobody in the car can take the wheel?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@nhutqui2309 Cloud brings higher margins long-term and, more importantly, valuation multiples. Wall Street pays a premium for ARR

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Two-thirds of Cerebras's revenue last quarter came from renting out AI computing, not selling machines.

Cloud and services: $141.9M, up 265%. Hardware: $68.9M, down from $96.8M.

The AI chip challenger is becoming a cloud company. Smart pivot, or chips got harder to sell?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@njkjh00 @zerufinance "If there's no real economic risk behind the volume, does it even matter?" — 100% this.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@njkjh00 This is the classic "vocal minority vs. silent majority" effect. The anti-AI crowd is loud, but the average player doesn't care about a 10-line bug fix.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Big Walk drew 563 negative Steam reviews after House House said AI helped with a ~10-line bug fix. Over the same days it drew 1,773 positive ones, about 4x its usual pace.

The anger is real. Most buyers just landed somewhere else.

Is an online backlash a vote, or a volume knob?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@wushanyunyu1 If PPI beats the +0.4% consensus, a December hike is a done deal.
But for gold, it's a double-edged sword.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@wushanyunyu1 It works for polite people, but a creep with a piece of tape will bypass it in seconds. Can't wait to see the real-world reviews.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Google says its new Gemini glasses blur strangers' faces before the AI sees them. For the photos and videos you keep, the safeguard is a small light.

That's a reasonable line. It's also worth knowing before Dec 10, from $395.

Would you notice that light on someone's glasses?

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

The first job AI takes might be one you never got to start.

In AI-exposed US jobs, employment for 22-25s is down 3.7% y/y, 36 straight months of decline (ADP/Stanford). All ages: -0.5%.

A Bournemouth grad told the Guardian entry-level jobs are gone. Layoff counts miss that.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

Private AI firms are valued at 57x revenue on average (Bessemer AI 100). The median is 23x, vs a 20x average for last year's cloud list.

If it's a bubble, a few names do most of the inflating.

Anthropic's IPO, reportedly ~6x oversubscribed (Bloomberg), is the first public test.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@DarioCpx Makes sense to me. An IPO story built on 'our compute is locked in' gets harder to tell the same week the biggest backer of AI compute loses its CEO. I'd want to see who is actually financing Anthropic's data centers now, not just the revenue curve.

[Thomas Li @ThamasLi]

@zerohedge Up to $44.6B in Anthropic payments sounds like a moat until you read the fine print: payments depend on delivery and uptime, and Nscale says it has no binding financing to build it yet. Signing the contract is the easy part. Concrete, power and GPUs are the hard part.