Alastair Unwin is a fund manager on Polar Capital’s Technology team. We discuss Alastair’s career as a technology investor, AI’s exponential curve of improvement and potential as a general purpose technology, as well as the issues that investors should consider as ever more capital is spent to realise AI’s promise.
Show notes:
[01:33] Alastair discusses how he got into investing
[03:14] Lessons from Herald, Neptune and Polar
[05:05] Heuristics for technology investing
[07:29] AI scaling laws
[10:10] AI bottlenecks
[13:45] Capital formation and AI’s new infrastructure
[17:42] A hardware cycle
[19:37] Motivations for increasing capex
[25:08] Capex in the context of improving models and the global wage bill
[28:49] Increasing circularity of AI financing
[31:14] Is it winner takes all or will models be commoditised?
[33:34] Nvidia and the depreciable life of chips
[37:52] Hyperscalers’ ability to win in the new paradigm
[40:32] Alphabet’s prospects
[44:21] Adoption rates and use cases
[49:03] Sitting with ambiguity and not being dogmatically convicted
