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

Alastair Unwin (Polar Capital) - Investing in an AI-first World