Continual Learning Won't Remove Hardware Demand

My guest today is Gavin Baker, founding partner and CIO of Atreides Management. This is our seventh conversation, and just two months after Gavin's last appearance.

It's about the gap between what the market is doing and what companies are seeing. It's been a tough month or so for public AI names, but there's no sign of a slowdown on the ground in Silicon Valley.

We discuss the latest moves, contracted vs. spot GPU prices, the game theory of memory supply agreements, and why Claude has become the Walter Cronkite of the stock market. We close on SpaceX, orbital compute, and what Gavin sees as the single biggest risk to all of it.

Please enjoy this conversation, from the famous table at Benchmark, with my friend Gavin Baker.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best

(00:02:35) First Question: July Was 2022 in a Month

(00:04:08) The Private Companies Public Markets Can't See

(00:05:06) Old GPUs Repricing Higher

(00:06:53) Walking Through the Month

(00:08:22) Kimi, GLM 5.2 & the Open Source Freak-Out

(00:10:51) Real Yields, Spreads & CDS

(00:11:54) Does the Build-Out Need Credit?

(00:15:22) A Sell-Off With No Clear Villain

(00:17:35) Open Source as Dark Matter

(00:18:39) Nvidia's Lowest Forward PE in 10 Years

(00:21:35) Claude as Walter Cronkite for the Stock Market

(00:23:55) Continual Learning & Sample Efficiency

(00:25:19) What Would Actually Scare Him

(00:26:38) Routers & the Multi-Model Future

(00:30:51) Tokens as a Percent of Comp Spend

(00:33:37) The Game Theory of Breaking an LTA

(00:36:41) Nvidia's Credit Wrapper & Revenue Share

(00:37:45) What He'd Do If He Ran Hynix

(00:41:46) Who's More Bullish than Him

(00:43:28) China's DUV Machine

(00:46:10) Bull Case for Software

(00:48:16) The RSI Maximalist View

(00:49:31) Inference Clouds Growing Without Burning Cash

(00:50:35) The Biggest Risk Is Regulation

(00:53:44) Telling the Story Better

(00:57:15) Dark Horses

(00:58:02) SpaceX in the Public Markets