
@GavinSBaker
Managing Partner & CIO, @atreidesmgmt. Husband, @l3eckyy. No investment advice, views my own. https://t.co/pFe9KmNu9U
On another note. Sunsets over the Aegean. And I have always wanted to see the “Temple of Poseidon.” Also congratulations to SB and JP on their nuptials. Did not know the Swarthmore crowd could be so fun.
@Ross__Hendricks Also henceforth I am only going to refer to myself as “geologically stupid.”
@BetterIRR And for the sake of clarity, I do not think they are going to fail. I think they are highly likely to co-exist in an increasingly stable equilibrium with Muse, Grok, Open-Weight and perhaps even Gemini. But will take a long time to get to equilibrium shares. Yes and.
@BetterIRR As to the second part of your deeply thoughtful, well-considered and *super* contrarian post, open-weight tokens are highly profitable and growing much faster than OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open-weight models that decrease margins at the model layer are positive for AI infra, exhibit 1001.2 Since the @Silicon_Data “token index,” which captures both price and mix, peaked on May 31: B300 prices are up 38% B200 prices are up 10% Other GPU indices are up *much* more.
Competition and fragmentation at the model layer is positive for AI infrastructure demand. The better that OpenAI and Anthropic do relative to Muse, Grok and Open-weight models, the worse it is for AI infrastructure demand over the long-term. Token volumes, compute costs per token *and* intelligence per token (which impacts volume) are what matter to AI infra demand not token prices. To quote Fenster from the Usual Suspects, “Can you hear me in the back?”
Someday I’m just going to send all my draft replies.
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·Hmm. Let’s think for a second. Why are the frontier models cutting price? Might it possibly, just possibly, be a result of the fact that they are losing share to open-weight models? Given positive elasticity, their price cuts are clearly good for AI infra demand. Open weight models are positive for AI infra demand, exhibit 1002. And obviously the semiconductor companies and cloud companies would fund open-weight training if necessary. Jensen already is! OpenAI and Anthropic have locked in years of compute at below market prices. Other companies would happily assume these commitments at *higher* prices. Also I’ve always wondered if “missing the forest for the trees” is an idiom, a proverb or an aphorism. Do you have a nuanced view on this? I am going to ask everyone this question from now on when appropriate.
Why open-weight models that compress margins at the model layer are net positive for AI infra demand, exhibit 1001. An open-weight token consumes *roughly* the same amount of compute as a frontier token for a similar size model.
Said another way, the production cost of a given token in compute and energy terms is the same regardless of whether it is an open weight token or a closed frontier token. And open-weight tokens are the highest margin tokens for the clouds and neoclouds given the negotiating leverage and size of Anthropic and Open AI.
Should be fun
NVIDIA GTC@NVIDIAGTC·Meet your #NVIDIAGTC Berlin pregame hosts: Deirdre Bosa (@dee_bosa) and Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker). Tune in October 21 at 9 a.m. CEST for live conversations on AI and accelerated computing before NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at 11 a.m. Add it to your calendar → t.co/uWgI0m6zNh
More probable: The high frequency trading and cyber wars of 2027 fought via low latency SRAM chips, whether Groq 3 LPX or CS-4, in disaggregated setups with Rubin. Jane Street reportedly paying $200 million per mw - $200b per gigawatt - is likely the beginning, not the end.
Sholto Douglas@_sholtodouglas·the high frequency personal agent wars of 2027, fought via low latency chips and rack placement next to the servers hosting Resy and SF tennis court systems
@masayoshisson Yeah I go through my bookmarks frequently
The White House Accord on Super Intelligence will have a positive impact on safety. Committing to hire third party auditors who will report to an independent committee of board members has more practical near term significance than almost any conceivable regulatory action. These board members will have a fiduciary duty. If they ignore a report from the third party auditors then a bad faith finding from a court is a real possibility. A D&O carrier could use this to deny coverage. Really good outcome for ordinary Americans. More effective and elegant than some ridiculous new regulatory body that would take months to do anything, then almost certainly done the wrong thing and along the way probably created a regulated oligopoly at the frontier which is the scariest potential outcome* As I read the articles about the accord, it did occur to me that they were mostly written by political reporters who may have not understood the significance of the accord given their reporting beats are generally focused on public policy instead of corporate governance. *Scariest because I do not trust any 5-20 individuals to make the best possible decisions about the direction of this technology. I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that they encompass the diversity of human values across the world and richness of human variation. And I want an AI that shares my own personal values. Safety, freedom and the maximization of human agency through democratization, distribution and diffusion vs. centralization. History has spoken on the dangers of the latter path. **Also SI not AI still adapting to the change but I do think better branding. Who wants artificial ingredients in their food?
Backstage before our panel on superintelligence at the launch of America.gov Will post the video when it comes out. Also @jgebbia has done something truly awesome for the country. We should all be grateful! 📸 by @KatieMiller
Empirically impressive numbers @cognition and @ScottWu46 Would also be interesting to have cash burned to get to $1b on this chart. Chart from @absoluttig and please note that I am biased here.
Nvidia’s new Open Agent Safety Platform would have probably prevented the much discussed Hugging Face incident. Engineering a better, safer world.
clem 🤗@ClementDelangue·From what we know (take with a grain of salt, we need much more transparency!), if @OpenAI had been running this on their own agents that attacked us, they would have caught them before we did! Since the first agent cyberattack hit us in July, we've been asking what safe agent infra actually needs. Our current read: the destinations were allowed, the payloads weren't. By OpenAI's own account the agents turned an allowed package repository into a message board. Allowlists alone restrict where an agent can go, not what it does. So here's our first contribution to OpenShell, part of the just launched @nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform: monitoring of the traffic you already allow. - Network budgets per sandbox (requests, writes, bytes) - Drift versus each sandbox's baseline and the cohort - Fleet view: many sandboxes suddenly writing to one host raises a finding, even if every single request is allowed In the demo below, 4 sandboxed agents coordinate through a software repository they're all allowed to use. 0 rules broken, caught in minutes. That fleet view is exactly the message board pattern from July. OpenShell: t.co/ZbDANrZsm6 Our proof of concept: t.co/KJ2X5agLzP Agent security will be solved in the open, collaboratively, together!
Safety is an engineering problem, the @nvidia edition: Open Shell to enforce policy in the kernel outside the agent process. Can be paired with Sentry which runs in BF-4 and can quarantine a rogue agent in milliseconds. Containment is the backstop to alignment. Super elegant.
My analogy would be that this is an seatbelt and airbag for AI that protects us from bad driving, whether our own or others. But their analogy from their technical blog is better: “The internet in the 90s…was new and full of possibilities. You could build a website over a weekend and share it with the world, or chat with someone half way around the world in online chat rooms without long-distance telephone fees. It brought endless opportunity, but also a lot of risk. A website could run code on your machine, steal your sensitive information, or infect your computer with a virus. People loved it anyway. To introduce a layer of trust, the community built things like encrypted connections and a lock icon to know when a connection was safe. The step function change in safety came from a radical security idea at the time: isolate each page in its own sandbox (a tab in a browser) so that a rogue page couldn’t infect the rest of your computer. Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Meta were all built on this trust layer. Security and safety for the internet enabled online commerce, connection, gaming, and so much more that wouldn’t have been possible before. Security and safety didn’t slow the pace of innovation—they allowed it to accelerate.” Kinda love it that they left the emdash in there.
Really happy that @rauchg will be interviewed by @glennsolomon at the @TomorrowXSummit in Austin, Texas November 17-18. Vercel occupies a critical place in the AI ecosystem with •Over $500M+ run-rate revenue •130%+ annual growth •NDR at 130%+ •400k+ paying customers Having had the privilege of hearing Guillermo speak at a private event, I think we will all learn a lot from this fireside chat. Please register at the link below - looking forward to seeing as many people as possible at this event. Everyone is welcome!
Sign up here!
TomorrowX Summit@TomorrowXSummit·Register here: tomorrowxsummit.com
I think we need to bring back paper.
Open models continue taking share. Not just tokens, more $ now spent on open models than OpenAI. Positive for the AI infra trade. Open models taking share shift $ margin from the model layer to the infra and app layers.
Guillermo Rauch@rauchg·Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). (Do note that's the spend for inference of the model across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open weight labs.)
Extraordinary share gains for OpenAI vs. Anthropic over the last two months. Per Openrouter, OpenAI has gone from 20% share to 50% share vs. Anthropic (meaning Anthropic has gone from 80% to 50%) since June.
More on AI pacing: Sarah Friar CFO of OpenAI yesterday on CNBC: “from where I sit today there is so much opportunity to drive growth that I am still highly focused on getting more compute to keep that flywheel going.” Sachin Katti VP of Compute Strategy at OpenAI @sk7037 yesterday: “The way we will make sure frontier models are safe and aligned is by spending compute. So the counterintuitive point is that we’ll need even more compute to make sure future models are more safe and aligned.” If you thought “pacing” was negative for AI infrastructure demand, think again. Almost as bullish as open-weight AI taking share but not quite.
Funny and almost right. A scenario where OpenAI and Anthropic are a duopoly would be terrible for compute demand regardless of whether they accelerated or “paced.” And open source losing would also be terrible for compute demand.
malinvestment.jpeg@malinvested·starting to get the hang of this: open source loses => OAI/ANTH need even more compute, bullish open source wins => more margin for compute, also bullish accelerate the frontier => bullish, obvi pace the frontier => more safety spend, also bullish no data wall => bullish of course hit limits of quality data => need more synthetic data, which needs compute to synthesize, so that’s also bullish scaling laws hold => bullish, obvi scaling laws slow => need even more compute to maintain frontier and offset diminishing marginal returns, also bullish AI adoption accelerates => bullish ofc AI adoption slows => also bullish, means need even more compute to new train models to expand use cases
The way that Anthropic and OpenAI are going to “pace” the frontier is by spending more time and more *compute* on alignment, monitoring and evals. The frontier labs that choose to “pace” likely spend slightly more money on compute at the cost of lower margins. That’s it.
Many factors would go into the lower margins, but incremental compute spend on alignment would be one. Don’t take it from me, take it from a senior OpenAI employee:
roon@tszzl·for the skeptics in government and elsewhere: “pacing the frontier” will compress the margins of the frontier labs. it is a heavy cost imposed asymmetrically on model developers with the strongest AIs in America. by its nature, it would be a terrible regulatory capture tactic
Love it that Meta is giving their AR glasses to every blind veteran in America for free. The industry needs to do more of this. Also a great ad!
The ad: about.fb.com/news/2026/06/f…
Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators is smart as there is no Section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a “duty of care” will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section 230 so limiting liability really matters. There are minimal investment implications from this single new fact, but I do think that for anyone who wants a “smoother for longer” cycle then most constraints are good: wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. Excessive regulation is a different matter but I don’t think we are anywhere close to this even if the vector changed over the last 24 hours. To summarize the events: Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend: embedded 3rd party evaluators, a national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability/ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute/distillation for China and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there is a national regulatory regime, he wants a Sherman act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. TBF, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals like “Policy on the AI Exponential,” where he advocated for an FAA for AI. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs. And despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long-term. Sam agreed that embedded 3rd party evaluators were a good idea and stated they would implement them. Again, this is smart as should help limit future liability. Elon said “Dario is right” and later specified that “Dario is right that there should be some oversight. Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” This would be a MPAA like self-regulatory structure for AI with regular calls between the labs plus a process where each new model is evaluated for safety by competitors for a 1-2 week period before being released. That is *wildly* different from Dario’s proposal and in-line with what David Sacks has been proposing. Elon also stated that nothing was going to slow down open-weight models. Demis said that Dario’s essay was a “step in the right direction.” Dario also said that he was also open to Demis’ idea of a FINRA like self-regulatory structure as part of his proposal. David Sacks had a thoughtful post where he said that Dario and Sam should pace unilaterally, called the antitrust waiver a cartel request and denied that METR was truly independent given their ties to Anthropic. Sriram Krishnan, former White House AI advisor, noted that it would be important to have the 3rd party evaluators come from independent organizations that are not affiliated with any lab, which is basically an indirect statement about the relationship between METR and Anthropic which Sacks was explicit about. Clem from Hugging Face said they were open to being a neutral 3rd party evaluator, which is interesting especially if Jensen was consulted before that post. Alexander Wang from Meta noted that alignment would be an increasing focus going forward. An executive order seems likely after all this and the language in this EO is going to be really important. It is possible to democratize and distribute AI broadly and safely without centralizing it in the hands of a few corporations who might each become more powerful than any single government. I do not want a few humans in control of intelligence. I want us all to have our own intelligences that reflect our own values and human variation in all of its richness. Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization FTW.
High confidence prediction: all these Anthropic people come back after 6 months. I think they are sincere in their beliefs, but their actions are very calculated and coordinated with a specific goal in mind: regulation. Better for 🇺🇸 for AI to be distributed and democratized.
Delighted to have @DavidSolomon CEO of @GoldmanSachs doing a fireside chat at the @TomorrowXSummit in Austin on November 17! So many questions about financing the AI buildout, how AI is impacting their business and perhaps most of all how he is seeing the world/markets as I’ve always found his takes to be thoughtful, knowledgeable and provocative! Looking forward. Link to sign up in the next post!
Register here! tomorrowxsummit.com/#attend
Love this.
Francis Brennan@FrancisBrennan·WATCH: @Meta's @DinaPowellMcC on @RuthlessPodcast highlighting our data center community compact. "We promise to not only pay for our own electricity but to actually work to drive down electricity costs...we work with teachers & first responders to give them direct bonuses..."
I applaud my friends for giving their time, effort and money to help veterans with PTSD and victims of trauma. They are sincerely trying to do something good for the world and I believe they have already made a real difference to many veterans. wsj.com/health/healthc…
Anthropic pre-IPO gamesmanship post. Pure speculation but sharing as curious for thoughts. Anthropic shifted from gross to net ARR accounting and stripped out both Meta and Chinese distillation from their $65 billion ARR number. Meta speculated to be over $5 billion in ARR so taking them out means they can easily weather it when Meta turns them off shortly after being public, which is widely expected. Also decreases the odds of Meta turning them off, watermelon quality dependent. All smart. Then release Fable 5.1 so OpenAI feels confident releasing Astra. Vibes here on Astra are really good btw. I think that Astra was probably better than Anthropic was expecting. Now there are whispers that Anthropic has solved Navier-Stokes, which would be super impressive. Anthropic probably releases Fable 5.2, which should be better than Astra unless something is awry, sometime before the IPO. Likely also planning on showing a significant reacceleration in ARR in September which will of course leak to the press. Grok 4.7, Meta’s Watermelon and ChatGPT 6.1 all likely coming in the next 6 weeks as well. All those labs are confident about their roadmaps in a way I have not seen in the last 18 months. And we will see about Gemini 4. Competitors get a vote in all these plans. Grok Bot feels like the best agentic harness yet for enterprise use cases and Instinct is a promising agentic harness for consumer use cases. Should see variations of both from competitors soon. Grok Bot remains transformational for my use cases. And all this is happening into a continued acceleration in overall AI demand. Wild times. As an aside, I think Krishna might turn out to be an exceptional CFO. His former Blackstone colleagues speak super highly of him. Going to be important as communicating clearly to Wall Street if they decide to shift their compute from inference to training will be difficult to digest the first time. Probably worth studying Amazon’s invest and then “check-in” margin strategy from 2010 through maybe 2016, which investors eventually understood.
Status seeking monkeys. Loved the analogy between Aristocratic and Chimpanzee societies. asteriskmag.com/issues/15/afte…
@MollyJongFast There will be more articles like this. The truth eventually wins.
@MollyJongFast Plus lower electricity prices:
We need a bipartisan consensus on this. Americans deserve it.
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·The facts no longer broadly support anti-datacenter arguments. Working class America was devastated by the outsourcing of manufacturing to China. You are now implicitly supporting the outsourcing of intelligence to China. This would be so much worse. No impact on people with fancy degrees and lots of money, but would be terrible for ordinary Americans. Working class Americans deserves a bipartisan consensus on this.
Such a good easter egg.
etn.@etnshow·JUST IN: NVIDIA's $12,930,300,000 acquisition of Hugging Face contains an easter egg. The number 129,303 is the decimal conversion of Unicode point U+1F917. The 🤗 emoji.
The Hugging Face acquisition is important for America and I think Nvidia will be a good steward for the ecosystem. The Poolside transaction may end up mattering even more. I think Jensen is likely to bring American open-weight AI to the frontier, which is going to be awesome for America. We might see a multi-billion $ training run from Nvidia in the next 18 months for Nemotron v5-6 that is easy for customers to post-train and optimize for their own use case. Would be cool to see a 10 trillion plus parameter American open-weight model. If the best open-weight base is American, cheap to run, and actually post-trainable, then people, companies, labs, and governments can own their own intelligence instead of renting it from a company that might not share their values. Would be good for freedom to have a rich variety of AIs that reflect our own individual human preferences. And for the sake of the clarity, I think cheaper, specialized open-weight intelligence might end up making frontier tokens more valuable!
Jensen Huang@JensenHuang·Exciting day for NVIDIA and @huggingface. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI. Thank you @ClementDelangue for coming to me. NVIDIA is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models. 🤗 t.co/q8Om2Xc5ye
AI was seasonal in 2024-2025. Growth decelerated during the summer (students/people work less is the theory) and reaccelerated after Labor Day. This year, AI accelerated in July/August led by OpenAI, Grok and open-source. And today is the first time I’ve ever seen this:
Muse 1.3 enters the chat. The frontier is now Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Muse. No longer just a two horse race. Gemini is playing a slightly different game for now.
Grok 4.6 and Fable 5.1 are now alone on the CursorBench pareto frontier. Should evolve rapidly over the next few weeks as Astra, Grok 4.7 and Fable 5.2 are released.
Releasing Fable 5.1 before Astra is quite a flex. Makes me think Fable 5.2 is ready to go. So much gamesmanship between Anthropic and OpenAI right now. And I am very much looking forward to the next version of Grok. Exciting times.
Here is the podcast with timestamps.
a16z@a16z·Gavin Baker and a16z's David George on the state of the AI boom: The future doesn't have to be winner-take-all. Labs, open-source, applications, and the clouds can all capture value. Demand for intelligence is still dramatically underestimated. Today's power users number in the millions and will grow to hundreds of millions. Gavin and David argue a compute shortage is a more real risk than an AI bubble, and building through it is an opportunity to reindustrialize America. In this episode, they get into why compute investments pay back so fast, what the data center backlash gets wrong, the case for putting compute in orbit, why enterprises will run several models at once, and how Nvidia ended up at the center of the entire supply chain. 00:00 Intro 01:06 The bear case Gavin couldn't find 05:50 Why a lab would cut its own revenue 75% 08:05 What LPs get wrong about a crash 10:50 Microsoft slowed its capex and regrets it 14:33 The engineers spending 100x the median 17:35 Why 23-year-olds use AI better than Gavin 21:45 How much copper 500M AI users need 23:00 Stop promising to cure cancer 26:00 America's richest county is full of data centers 30:48 Who gets priced out of compute 33:05 The age of Elon and Jensen 34:25 Orbital data centers 44:40 Asteroid mining 48:12 Why Microsoft doesn't need a frontier model 54:02 Who becomes the abstraction layer 55:40 Everyone wanted a deity, Cursor wanted a product 1:00:25 Never take shots at Jensen 1:07:40 What happens when the chip doesn't work 1:12:10 What chip deals reveal about customer demand YouTube: t.co/2mokoHwtDa @GavinSBaker @DavidGeorge83
Always fun with my old friend @DavidGeorge83 whom I deeply respect in every way. Also sometime we will have to tell the story of how we first met.
A clip from the podcast:
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·Talking to brilliant physicists who have thought about orbital compute for 3 hours and are convinced it will never work makes me think of this Keanu Reeves quote: “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right. Have fun." x.com/firesidealpha/…
Talking trash to Michael Jordan was not a good idea.
Fireside Alpha@firesidealpha·Gavin Baker says rival chip CEOs should thank Jensen and be nice to him, because otherwise you're just the kid trash-talking Michael Jordan "Let's say there's some accelerator that emerges that is really, really good. Almost certainly it will be better if it can plug in. And this is why, I know you have an accelerator investment." "My number one thing is if you're a semiconductor CEO, the only thing you should ever say is thank you, Jensen. Thank you for creating this opportunity. Thank you. How can we work with you? We want to enable you." "Sure, we're going to compete with you on the edges. But my rule of thumb for accelerators, every 1% share today is probably worth $100 billion. So there's no need to go head on with NVIDIA. Just pick a niche, get your 1%." "He has nine chips, he's got multiple flavors of accelerators, CPUs, Ethernet switches, two kinds of GPUs. We've gone from just scale-out networking being a thing. We have scale up, scale out, scale across, now scale in. So just try to find a way to plug into his ecosystem." David: "By the way, this is not foreign. His biggest customers all have competing products with various of those nine chips." Gavin: "Yeah. And just try to find a way to plug in, but just be nice to him. Be nice. Be nice. It's all personal." "And it's like, have you ever seen game tape of the Chicago Bulls when Jordan is, it's game 50 of the season, and he's a little bored?" "And the Bulls are down, because they're up eight games over the number two person in their conference, and he's a little bored." "And then somebody who's kind of young decides, I'm going to talk shit to him because we're beating him. And then he just looks...it's amazing. We've all seen the Last Dance." "Just don't do that. Just like, hey Michael, man, I'm so happy to be on the court with you. That's the move." "But the reason it's particularly important is because Jensen's data centers are financeable."
Always fun with my old friend @DavidGeorge83 whom I deeply respect as an investor. Sometime we will tell the story of how we first met.
@alwayslearni Just think for a few seconds about why Codex growth *might* still be a relevant metric that is important to thoughtful investors.
Talking to brilliant physicists who have thought about orbital compute for 3 hours and are convinced it will never work makes me think of this Keanu Reeves quote: “I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of arguments. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right. Have fun."
Fireside Alpha@firesidealpha·Gavin Baker says the physics PhDs calling orbital data centers impossible on X have not out-thought the 10,000 SpaceX engineers who treat it as solved "It's very hard for me to engage. There are all these people on X and they're like, I am a physics PhD and this is impossible." "There's a friend, another investor, who actually is a physics PhD, who I had many arguments about it with him, and he's like, I am a PhD and this is impossible. And then he goes to the SpaceX day and talks to the SpaceX engineers, and he's like, well, I was wrong." "So let's say you're an astrophysics PhD. You are brilliant, you're hanging 100 IQ points on me. Have you thought about this for an hour? Have you thought about it for 10 hours?" "Because you have 10,000 of the world's smartest engineers at SpaceX who've thought about this each for hundreds if not thousands of hours. And the sum of that, working with very sophisticated engineering tools, is it's a solved problem." _______ For more on Gavin Baker: t.co/jNYTxqrBAr
@evantindell Just think for 25 seconds about why this is so self-evidently ridiculous.
@evantindell And for the sake of absolute clarity, I understand that Codex and ChatGPT have been combined and still think Codex user growth is a relevant metric.
OpenAI still taking share while Anthropic likely reaccelerating. And open source is growing even faster.
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
50% price cut driving 14x more volume is kinda wild.
OpenRouter@OpenRouter·What happened when GPT 5.6 Terra and Luna were heavily discounted on OpenRouter? Token usage exploded by 13.8x Jevons Paradox = as technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases 🧵
Nature is healing. Any politician opposed to data centers is unqualified to hold public office. Data centers are revitalizing small towns all over America, a godsend for blue collar workers, lowering electricity costs, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy and use negligible amounts of water.
This was so good:
Danny Penny@12Palehorse·So that Americans will continue to win for generations to come. x.com/i/article/2092…
Going to see more and more of these:
Andy Stone@andymstone·A rate cut enabled by data centers. You don’t say! “The plan would reduce bills by $79 million a year, saving the average residential customer about $100 a year. It also calls for freezing rates for three years. I&M says the plan is made possible by increased revenue paid by large customers including data centers.” t.co/SQqu9L0Eq3
Data centers are awesome for America in every way.
Stephen Moore@StephenMoore·Data centers helped resurrect Quincy, Washington.The poverty rate fell from 29.4% to 6.2%. Tech tax revenue funded a new high school, hospital, library, police and fire stations, while residents’ property tax rates decreased. Build data centers in communities that want jobs, investment, and economic revival!
Interesting. Cursor has had some high growth products before this. Grok Bot has been transformational for me.
Michael Truell@mntruell·Grok Bot is now available to everyone with a standard Grok or Cursor subscription. It's grown faster than any product we've seen. It's been particularly exciting to see the range of jobs people delegate to Grok Bot, from running small e-commerce businesses (including support, advertising, inventory, finance), coordinating customer events (directly pinging and working with dozens of human coworkers), testing production software, and completing large, mundane parts of users' day-to-day work.
Maybe GPUs plus CS-4/5 for Ultrafast at scale. Jalapeño not financeable at comparable rates to GPUs and probably not that big of a wafer allocation next 2 years. Jalapeño still a really impressive achievement from OpenAI. I remember being sad when they hired Thomas away from Enfabrica.
Tibo@thsottiaux·@cerebras ftw!
I do enjoy abstruse technical debates here.
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·Hmm. I might ask @dylan522p if Attention-FFN disaggregation (AFD) is compatible with data locality and not moving the KV cache. That constraint is what OpenAI focused on with Jalapeño. They absolutely did not make an “explicit bet that disagg is not the way to go.” There are multiple forms of disaggregation, and one disaggregated topology compatible with data locality is prefill and attention computed on Jalapeño and FFN on another chip. And they are obviously doing relatively crude disaggregated inference (PD) at scale today with their GPU fleet. Today. AFD is a hard networking problem that everyone is working on as it can be generally superior to simpler PD disaggregation via approaching similar interactivity without making the traditional tradeoffs between latency and throughput for growing KV caches. The CS-4 Wafer I/O Module was described as a “programmable, universal disaggregation interface” designed to support multiple forms of disaggregation, including both prefill-decode disaggregation and attention-FFN disaggregation. We know that CS-4 is capable of crude PD disaggregation today with GPUs (Helios) and the Trainiums. Likely already generating tokens today in one - and probably both - of these setups. And I think this is about as explicit a statement as one will get from a public company about Jalapeño and its potential FFN disaggregation companion chip. “Jalapeño+Cerebras.” And if can do AFD disaggregation with Jalapeño then can almost certainly do it with Trainiums and at a minimum Helios GPUs. Note they probs have technical line of sight to this - would be surprised if they have it working today for all models. And might also be possible to pair Jalapeño with LP30s in an AFD setup. The more interesting question is what cruder PD disaggregation with an SRAM rack (whether LPX or CS-4) unlocks for the existing GPU fleet. Even Hoppers. And what this might mean for the useful life of Hoppers…
Impressive that Jalapeño outperforms the comparable TPU and is in the mix with Rubin. Credit where credit is due - first good ASIC outside of TPU/Trainium. However, will likely significantly underperform a disaggregated GPU/Trainum plus SRAM accelerator setup. Especially with AFFN disaggregation.
Should note the real comparison will be with Rubin Ultra given Rubin shipping today so kinda have to wait. And Feynmann coming fast. But still impressive debut from Jalapeño.
Also pretty funny that Jalapeño participated in a third party benchmark *before* TPUs! Tells you a lot!
I literally have no idea why anyone is concerned about the FT data on Fable 5. Just shows customer preference for ZDR. Actually surprised so many are still using it after Opus 5 became available.
martin_casado@martin_casado·Consensus on this seems to be ZDR which tracks to my own experience as well. If that really turns out to be the case, it's an incredibly strong and clear message to the labs on the impact of data retention policies. x.com/martin_casado/…
“Niche”
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·Hmm. This looks like the flagship big model from the second largest frontier lab. And IIRC @thsottiaux from OpenAI said they wanted this currently capacity limited Ultrafast mode to be the default mode 6 days ago. I’m not sure I would describe “default mode” for the flagship OpenAI model as “niche.” And does disaggregated inference change anything from your perspective? 😁
The most obvious implication of GPU price increase is that anyone who is spending a lot on Blackwell and Rubin before January 31, 2027 is in a good relative position vs. competitors. Super curious to know if GPU prices are going up more than rack prices.
High conviction hypothesis especially for large enterprises. This is the best path to Pareto dominance while keeping data safe. SMBs and individuals probs just use the frontier harnesses.
Gavin Baker@GavinSBaker·Yes. The acceleration in OpenAI/Anthropic as open-source takes share is so interesting. The future is multi-model with specialized open-source models that were post-trained on customer data working together with frontier models behind a customer specific router. Firework Nexus and the Cursor Router are early instantiations of this - note I’m biased in both cases.
Every accelerator company, and I mean every accelerator company, is likely going to do some variant of 3D DRAM or the “zHBM” which were both discussed at HotChips today. The larger companies will probably run (are running) parallel programs, but these two memory variants probably co-exist for a long time. Each has distinct advantages.
Suspect we will start to hear about a “Pareto optimal” balance of computationally efficient humans, cheaper open-source tokens and frontier tokens. Our internal AI spend @Atreidesmgmt will be roughly 100x higher in August 2026 vs. March 2026. Still roughly doubling every month. Note that is before Grok Bot moves to consumption pricing which will likely create a step function when it happens (at least for me). AI means that scale has become more important to investing imo. I think there will be a minimum token spend required to be competitive in most knowledge based industries. The “compute inequality” referenced by Sholto in our discussion.
More data than open-source AI is taking share from OpenAI and Anthropic. Open source has gone from 28% token share to 62% token share @vercel over the last 2 months. Chart from @rauchg Super impressive given that the sum of OpenAI and Anthropic accelerated in July. So net token/AI infra demand accelerated even more than the acceleration we saw at the frontier. And suspect Grok growing even faster than open-source and we saw some of this in the @tryramp data. Open-source AI taking share is positive for AI infrastructure demand as it lowers margins at the model layer and an open-source token costs just as much compute to produce as a frontier token. Nothing about open-source AI inference is “free.” Most likely end state IMO is that closed, frontier tokens are 60-90% of economic value but only 15 to 25% of tokens.
Interesting disclosure from Ken Griffin via @CNBC that they have shed 80% of the SALP portfolio. Super high confidence that this was $45b levered more than 4 to 1 so at least $180b gross. Unwinding that $180b would absolutely have had an impact. Have felt it in the market.
And given that Citadel likely has $500 billion of gross, this means it is most likely over from a selling pressure perspective.
Yes. And the sum has accelerated slightly QTD with a sharper acceleration in August vs. July. And note that Grok Bot, Grok and Open Source are all likely growing faster than both of the two leading frontier labs. But at some point going to have to move past second derivatives and focus on first derivatives.
Ara Kharazian@arakharazian·May startle the markets with this but: OpenAI is growing faster than Anthropic, actually. While data through Q2 shows tepid growth for OpenAI vs. Anthropic, Q3 to date shows that OpenAI has surpassed Anthropic in QoQ enterprise growth: 82 vs. 76. Why? GPT-5.6 Sol is really good, increasingly the choice for developers. Fable 5, meanwhile, disappointed both in adoption and real-world application given price + data retention requirements imposed by regulators.
Empirically impressive metrics from Stripe in the Axios report about their acquisition of Openrouter. Growing net revenue and FCF almost 2x faster than Adyen YTD with the share count declining over the last 3 years. I think Stripe will be a good steward of Openrouter and it is a smart acquisition for them with revenue synergies that are likely to be immediate. Having them as a neutral payments infrastructure layer has been awesome for the e-commerce industry and hope to see them play a similarly neutral role with Openrouter in AI.
Original Axios report: axios.com/2026/08/19/str…
Fireworks and Baseten are the two largest inference clouds and I think of them as *an* index for open-source AI adoption. Also first time seeing SpaceXAI on the list of “fastest growing” IIRC. SambaNova! Will wonders never cease.
Good chart from @TMTBreakout July accelerated both MoM and YoY for the sum of OpenAI and Anthropic. Some chance Anthropic shifted from gross to net reporting for ARR. Meaning the 65b is a more conservative metric than the $47. Smart thing to do before an IPO. Openrouter data shows that AI broadly has accelerated further over the last 3 weeks. Open source taking share is positive for AI infrastructure demand.
From yours truly on Friday’s @theallinpod “On the margin, Anthropic is losing share to OpenAI, to open source, and to Grok, and they're still growing so fast.” If the $65b is correct, then someone leaked it to help Anthropic on their forthcoming IPO roadshow. Basically, they are hoping will be able to say “we are now at a much higher ARR after bringing on capacity during July, August and September.” And after the Anthropic commentary during their potential September/October IPO roadshow and given that OpenAI is almost certainly taking significant share given how aggressive they were securing compute capacity, we should then expect a leak from OpenAI showing they are still growing faster. There is going to be so much gamesmanship into this IPO. I read the $65b as impressive both for Anthropic given their limited capacity and for AI overall given that Anthropic is likely losing some share. Reasonable minds can disagree. We shall see! Codex user numbers for reference; users have almost tripled over the last 5 weeks:
I think @bot is another “Claude Code” moment for AI. I would estimate my personal AI usage is up something like 100x. And for everyone who reached out about how to build a “podcast summarizer” it took me about 15 seconds in Grok Bot and is better than what I had before.
The GrokBot origin story as told by @bot Sadly they lack both a sharing feature and an iPad app but I’ve been told they are both coming soon:
Happy to announce Sumit Sadana EVP and Chief Business Officer of @MicronTech as a confirmed speaker at the @TomorrowXSummit in November. Memory per FLOP drives tokens per watt. Looking forward to hearing Sumit’s thoughts on how AI is changing the business model of memory suppliers, how SCAs are different vs. LTAs of the past, what new memory-intensive applications might be on the horizon and much more. Sustainability of the memory cycle is one of the biggest debates in public markets today. Sumit’s 30+ years of industry experience should bring plenty of perspective on how the present moment compares to the industry’s past!
Sign up here:
TomorrowX Summit@TomorrowXSummit·Register here: tomorrowxsummit.com
Makes me really like the guy. wsj.com/finance/bankin…