Gavin Baker

“My standard question is, can you tell me one quantitative data point in your business that's getting worse? Just one. That's my standard question, and it's at least in July and August, I haven't been able to find a single person.”

“I disagree with a token as a token. That may be true at the moment with pretty much frontier models, but I disagree with it because companies like fireworks and others are helping companies to customize. The more you customize the model, the more the token cha…”

“I don't generally invest in Elon's competitors. I don't think it's a wise course of action.”

“I think four to five, I think four to five hundred billion is within the zone of like realistic and achievable.”

“Anthropic is generating cash, and like, they kind of, this fact is, I would say, kind of known in the world, and I've actually never really spoken to Anthropic, but it just, you know, it feels like there are enough signals And then if you're to read the tea le…”

“A world where Anthropik, OpenAI, and, you know, maybe even SpaceX are kind of the only model providers that dominate the model layer, that is a hard world for software.”

“I profoundly believe the future is composable models, and you're going to every enterprise, You're going to have what Andre Karpathy called the Council of LLNs.”

“They're awesome for the AI infrastructure providers. They just shift economic value from the margins of the frontier labs to the infrastructure.”

“We're going to be using GPUs for Seven years, 10 years, 12 years, and that's great because it lowers the cost to finance them, which makes this AI revolution more financeable.”

“Well, I did own 15% of the video when it was a sub two billion dollar market cap, but I owned 10% of Tesla when it was a sub two billion dollar market cap.”

“From a pure risk award perspective, I thought MGM was the best. Your downside is really capped because of the Barry Diller bid, and then you have Japan and Dubai as, I think, very valuable future sources of value.”

“If you ever get a biotech company that can become a platform and they have a mechanism, whether it's of drugging, whether it's targeting, if you have something that is broadly applicable, that is when you can get these really, really big hundred billion dollar…”

“In 30 days, we went from not being an AI hyperscaler to being number four, and we passed a lot of companies, including Oracle.”

“I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer.”

“They have cut The maternal mortality rate in some of these African countries by 90 to 95%.”

“I think now it's somebody who's like a Gavin Baker type, a junior Gavin Baker, somebody who understands a company or understands an industry and understands the nuances of a technology.”

“I don't know when. I don't want to make a prediction. I would guess a year or two. Maybe sooner.”

“Second half of 28 to First half of 20 30 would be my point prediction.”

“All GPUs use Grok or Cerebrus for decode, and then those older GPUs, they have a useful life for 10 or 15 years, and this means that you can finance GPUs.”

“There are drawdowns where you're wrong, a company missed estimates, your hypothesis was invalidated, and you have to take your medicine and you crystallize that loss. And then there are drawdowns or periods of underperformance where you're underperforming beca…”

“Everybody needs to have a say for it. Everybody needs to go Leave your digital devices behind. Literally go to the ocean and have a family say for it or a company say for it. And it can't be one that can be like socially engineered.”

“A lot of being successful as an investor is finding an investments philosophy. That fits your own emotional makeup such that you can be rational when you are wrong.”

“I didn't care whether the analysts at Fidelity got their stocks right or wrong. It was utterly immaterial to how I evaluated analysts. There's an analyst, he consistently had some of the worst stock picking metrics in the department. But I made a vast amount o…”

“Investing is a Bayesian endeavor. You have a Bayesian probability space of expected outcomes. The data points should fit within that. And then if there's a data point outside that, that's what you have to super focus. If a data points inside your expected prob…”

“As an investor, you have to either panic early or double down late, and you have to be one of the two. It's hard to be both.”

“For me, I'm a double down late person. I'm always buying stocks on the fifty-two-week low list. It makes me uncomfortable when a name is in the consensus. Sometimes consensus is right, but it's important to me to be contrarian.”

“Warren Buffett's famous statement is the price you pay determines your return. I would modify that and say the price you pay determines your return for a given business outcome.”

“If you've been doing this more than five years and you can't instantly do a DCF in your head, this is the wrong business for you.”

“The alpha in the market as a fundamental investor comes from having earnings estimates or free cash flow estimates or whatever metric you choose that are materially different from consensus and being right.”

“I did invest in WeWork. They pushed the price, and I did cut my order in half. Never did anymore, to the best of my memory, but it's not like it was all roses or successes.”

“Instead of having an investment thesis, we have an investment hypothesis, thesis being a literal statement of belief, and if you state a belief, as a human, you become attached to it, whereas a hypothesis is quantitatively falsifiable, and you're attempting to…”

“Every position in the fund, I think of it as like an airplane. You can pick any moving vehicle. On some positions, I'm the pilot. On other positions, I'm the co-pilot. Some positions, I'm in the plane, and maybe the pilot or the co-pilot are people who I've wo…”

“For me, execution is the gap between our performance and the performance we could have had based on the quality of our insights. I make an effort to measure that every year.”

“There's no difference except for the risk, but the same principles apply. If you're good at buying stocks, you're going to be good at shorting stocks.”

“If you're going to run a high gross, the most essential thing that you have to manage is basis risk.”

“You can't be long a stock like GM and be short Tesla. From a quantitative perspective, that makes no sense. If you're long growth and short value, that's equally painful. If you're long value and short growth, that means you're just levered value. If you're lo…”

“It's funny that some investors have an idea that you can do 90 days of work on a business and really understand it. I don't think it's possible. For me, to really understand a business, I need years of history, in some case decades, to see how the business and…”

“I have never seen a new technological trend where at every level of the stack, the competitors are both public and private.”

“I don't like to invest in a company and make it a big position unless it's either a repeat founder who I've had a long duration relationship with, or there is a VC who I have a close personal and professional relationship with, Who has a really good track reco…”

“This is what you do the first time you get a short seller, write a report about you. Do not respond. I know it feels so personal. I know how personal it is, but just don't respond. Let the numbers do the talking. If you get in a public fight with them, it's ju…”

“The short answer is a lot of the operational value add from a lot of these firms is wildly overstated. The wise advice is super not appreciated.”

“I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the world in the next Three to four years is data centers in space.”

“In space, cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite, and it's as close to absolute zero as you can get. So all that goes away, and that is a vast amount of cost.”

“The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. So if you can link these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on Ear…”

“You know, it's, you know, it's some big companies that are very tech forward, you know, 50% plus of customer support is already done by AI, and that's a four hundred billion dollar industry.”

“The one thing I just, that I just think is so cool about it and so underappreciated is your average semiconductor venture founder is like 50 years old.”

“By the way, something that could slow all this down and be a natural governor is if we get our first true DRAM cycle since the late nineties.”

“I do not believe we're in an AI bubble today.”

“And the nature of AI because of scaling laws, Richard Sutton's the better listen they're just more compute intensive. So their gross margins are structurally going to be lower. But that doesn't mean they can't be great businesses. I just, I think it's going to…”

“It is definitionally impossible, given what we just discussed, to succeed in AI without gross margin pressure, and I do not know why they have concerns, because we have an existence proof that a software company can deal well with declining margins in Microsof…”

“In the next three years, I think you'll see a bunch of high-profile ASIC programs canceled, especially if Google starts selling TPUs externally, which has been all over X.”

“Humans were fundamentally paid based on outcomes, and a lot of AI will be augmenting humans, but probably also replacing some humans, and that will involve being paid paid for outcomes.”

“Because people overvalue systematically their ability once they've acquired a customer through Google to keep it as an organic customer. So they systematically overpay. And they continue doing that. That's why Google never went to outcomes or marketplace, beca…”

“Yeah, very real, and it's gonna be Tesla versus the Chinese in the same way it's Tesla versus the Chinese in, in cars.”

“Is it going to be humanoids or not humanoids? I think that debate is over because humanoids can kind of learn, you know, from watching YouTube videos, and then it's easier for a human being you know, to put on a suit and show the robot how to do it.”

“He said, Larry Page has said internally at Google many times, I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race. Everybody is focused on ROI, but the people making the decisions are not basically saying that scale, it's all about scale.”

“Gavin, at least in the public markets, is the most knowledgeable person I've ever met on a sector, let alone it just happens to be that sector is AI.”

“I mean, in all fairness to OpenAI, the router that kind of auto selects the right model was apparently broken for the first kind of. 12 or 16 hours of the model's release. It wasn't working.”

“And the executive branch, which is at least elected and accountable, I would rather have an imperial president who we can judge and vote out of office than an imperial judiciary.”

“Unless Adams or Cuomo pulls out, he's almost certainly going to win.”