The Ledger, every show

“When Apple passed ATT, app tracking transparency was one of the most One of the worst antitrust violations in the history of technology, like, just Apple unilaterally obliterating all these business models while they're simultaneously building their own, as fa…”

“What happens if we get super powerful AI and China doesn't? What are they going to do? The optimal thing would be to just bomb TSMC out of existence, because suddenly that becomes optimal, even with all the costs that that does, and then what?”

“So I, there's a, just a fundamental disconnect that I have with a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley, coming out, I think, of one of the labs in particular, where if we get to a place where we have a meaningful superiority, particularly from, lik…”

“So you have, like, on the calls, you have both Andy Jassy and Cyanadella are out there saying, look, we're just building data centers. Like, these are the shells. We might not use them now. Maybe we'll use them in the future. And we only buy GPUs when we know …”

“If you actually look at their business holistically, what that is, is a price cut, right? Like they, now the price cut didn't show up in margins. It didn't show up in what they're offering, but a lot of what NVIDIA is doing is how can we maintain our margins?”

“CUDA's moat is dramatically diminished because the models don't care what they run on, and that's what actually matters, what's built on top of the models, but it still matters. It, it's still something of a mode.”

“No, they should be charging like 200 dollars.”

“The moment that a company, an industry, wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it, when it's growing and a company is maki…”

“Unilaterally imposing restrictions, even if those restrictions are good, isn't just an issue as far as who rules us, the democracy issue, that sort of Palmer Luckey, I think very eloquently raised. It's inviting Very bad outcomes for those asserting that in ge…”

“I think it is a safer equilibrium To have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan while we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it a…”

“The goal isn't to, fine, we just won't use Anthropic. I do think the goal is to hurt Anthropic. And you're, if you're not going to be subservient to us, you're not going to be allowed to build a power base, period.”

“You could say Congress isn't gonna do anything, therefore, Amadei should. Just appreciate that is giving up on the democratic process and saying we should have unelected, unaccountable individuals making weighty decisions.”

“I think there, you know, just in general, there is this very naive view of the world that doesn't understand why militaries are important and necessary, and I think Silicon Valley got itself in a lot of trouble by giving in to this naive mindset that we have n…”

“Actually, OpenAI could stop making models and be one of the most valuable companies in the world just because of ChatGPT. That's their most valuable asset.”

“Actually ads are good. They are societal good. They get, they are the driver of all the consumer surplus that tech throws off.”

“The problem with TikTok, and back then everyone was talking about user data. Who cares? Like the whole user data thing, people have this view of like the East German Stasi and like folders, like going through people's data. Like these are like vector databases…”

“The way that it shows up messily is we somehow do pass the law banning TikTok and it didn't get banned. And now it is sold, but China still controls the algorithm. So I think it's a big disaster.”

“What we clearly need is some sort of market mechanism For data generation that in the long run will replace what we're getting from journalistic enterprises, which are even more doomed than ever before.”

“I think OpenAI might be a bigger threat to Facebook than Google, something worth considering”

“So there's a real national security element here, and it's just, it's a really tough situation, because Intel is a failed company at this point, and they're, and the reason the failure is so total is because The aspects that drive their failure are the same th…”

“I think there's a little bit of magical thinking, which I just invoked in terms of manufacturing and whether it be fabs, whether that be actuators, like all these sort of precursors, like the, I think the degree to which we are dependent on China is underappre…”

“I think OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly on the frontier. Who knows what's happening with Google and then Grok and Meta are chasing them. Meanwhile, the Chinese are very capable, very smart, and also definitely distilling these models to sort of stay about six…”

“Even if we have this blow up, the AI is not going away. It's not gonna stop improving. It's going to keep sort of progressing, and in a way that we look back on the dot-com era, or we look back on the railroad era, or we look back on whatever bubbles through h…”

“The absolute profits available here, even if the margins are lower, is so much larger that will we look back and Google search was seized candies. And I, it feels like that's what's happening.”

“I think that market is so huge and so large that if the models did not improve at all from where they are right now, the economic opportunity is actually massive.”

“I think they had to do it because that extreme of user who uses a ton of tokens and is actually leveraging AI costs way more to Microsoft than a hundred dollars a month. They can't support them, but they want to hold on to this set cost for the vast majority o…”

“Consumers don't want to pay. So there's two things to understand about consumers that Silicon Valley has to relearn about every 10 years. Number one, consumers do not want to pay for software. And number two, consumers do not care about being productive.”

“There's a bit where had they leaned into advertising immediately as soon as ChatGPT was a hit, I think they would have a killer ad product right now. I think that Google would be in much bigger trouble. I think Meta would be in much bigger trouble”

“TSMC, Decreased their rate of growth in twenty-twenty-three and twenty-twenty-four and twenty-twenty-five. So, like, we're, our shortage of compute is going to get worse in the next few years.”

“So, today when we say there's not enough compute, it's not like all the money that the companies are putting in today manifests in compute tomorrow. No, it all manifests in compute in twenty-twenty-eight and twenty-twenty-nine.”

“The scarcity is what ultimately saved Intel. And I expect at some point in the year that they're going to announce like some major partner for the first time. It's going to be a big deal, but it was ultimately TSMC brought it on themselves.”

“Given they have so many investments in the real world, their core business feels so impervious to AI for like the model version of AI. It will benefit from AI. But their moat feels deeper than anyone as far as their core business and their ability to just sort…”

“AI is this probabilistic endeavor. Apple is the king of deterministic products. Like, a physical product, you ship that iPhone, you ship it once, and it's gotta be good.”

“Biggest impact of the models, the biggest monetization right now is probably not anthropic opening. It's the incremental gain that is happening for Google and meta.”

“Their ultimate competitors are the hyperscalers, particularly Google and Amazon. So Google and Amazon aren't just building their own chips, but they're also looking to sell those chips externally.”

“If we get to a world where we actually run out of power, that's probably good for NVIDIA, because in a world where we're totally constrained on power, we have to get the best efficiency, the best token efficiency, and I think NVIDIA is still the most token eff…”

“The longer we have enough power, the more time Amazon has to make Trinium better. The more time Google has to make TPUs competitive from an efficiency standpoint. And if we get in a world where, this is a world where those margins seem very hard to sustain.”

“None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games, pay way less to pay these games, and Microsoft ate it.”

“I mean, I think it needs to happen.”

“If AI is what it is, The people with guns are going to want to have a say. Whether that be domestically, whether that be internationally, that might be in the context of the U.S. Government just taking it, trying to kill your company because they feel you're n…”

“People, like, I was talking to someone, they're like, why doesn't the government just have, just get someone to make their own model? It's like, because it's, like, you talk about government contracts, we're, like, single digit billions. We're talking about fo…”

“Anthropic has a local advantage in that most people, I think, in the industry are with them, and they have a national PR problem in that I think a lot of folks outside of tech don't understand why tech companies always try to Or resist helping the US governmen…”

“If you're using the easiest possible way to target ads, which is based on the context of the conversation, we're going to show you a roughly relevant ad. Number one, your market's way smaller because you have to hope someone starts a conversation that matches …”

“I think the ideal outcome for Google is they never put ads in Gemini, but they understand so much about you because of what you do in Gemini, that they can then manifest that through ads on YouTube, through ads on Google, through ads on their other properties.”

“And the problem is that I think being an advertising based model is generally incompatible with being a platform. The whole point of a platform is you're letting something else shine, something else bring to the surface. You're just on your, you're the support…”

“OpenAI wants to be the place you do everything. They want to be like the aggregator. I think a critic would say people compare them to Netscape. I think the better analogy if you're an OpenAI skeptic would be AOL, where they want to be sort of like the interfa…”

“Actually the largest and most successful agent in the world today is Facebook advertising, which is exactly right.”

“People saying they're going to zero are wrong. But if the assumption is you're fine, but you're not going to be growing indefinitely, like that shift from thought of as being a growth company to being a stable. That's a haircut, and again, it's combined with t…”