The Ledger, every show

“I personally would be surprised if in five years NVIDIA wasn't worth 10 trillion, but I can't predict the outcome.”

“Well, the way I like to put it is typical, typical, not all, but typical West Coast VCs are more like Lemmings, and typical East Coast VCs all think that they're smarter than each other.”

“Right now, people are making more money than they're spending. It's just very lumpy. As an aggregate. Plenty of people are gonna lose their shirts, but overall, less money is gonna go in than is gonna come out.”

“If Nvidia wanted to, they could build fifty million of those GPU die, Per year. But they're going to build about 5.5 million GPUs this year.”

“The cost to run the OSS model is about one-tenth that of the Chinese models.”

“Then Europe's economy is going to be a tourist economy. People are going to come here to see the quaint old buildings, and that's going to be it.”

“I believe that AI is going to cause massive labor shortages. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have enough people to fill all the jobs that are gonna be created.”

“It's like, it's in Gmail, but it's practically unusable. It's in pretty much every product, and it seems thrown in, kind of, like, half thought through”

“That NVIDIA's software is a moat. Yeah it's true for training, but it's not true for inference.”

“You can almost say we're one of the best things that's ever happened to NVIDIA because they can make every single GPU that they were going to make, and they can sell it for training, high margin, gets amortized across deployment. You know, we'll take the low m…”

“Like, if you look at the last GTC, there was an announcement that the latest GPUs were 30 x faster than the previous generation. And when you look at how it was done, there was this curve that looked kind of like this, and then it Basically ended here, and the…”

“And our goal by the end of 20, 27 is to be providing at least half of the world's AI inference compute.”

“One of the concerns right now is about Malaysia or Singapore, that region over there being a place where people are deploying GPUs with the wink, wink, like we're not going to rent it to China, right? But that's a belief that a lot of people are doing that. Ot…”

“I'm anti-founder mode. I believe in delegation. I think when you are telling people how to do their job, that is an indication that it's not a, not necessarily a problem with you. It could just be that that person is not right for that job.”

“I can't speak for Sam Altman or OpenAI, but if I was in that position, I would be gearing up to open source my models in response. Because it's pretty clear you're gonna lose that, so you might as well try and win all the users and the love from open sourcing.”

“Open always wins. Always.”

“This model was supposedly trained on a smaller number of GPUs and a much, much tighter budget I think the way that it's been put is less than the salary of many of the executives at Meta, and that's not true. It's actually, there's an element of marketing invo…”

“Open AI Was effectively subsidizing accidentally the training of this model because they were using open AI, right? And, you know, rumors are that open AI may not be completely profitable yet in terms of every token in the API, like on the subscriptions maybe,…”

“The CCP is probably going to be taking the safeties off the weapons. They're going to be like, why are you making this model open source? Please direct your data towards us. Go win a bunch of customers this way, but now we want the data, right? And so they're …”

“This has just made it absolutely nakedly clear that the models are commoditized, right?”

“Actually, I don't think it's enough spending.”

“Most people think of them synonymously as AI. They could just switch to deep seek and people would still use them. It's brand. It's one of the seven powers.”

“And I think that's going to happen. I think people will like you cannot lose.”

“And then you look at China, China practices R D T research development theft. It's just part of the culture. And it's not just against Western company. It's against each other too. The difference is if you're a Western company, then the government Steals from …”

“I don't know that Nvidia will ever see it this way, but I do think that those of us focusing on inference and building stuff specifically for that are probably the best thing that's ever happened for Nvidia stock because we'll take on the low margin, high volu…”

“And so when you are leading groups of people, if you want to reduce the amount of politics and people going off and, you know, forming side cliques and all this, stop having one-on-ones, have big meetings with everyone who you want to tell something and tell t…”

“What's changed though is that unlike the Keynesian beauty contest where the winner is the one with the most money, in reality, there's a point at which you get enough money and you don't need more. And for the first time in history, the startups are not starve…”

“What we realized was, and this is what most people get wrong when they're trying to do this themselves. They'll, they'll take the reading of tokens or what's called pre-fill, and they'll do that on one piece of hardware, and then they'll put the generation of …”

“Now bring in the LPU, and you can go deeper, faster, you can search faster, and so you can actually make a model smarter by making it faster. And so the realization is, and now that you've got this ability to reflect, think deeply, and change the outcome based…”

“The biggest flip in my hiring was when I went from looking for positives, which is what you do when you're trying to grow talent, to looking for negatives, which is what you do when you're trying to select talent.”

“What I'm seeing is that code is becoming almost free. It's, it, the marginal cost is approaching zero.”

“The countries that control compute will control AI, and you cannot have compute without energy.”

“If OpenAI were given twice the inference compute that they have today. If Anthropic was given twice the inference compute that they have today, within one month from now, their revenue would almost double.”

“Microsoft in one quarter deployed a bunch of GPUs, and then announced that they weren't going to make them available in Azure because they made more money using them themselves than renting them out.”

“That's how the hyperscalers feel. So of course they're going to be spending like drunken sailors because the alternative is that they're completely locked out of their business. So it's not a purely economical framework that they're using. It's a, do we get to…”

“Four hours later, it was in production. Not a single line of code was written by a human being. There was no debugging done by a human being. It was all prompting.”

“And when you look around the industry, you've got a bunch of people building chips, some of them are getting canceled, like Dojo recently got canceled.”

“Going off and saying, I'm gonna build my own AI chip to compete with NVIDIA, It's a little bit like saying, you know, that Google search is pretty nice. Let's go replicate it. It's insane. Like the level of optimization, the level of design and engineering tha…”

“I have no doubt that OpenAI will be able to build its own chips. I have no doubt that eventually, Anthropic will be building their own chips, that every hyperscaler will build their own chip.”

“The thing is, Nvidia effectively has a monopsony on HBM.”

“There's also this situation where the margin on HBM is so high, That no one wants to actually increase the supply, because then the margin goes down.”

“So when you hear the hyperscalers talking about that, you know, seventy five billion to a hundred billion dollar a year investment, because they're building out the capacity for data centers, they're putting a lot of money up for returns that they're expecting…”

“You have to write a check two years in advance to get GPUs. For us, you write us a check for a million LPUs, and the first of those LPUs starts showing up six months later.”

“So if you are the incumbent, you have an advantage because people are designing their models for your hardware. It doesn't even matter if there's a better architecture out there. It's not going to run well, so it's not a better architecture.”

“NVIDIA still keeps selling chips.”

“AI doesn't work the way SAS does. In SAS, you have a bunch of engineers who go out and build a product, and the quality of that product is determined based on what those engineers did. That's not the case in AI. In AI, I can improve the quality of my product b…”

“They're going to build a 150 nuclear reactors. So they're going to have enough energy, even though their chips aren't as energy efficient.”

“So my expectation is that right now for the next two to three years, the United States has a clear advantage in that away game over China.”