The Ledger
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Gerstner Predicts OpenAI Will Release an Open-Source Model by Summer 2025
“I do think you're going to see the open AI open source model. I mean, Sam's talked about it many times. I think you're going to see that in the next 30 days or so, certainly by the end of summer, but I would guess sooner rather than later.”
Gerstner: US tariffs will settle at 5-10% globally, 25-30% on China
“I think we're going to probably land somewhere in this kind of five to 10% terrace for the rest of the world. Right. If you add that up, that's going to be somewhere order of magnitude, two hundred billion dollars of tariffs, and you're not going to end up at …”
Gerstner: The US banned Nvidia H20 chip exports to China
“What we did last week is the US did ban H-twenties going to China”
Gerstner: Huawei AI chips already surpass Nvidia's H20 performance
“And we just unilaterally disarmed around that in a way that doesn't even advantage us against Huawei because their chips are already surpassing the H.”
Gerstner: US tariffs will ultimately settle around $300B to $400B
“I think we're going to land the plane here closer to three or four hundred billion in tariffs, not six or 700, and certainly not a trillion in tariffs.”
Gerstner: Enacted US Tariffs on China Will Not Land at 54%
“There's no, no way that lands, I think at 54%. That's the headline tariffs.”
Gerstner: China No Longer Depends on Nvidia for AI Inference
“BYD is designing a better car, and CATL is designing a better battery, and their glow, their vertically integrated supply chain around semiconductors no longer is dependent upon NVIDIA for inference. Now they're running inference at DeepSeq on the Ascend nine …”
Gerstner: X is the top news platform in every country worldwide
“X to me is so interesting because they have a platform that is the number one news platform in every country on the planet.”
Gurley: Leaked OpenAI forecasts show $20B annual losses in 2025 and 2026
“There was someone published the internal forecast of OpenAI, which included, I think, in 25 and 26, losing twenty billion each year.”
Gerstner: Public companies report Google organic clicks down 20-40% YTD
“We have public companies now reporting, that are reporting their Google organic clicks are down 20 to 40% year to date.”
Gerstner: Congressional Democrats will file federal lawsuit against DOGE budget cuts
“I do expect that Schumer or a group of members as early as this week is going to file you know, a claim, a lawsuit in federal court where they say that there's a violation of the constitution under article one, section nine, clause seven, where Congress has th…”
Gurley: DeepSeek innovated by separating parameters to run more experts
“Deep Seek had put more experts simultaneously against a problem. They were able to do that because they figured out a way to
separate the parameters and work on things with smaller parameter counts faster, which no one else had done before. And so you end up…”
Gurley: DeepSeek bypassed Nvidia's CUDA framework for low-level optimization
“One, it's validated now that they went around CUDA, and I just think that's interesting.”
Gerstner: OpenAI and other frontier labs will open-source models in 2025
“Sam and the industry response seems to be tipping more in the direction where we're going to go open to. And my suspicion is you will see that this year you know, out of folks like open AI”
Gerstner: Congress plans federal preemption and moratoriums on state AI laws
“I coordinated some meetings this weekend between him and a lot of CEOs of leading AI companies. And there is a plan by Congress on the one hand to have federal preemption. Clearly this is a matter of interstate commerce. So we should have federal preemption, b…”
Gerstner: Trump will commit to balancing budget in March State of the Union
“I think in the President's State of the Union address in the first week of March, he's gonna make a commitment to balance the budget in his first term in office.”
Gerstner: Nvidia will not lose AI market share from 2024 to 2025
“So I actually think if you look at the consensus numbers, they probably would imply that NVIDIA's market share is going down 24 to 25. And I don't think that to be true.”
Gerstner: DOGE and Trump will cut hundreds of billions from federal budget
“My forecast is that Doge is actually, and this administration are actually going to cut a lot out of the budget. And you know, I think that you have the leadership in the House and the Senate, and so if they cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of this budg…”
Gerstner: Big tech AI CapEx investments will materialize in 2025
“And I think what we can put to bed based upon the conversations we've had, what people are hearing out there, the conversations at CES, there are going to, these investments are going to show up in 20, 25, right?”
Gerstner: Google and OpenAI will launch superior coding agents in 2025
“I think you're going to see some pretty dramatic breakthroughs this year on coding, right? So think about all the startups that we've seen in the coding space. A lot of them have used prompt injection and other techniques in order to You know, kind of get thes…”
Patel: NVIDIA is cutting Blackwell margins to compete with custom ASICs
“Like with Blackwell, not only is it way, way, way faster, anywhere from 10 to 15 times on really large models for inference, because they've optimized it for very large language models, they've also decided, hey, we're gonna cut our margin, too, somewhat, beca…”
Patel: Samsung holds almost zero share in HBM memory, especially at NVIDIA
“In HBM, Samsung has almost no share, right? Especially at NVIDIA”
Gerstner: NVIDIA trades around 30 P/E compared to Cisco's 2000 peak
“Cisco, you know, 2000 and we'll show it on the pod, but you know, they peaked at like a 120 PE. Right. And yeah, you know, if you look at the fall off that occurred in revenue and in EBITDA, you know, and then it had 70% compression in the priced earnings mult…”
Patel: Broadcom holds custom ASIC wins with Meta, OpenAI, and Apple
“Broadcom does have multiple custom ASIC wins, right? It's not just Google here. Meta's, Meta's ramping up mostly still for recommendation systems, but their custom chips are gonna get better. You know, there's other players like OpenAI who are making a chip, r…”
Patel: Broadcom is building an NVSwitch competitor for AMD and others
“Broadcom is making a Competitors to that, that they will cede to the market, right? Multiple companies will be using that. Not just, you know, AMD will be using that competitor to NVSwitch, but they're not making it themselves because they don't have the skill…”
Gurley: 35% of Chinese university grads study STEM versus under 10% in US
“The number of graduates in China's University system that are STEM is 35%, and that number is below 10 in the US.”
Gerstner: Tesla FSD 12.5 delivered 100x improvement in MPCI
“By the middle of this year when they released 12.5, it showed a hundred X improvement in miles per critical disengagement.”
Gerstner: Tesla FSD 13 will deliver another 10x MPCI improvement
“And then with the launch of FSD 13 in the next couple of weeks, we expect another 10 X improvement. In terms of that MPCI”
Gerstner: AI clusters scaling to 1 million GPUs are already being planned
“Now, I think these things, Bill, are already being planned and built.”
Madra predicts multi-agent systems will enable transactional AI within one year
“You can have a thousand agents working together.
You can have one that's making sure that the credit card charge is not too big.
You can have another one to make sure that the address is right.
You can have another one checking against your calendar.
And so al…”
Zawalick: PG&E Applied for 20-Year NRC License Renewal for Diablo Canyon
“Unit one's current license expires November second of 2024.
And it'll be really interesting to look at what's going on November third and fourth with our grid had we taken unit one off.
So we're right there, right?
unit two's current license expires in August…”
Zawalick: All US commercial nuclear waste fits on one football field
“You roll up all of that footprint, and you got to see it's very small and you take all of the over hundred units in the United States, it would fit in the size of a football field up to the goalposts.”
Gurley: Nuclear startups pay $60M in NRC fees for first approval
“The NRC, which we haven't talked much about, but the Regulatory Commission here in the US is fee-based, and all the people that are playing in this market I've talked to say you're probably sixty million to first approval. Just on fees, the startup's gonna pay…”
Gerstner predicts SearchGPT will not reach one billion users
“I would say that search GPT I don't think is going to be the product that gets up to a billion users, and it reminds me, it takes me all the way back to a conversation you and I had maybe in episode four Which is what is going to be the next, you know, GPT mom…”
Gurley: OpenAI's 12-Month Subscription Retention Rate Is Around 35%
“On the 20 dollar thing, but at 12 months, the retention even in OpenAI is like 35%, so I doubt that anyone that is looking at that, even at two billion, Feels great about that as a durable business model”
Gerstner: Tesla FSD 12.5 and 12.6 will be 100% hands-free
“On 12.5 and 12.6, we think they get to the point where they're a hundred percent hands free. So it doesn't constantly ding you to grab the wheel and you can really start looking away from the road for longer periods of time.”
Gurley: Federal $42B rural broadband program has connected zero people
“So I, according to Brendan Carr, who is one of the four FCC commissioners, he says, Zero. Zero people have been connected”
Gurley: OpenAI Reaches ~$2B, Anthropic ~$100M, and Perplexity ~$25M from Subscriptions
“Playing around with credit card data, I think OpenAI is about two billion Anthropics about a hundred million in perplexities at like twenty-five million.”
Gerstner: Amazon Spent Over $100 Billion on AWS Before Turning Profitable
“By our analysis, for example, just Amazon, Spent over a hundred billion dollars on AWS invested for over eight years before they saw profitability in that business.”
Gerstner: Apple will partner with OpenAI, limiting features to newer iPhones
“I think they're going to have a series of announcements, you know, in terms of integrating with OpenAI. They're going to make the phone better. They're going to say, you can only get it on 15 plus or 16. They'll drive a replacement cycle into, you know, that b…”
Gerstner: Cloud providers are paying revenue shares to open-source model creators
“I can definitely confirm that the data clouds are paying a revenue share. To the open models.”
Gerstner: 83% of CIOs plan to repatriate workloads on-prem
“So this among enterprise CIOs moving back to hybrid and on-prem, the number was the 83% of respondents said that they were going to repatriate at least some of their workloads. Right. Back to on-prem and that was up from 49% or 43% in 2020.”
Gerstner: GPT-5 will introduce early memory and agentic actions
“Like I think in GPT-V, it's not going to be the final state, but I think you're going to see the beginnings of memory and the beginnings of actions. Right. And this is, you know, months away and you and I have a bet on this.”
Gurley: Tesla has not applied for regulatory driverless permits
“Tesla's, one, they haven't even applied for those things, but we don't have them driverless on the road yet.”
Gerstner: The GPU shortage will not turn into a glut in 2024
“Every supply shortage does ultimately result in a glut. But people have been calling for this glut now for you know, 12 months anyway. And they're calling for it again this year. We're not going to see it again this year.”
Gurley: Gary Steele cut Splunk's stock participation from 87% to 15%
“Gary, you know, crushed it at Proofpoint and a huge value creator, and he said, you know, in a very short window, he went, he said he took stock participation from 87% to 15.”
Gerstner: Apple has a near-zero probability of outsourcing its AI to Gemini
“I put the probability of them, quote unquote, outsourcing AI to Gemini at next to zero.”
Gerstner: Next-Gen AI Frontier Models Will Arrive in Q2 2025
“All the rest of the frontier models are kind of in this holding pattern because they're waiting for the B 100 to get launched to this Q three, Q four out of Nvidia. Which probably means the next iteration of the frontier models will come out in Q two of next y…”