The Exchanges

Q Okay, so speaking of not caring about the math and going all in, one thing that you wrote recently, I think it was in twenty-twenty-five also, you wrote, one thing has become clear, nothing short of AGI will be enough to justify the investments now being proposed for the coming decade. Do you still believe that?

A Yeah, I do. Um, I think that's when you and I first started exchanging emails, uh, on this topic. Uh, it's funny actually, I, I remember writing that post, I had just read Hyperion, which is the name of Meta's new data center. Maybe there's something, ah, to that. But, um, you, at that time, again, to remind the audience, at that time, everyone was talking about 10 gigawatts, then 30 gigawatts, then a hundred gigawatts of CapEx. And so, and those are just astronomically large numbers, um, far beyond where we are today, to be clear. Um, and so if you kind of think about those dollars of CapEx, the only possible way to pay those dollars back is going to be AGI. And so what I think the market kind of gets wrong, and it's just inherent to Wall Street, but Wall Street sort of always has this view of, like, is the stock market going to go up two percent, or is it going to go down two percent, right? It's like this just constant volatility, and everyone, you know, if the market's down 10% in a month, it's like, oh my god, if the market's up 10% in a month, oh my god. In reality, I think we are reaching this, like, sort of bifurcated path, where path one is, like, we get AGI, we pay back all these numbers and more. It's the greatest technology in human history, all of the things that we hear in the media all the time. And then path two is, We got the timing wrong. There's no next appli…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I do.”

Q Yeah. So I guess your answer here is it is feasible, but the question is, does it come on the timetable that is going to be acceptable? And sort of the interesting thing that we're going to find out is whether there is that, you know, sort of duration mismatch.

A And not only is it feasible, but we're making tremendous progress, right? I think it is worth saying, and I said this in the 1.5 trillion post. I mean, what, what has happened with Anthropic in the last year is nothing short of mind blowing to anyone who studied companies, right? It's the fastest growing company in history. And so I think it's more than feasible. There's real tangible progress. When I trace back, when I first published the six hundred billion dollar question, I said, basically open AI is the lion's share of revenue. I think at that time it was twelve billion. Today it's a hundred billion plus across OpenAI and Anthropic. Now there's still two companies driving the vast, vast, vast majority of the revenue in AI. Um, and so there's still a long way to go here. Um, but there has been tremendous progress. And so I think that's, that's, that's important. And I think that's great.

AI assessment note: “And not only is it feasible, but we're making tremendous progress”

Q um, let's say you go into a world where let's say LLMs commoditize, right? Then you need to be able to win based on product. And if you have the best talent, Um, then you could potentially have the best models and the best products. And that does seem to be down, like sort of one assessment of where Anthropic is, is playing right now. Does that, does that track?

A But again, I'm going to push back on this, like, okay, we're exactly where I think everyone gets confused because you sort of mix models here and you sort of, you have to focus on what's the strategy, the strategy. And you can back test this back to before Anthropic was famously successful is like the strategy has always been extremely consistent, deeply philosophically believe in AGI. It is all about getting to AGI. They believe we are going to get there, and they need talent to get there, and I think what evidence, at least so far, shows that they have been able to push forward their frontier, and in their view, they're going to keep pushing forward their frontier, and sure, they're going to have these products, and it's great that they have products, and they need revenue in order to attract investment dollars, but at the end of the day, it is all about AGI. That is my read. Again, this is just an outsider looking in. I'm not in the arena. I don't know. But as an outsider looking in, it's like very consistent strategy and they're going to keep executing that strategy. And sure, they need to like deal with this noise around commoditization and they need to do, but to them, it's just noise. It's just like, let's just execute the strategy. Andre Karpathy just joined. All this good stuff is happening. Like, let's go. Right. And I think that if you walk in the building and I don'…

AI assessment note: “I'm going to push back on this... it is all about AGI.”

Q on this AI infrastructure needed to make that money back. So, in terms of tech revenue, give us a scale, like a sense of scale of how much is four trillion, really? Is this something that tech companies make regularly, uh, they don't make often, and how feasible is it for this current level of investment to earn that money to pay back lifetime, uh, and make those investors whole?

A Well, maybe first a couple of comments on that. First, the two hundred billion is 2023. Six hundred billion is 24. Uh, anyways, regardless, these numbers have gotten really big. It's funny to almost hear the numbers from then because they feel quaint. Uh, things have gotten obviously, uh, mega sized since then, and you had a big reinflection in 2026, which is why you had, yeah, it's a two hundred billion dollar question, and 600, so a three X growth. 2025, it was eight 50, so it had slowed down. More than it about doubled in 2026 to 1.5 trillion. And then, as you say, if you look at 2027 and the forecast there, it's obviously going to scale past 1.5 trillion at this point. And then the last thing to say there is these numbers are cumulative. So if you really want to ask yourself, hey, what's the total capex burden? You say for every dollar capex, we eventually need to get an ROI. How much, how do you, if you have, you actually have to add up all of those numbers. So it's 200 plus 600 plus eight 50 plus 1.5. You basically have about three trillion dollars that needs to get paid back just since chat GBT. And then as you say, if you add 2027, it's going to get larger. Um, and yes, I think to your point, we all, I think we're all starting to recognize how big these numbers have gotten. The first post that kind of went viral was the six hundred billion dollar question. That was summ…

AI assessment note: “You basically have about three trillion dollars that needs to get paid back”