Prediction certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Kedrosky: Investors will pressure AI labs to slash massive pre-training spend

Paul Kedrosky · Why The AI Bubble Will Burst: The Most Logical Case — With Paul Kedrosky · Aug 12, 2026 · at 53:37

Investor Paul Kedrosky outlines how a shift toward post-training optimization could collapse demand for massive compute clusters and impact hyperscaler revenues.

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“Once investors look under the hood and see more and more of this, they'll be questioning, why are we spending so much on pre-training? Why are you doing billion dollar training runs anymore? If most of the gains and models are coming from post training and RLHF and some of these other tools, you're even like quantization and whatever else. There's going to be immense pressure for these, for the companies to cut back on that spending, which will have huge knock on consequences across the hyperscalers and across the board”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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