Evan Conrad is the co-founder of SF Compute. He explains why AI scaling laws create fundamentally different customer spending dynamics for GPUs compared to CPUs.
“Gusto isn't going to make like, you know, five percent more money. They're going to make zero, like literally zero money from every incremental GPU or CPU after a certain point. This is not the case for anyone who is training models. And it's not the case for anyone who's doing test time inference or like inference that has scales at test time. Because, like, you, your scaling laws mean that you may have some diminishing returns but you're, there's always returns. Adding GPUs always means your model does actually get better and that actually does translate into revenue for you.”
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More from Evan Conrad
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Conrad: Hyperscalers will probably lose significant money reselling Nvidia GPUs
“My intuition is that the hyperscalers are probably going to lose a lot of money, and they know they're going to lose a lot of money on reselling NVIDIA GPUs at least.”
Conrad: Decentralized compute networks will never beat co-located InfiniBand clusters
“I just don't really think this is gonna ever be more efficient than a fully interconnected cluster with Infiniband, or, you know, whatever sort of next spec might be. Like, I could be completely wrong, but Speedolite is really hard to beat. And regardless of w…”
Conrad: The AI VC bubble will pop and fail to return capital
“So what you've done by not having a future is you've inflated the venture capital market. And that is a bubble that's totally going to pop at some point. Like a lot of the companies are not going to work. And the valuations are not going to work. And what's go…”
Conrad: Software margins on GPU clusters drive customers to build in-house
“So if you have a 10% margin increase because you have great software on your billion dollars, the customers are that price sensitive. They will immediately switch off if they can, because why wouldn't you? You would just take that hundred million dollars, you'…”
Conrad: CoreWeave's debt-financed long-term contract model is optimal for GPUs
“So that means that the best way to make money in GPUs was to do basically exactly what CoreWeave did which is go out and sign only long-term contracts, pretty much ignore the bottom end of the market completely, and then maximize your long-term contracts with …”
Conrad: GPU businesses succeed as pure real estate or pure software, not both
“The GPU clouds are fantastic real estate businesses. If you treat them like real estate businesses, you will make a lot of money. The, Cloud services you can make on that, all the software you want to make on that, you can do that fantastically. If you don't o…”
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