The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 49 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dylan Patel: Political coup in Taiwan is more likely than full invasion
“What I think is most likely is that there is some sort of political coup or action. That destabilizes Taiwan in some way but doesn't actually, doesn't necessarily lead to an invasion, a full-scale invasion, and so sort of this is the best of the both worlds fo…”
Patel: China Has World's Most Advanced Standalone Chip Supply Chain
“China, China has by far the most advanced supply chain in semiconductors if you just look at China itself, right?”
Patel: Anthropic added $2B in monthly revenue at positive margins
“Anthropic doesn't just add two billion dollars of revenue in one month. You know, with, without having, you know, huge demand and they're doing it at positive margins, right?”
Patel: Google will have zero free cash flow in 2027 due to AI CapEx
“There's no reason why Google will have any profit in 27 at all, right, in terms of cash flow. They will just spend every dollar they make On, on AI infrastructure.”
Patel: AI backlash will be the top issue in the next election
“And I think that's gonna be, like, the hottest button issue of, like, the next election, right? If not the midterms, right? And it seems obvious to me that, like, any party that wants to win should just become the anti-AI party.”
Patel: Frontier AI model training costs are effectively irrelevant
“In my opinion, I think that's a little bit spicy, but yeah, it's like training costs are irrelevant, right? Like GPT-IV, right? Like 20,000 A-one hundreds. That's like, I know it sounds like a lot of money.”
Patel: Fine-tuning existing small models for cloud use is useless
“Unless, unless you're fine tuning for on device use, I think fine tuning current existing models, especially the smaller ones is a useless waste of time, right?”
Patel: OpenAI and Microsoft partnership will likely collapse within years
“Yeah, I expect in the next few years that the OpenAI and Microsoft probably falls apart too.”
Dylan Patel: TSMC will obey US export controls even under KMT
“Even if the KMT wins, it's not like TSMC starts disobeying American export restrictions because The way American export restrictions are upheld is that Taiwan utilizes American banking systems, American equipment industries, and so they'll still have to uphold…”
Patel: Claude Code's share of GitHub commits doubled to 4% in January
“Just in January, it went from four percent of or two percent of commits on GitHub to four percent of GitHub commits were done by Cloud Code, right?”
Patel: Google and Amazon will borrow debt to fund AI infrastructure
“Google and Amazon haven't taken on debt yet for AI infrastructure, but they will, right?”
Patel: Nvidia must vastly outperform rivals to overcome vertical integration
“Google, Amazon, they get to vertically integrate, integrate, and vertical integration always saves tons of money. So he has to be better than everyone. By, not just like a little bit, by a ton. To justify his margins. Otherwise, the vertical integration of his…”
Patel: Tech moats are shallower than ever due to massive capex
“I think moats are as shallow as they've ever been, right? Because how fast things are moving, the size of the numbers that are being thrown around now, right? It's hundreds of billions of dollars for each major hyperscaler. The size of the numbers are so large…”
Patel: Google will buy tons of GPUs through 2027 due to TPU limits
“When we look in 26, Google would buy a lot more TPUs, but they can't ramp production fast enough, right? And so they have to buy tons of GPUs. And we go to 27, it applies again, right? Google simply cannot buy enough TPUs, and they have to buy tons of GPUs.”
Patel: Semiconductor fab shortages will bottleneck AI through the end of the decade
“What's the bottleneck to building more fabs or to building more chips is more fabs, and people just have not built these fabs yet, right? And that's, I think, the big bottleneck now. And that's gonna persist through the end of the decade. Or until AI, you know…”
Patel: AI software will have lower human R&D costs but higher COGS than SaaS
“An AI software looks like it's going to be very different in my opinion, right? Like the R&D cost is much lower in terms of people but the cost of goods sold in terms of actually operating the service, I think will be much higher, right?”
Patel: Google will have more compute than any company by far
“Google is gonna have more compute than any other company in the world, period, by, like, a large, large factor.”
Patel: AI inference will deploy more GPUs than training by 2024
“LLM inference will be bigger than training, or multimodal, whatever, blah, blah, blah inference will be bigger than training, you know, probably next year, in fact at least in terms of GPUs deployed,”
Patel: Hugging Face libraries achieve only 15% MBU for inference
“Hugging Face's libraries are actually very inefficient, like incredibly inefficient for inference. You get like, 15% MBU on, on, on, on some configurations, like eight, eight, eight, eight, eight, eight, 100, and LLAMA-seventy-beat, you get like, 15%, which is…”
Patel: Google targets 2027 to exit Broadcom partnership after 2025 attempt failed
“Their latest target to get away from Broadcom is twenty-twenty-seven, right? But like, you know, that's four years from now. Chip design cycle is four years. So they already tried to get away in twenty-twenty-five, and that failed.”
Patel: AI chip bottlenecks lie in interconnects and memory, not matrix multiplication
“Multiplying tensors is kind of, you know, anyone can, there's a lot of people who've made good matrix multiply units, right? But it's about, like, getting good utilization out of those, and interfacing with the memory, and interfacing with other chips really e…”
Patel: Roughly 10 companies have compute to beat GPT-4 within six months
“There's, like, 10 companies that have enough compute in one single data center to be able to beat GPT-IV, right? Like, straight up, like, if not today, within the next six months, right?”
Patel: Intel will release a chip surpassing Nvidia H100 within a quarter
“Intel bought that company from him, and then shut it down, and bought this other AI company, and now that company is kind of, ah, you know, got new chips. They're gonna release a better chip than the H 100, ah, within the next quarter or so, right?”
Patel: AMD MI300 will beat Nvidia H100 on paper within a quarter
“AMD. They have a GPU. MI 300. That will be better than the H 100 in a quarter or so. Now, that says nothing about how hard it is to program it, but at least hardware-wise, on paper, it's better.”
Patel: AMD MI300 costs more than twice as much to manufacture as Nvidia H100
“In the case of amd their manufacturing costs for mi-thruhundred or more than twice that of h-one hundred and it only beats h-one hundred by a little bit from you know performance stuff i've seen”
Patel: Nvidia to ship next-gen chip in Q2/Q3 2024 with 3x LLM performance
“Nvidia's releasing a new chip, you know, in, you know, they're gonna announce it in March, and they're gonna release it, you know, and ship it, you know, Q-two, Q-three next year anyways, right? And that chip will probably be three or four times as good. Right…”
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI chip performs worse than Nvidia H100
“Microsoft's going to announce their chip soon. It's worse performance than the H-H-E-N-H-E-D but the cost effectiveness of it is, is better for Microsoft internally, just because they don't have to pay the Nvidia tax.”
Patel: US and China can each shut down the other's chip supply chain
“The U.S. Could absolutely shut down the Chinese semiconductor supply chain, they won't, but, and China could absolutely shut down the U.S. One, actually, by the way.”
Patel: TSMC's Arizona fab still depends on Taiwan for masks and shipping
“TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. It's quite a bit smaller than the fabs in, in, in Taiwan, but even ignoring that, those fabs still have to ship everything to Taiwan back anyways. And also they have to get what's called a mask from Taiwan and get sent to get…”
Patel: One-Third to Half of US AI Lab Researchers Are Chinese
“What, I think it's probably, like, Half or at least a third of researchers at labs are Chinese.”
Patel: Google and Amazon stocks dropped 10% on combined $380B CapEx
“Google announced a hundred and eighty billion of capex. The stock went down and then Amazon announced two hundred billion of capex and their stock went down. Like, I want to say like 10%.”
Patel: Meta is taking on $40B in debt for its Louisiana AI cluster
“Meta, they've, they're already taking debt on for their largest AI cluster in Louisiana. You know, they're taking like forty billion dollars of debt on for that”
Patel: AWS holds major infrastructure efficiency advantage over Azure and GCP
“Behind the scenes, they've done a lot on the infrastructure that is super custom, That Microsoft, Azure, and Google Cloud just don't even match in terms of efficiency. Like, if you think about the cost to rent out SSD space, so the cost to rent, you know, offe…”
Patel: Nvidia manufactured 400k H100s last quarter and will sell 530k this quarter
“There's 400 to 500,000 being, 400,000 manufactured last quarter, and like five 30,000 this quarter being sold, right, of H-Hundreds”
Patel: Nvidia will sell over 3 million GPUs in 2024
“NVIDIA is going to sell well over three million, you know, total GPUs next year. You know, over a million H 100 this year alone, right?”
Patel: TruthfulQA is a garbage benchmark that gets gamed
“Truthful QA is a garbage benchmark, like, you, like, some of the models that are very high on there, if you use it for five seconds, you're like, this is garbage, right?”
Patel: Hardware vendors and developers are coalescing around OpenAI's Triton
“Likewise, there's OpenAI's Triton, like, what they're trying to do there, and like you know, everyone's really coalescing around Triton. You know, people, you know, third-party hardware vendors”
Patel: Google is co-designing TPU v5 and TPU v6 with Broadcom
“TPU, you know, all the way through to all, TPU v-five, which is the one they're in production of now, and six, and, you know, all these are all gonna be you know, co-designed with Broadcom.”
Patel: Broadcom is working on Meta's second-generation internal AI chip
“So Broadcom is, is, is, is working with, on Google's chip right now, but of course on Meta's, Meta's internal AI chip, which they're on the second generation of, working on that.”
Patel: Google will avoid deploying local laptop models to retain control
“I don't think Google is going to deploy a model that I can run on my laptop to help me with code or help me with, you know, XYZ. They're always going to want to run it on the cloud for control.”
Patel: No open-source model is currently close to GPT-3.5
“And like, there's nothing open source that is anywhere close to 3.5 yet.”
Patel: Nvidia and Google control over 80% of advanced AI silicon manufacturing capacity
“To simplify it, NVIDIA has a little bit more than half, and Google has, like, 30%, right, through Broadcom. So it's like, the total capacity for everyone else is much lower, and they're all sharing it”
Patel: All sub-7nm chips depend on tooling from one Austrian monopoly
“There is no chip that is less than seven nanometer that doesn't get touched by this one Austrian company's tool, right? And there is no alternative.”
Patel: Large-scale AI training currently requires a single data center
“Everything that we've seen so far is that large-scale training has to happen in an individual data center with very high-speed networking.”
Patel: Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are developing multi-datacenter training
“One of the big bottlenecks is how much power and how many chips you can get into a single data center. So, like, A, Google and OpenAI and Anthropic are working on this, right?”
Patel: SemiAnalysis reported GPT-4 mixture of experts architecture in January
“Just being clear, I talked about mixture of experts in January, it's just people didn't really notice it.”
Patel: Google TPU v5e is half the size of TPU v5p
“TPUv-V-V-E is, like the new one, but it's mostly, mostly an inference chip. It's a small chip. It's a little bit, it's about half the size of a TPUv-V-V. That chip, you know, you can get very good performance on, like, Of Lama, 70 B inference, right?”