再次与我的双胞胎兄弟 Dylan Patel 聊天,非常开心。
我们探讨了未来几年实验室的经济学——随着 RSI(递归自我改进)临近,算力重心如何从推理转向训练;以及 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 如何有望在未来几年内掌控全球大部分可用 FLOPs(因为他们能更好地将算力变现,从而在竞价中压过所有人)。
接着我们讨论了:到本十年末,我们将会看到的总计超过 10 万亿美元的 AI 资本支出,是否会导致主权债务危机——超大规模云厂商的债务推高利率,将未涉足 AI 的国家推向破产,并重挫非 AI 类股票。
我们未能解决的一个问题是:是否存在任何力量能够抗衡这个行业正在涌向中心化的所有趋势——训练中的规模经济、算力的稀缺性,以及最终会到来的持续学习和 RSI。
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Grok Bot 在我寻找新编辑的过程中帮了大忙。我创建了一个招聘机器人,描述了我想要找的编辑类型。然后这个机器人又派生出几个子代理,它们翻遍了我的邮件和 X 私信,阅读了我喜欢的各种纪录片的片尾字幕,并查明了哪些人给我最喜欢的 YouTuber 做剪辑。它汇总了所有这些结果,然后给我提供了一份符合我标准的候选人短名单。你也可以在 x.ai/bot 亲自试试 Grok Bot。
Antithesis 让你能把“时间旅行”加入软件测试工具箱。由于 Antithesis 平台是完全确定性的,其中发生的一切都可以完美复现。所以如果你的软件崩溃了,你可以倒回到精确的出错时刻,冻结时间,然后进行调查。或者你可以通过扰动系统来测试不同的假设:杀掉一个节点或禁用一个功能,看看会发生什么,然后重置轨迹再尝试别的方案。了解更多请访问 antithesis.com/dwarkesh
Jane Street 目前正在招聘两个独立的机器学习实习生岗位,一个主要侧重研究,另一个侧重工程。两种岗位都要求实习生参与实际工作,而非虚构的练习项目:一个常见的项目是将前沿大语言模型论文适配到金融市场,这类任务往往伴随着大量棘手的挑战。重要的是,申请时不需要任何金融背景。2027 年的申请现已开放,请访问 janestreet.com/dwarkesh。
时间戳
(00:00:00)—— 两家实验室很快将控制全球大部分算力
(00:07:01)—— 60 亿美元的晶圆厂资本支出可带来超过 1 万亿美元的最终收入
(00:13:08)—— 如果实验室出价高于所有人,算力价格将上涨
(00:18:22)—— 哪一层将捕获大部分剩余价值?
(00:25:40)—— 什么可能拖慢进展?
(00:29:43)—— 实验室正在将算力从推理转向研发
(00:33:27)—— 中国获得的新增算力不到 10%,但其实验室需求也更少
(00:48:48)—— AI 会导致主权债务危机吗?
(01:07:52)—— 世界未来的劳动力会属于少数几家公司吗?
00:00:00 —— 两家实验室很快将控制全球大部分算力
好的,我再次请到了 Dylan Patel,SemiAnalysis 的创始人。我们版本的“家庭感恩节晚餐”就是每年一次定期播客。不过我们实际上并没有亲戚关系。
Dylan Patel
别告诉别人这件事。
那会毁掉这个神话。基本上,世界经济的走向越来越取决于实验室经济的走向、算力市场的走向等等。我想了解这个疯狂的未来在几年内会变成什么样。但让我们从今天开始说起。请带我了解一下目前实验室的算力和收入情况,也许再展望一两年。
Dylan Patel
回顾去年,即使在年底,美国 GDP 增长的大部分都来自 AI 基础设施。展望今年,即将上线的算力中约有三分之一是面向实验室的,也就是 OpenAI 和 Anthropic。这些算力可能是由其他方建设然后租给它们的,但从最终客户的角度来看,就是它们。
展望未来,算力的投入规模正在急剧膨胀。今年我们的资本开支略超一万亿美元。到2028年,这一数字将超过两万亿美元。各大实验室在这其中的占比也在不断提高。所以最终你会看到一个非常有意思的局面:实验室正从每年花费数百亿美元的公司,变成每年花费数千亿美元,甚至预计到本十年末每年将花费数万亿美元。这至少是他们已经开始与合作伙伴签署的部分合同所反映出的情况。
这要求它们的经济模式发生重大重塑。迄今为止,它们大多是亏损的公司。Anthropic 在第二季度开始盈利。据信在第三季度的某个时点,随着 Codex 和 5.6 等产品的更大规模崛起,OpenAI 甚至也可能开始盈利。但如果回到一年前,它们所有的钱都是风险投资支撑的亏损。即便回到今年年初,也依然是风险投资支撑的亏损。如今它们已经转过拐点,真正开始盈利了。
这并不意味着它们不再吸纳新资本。新资本仍在涌入,以进一步加速增长。但归根结底,它们越来越多的业务是靠自身收入来支撑,而不是靠外部注资。在过去一年半里,它们的利润率确实飙升了。算力的基础成本大约在每兆瓦1000万到1300万到1500万美元之间。
当前最有趣的一点在于:过去,如果他们部署一个模型——比如在英伟达 Hopper GPU 上运行 GPT-4——对 OpenAI 来说是在产生负毛利。但现在,当 OpenAI 部署 GPT-5.6,或 Anthropic 部署 Opus 5 或 Fable 5 时,他们的收入已经远远超过了每兆瓦 1000 万到 1500 万美元的增量成本。以 Anthropic 为例,其收入已经高达每兆瓦 5000 万美元。这让他们现在能够做到的是:“嘿,如果我在推理算力上花 10 美元,实际上能产生 50 美元的收入,然后我可以把这些利润全部再增量投入到训练中。”
我非常想了解的一点是,你如何看待算力在各大实验室的集中化趋势,或者说流向全球其他地方的算力与流向实验室的算力之间的相对比例。如果说现在大约三分之一的增量算力流向了实验室,那么到什么时候,全球增量算力中超过一半会流向实验室?到哪个时间点,实验室会基本上掌握全球绝大部分算力?
Dylan Patel
今年年初,OpenAI 起步于 2 吉瓦,Anthropic 不到 2 吉瓦。到今年年底,两家都会超过 5 吉瓦。所以他们的总算力增长了 3 到 4 倍。如果看新增的增量算力,这大约占今年全球新增算力的 30%。
展望明年,考虑到已经签署、敲定、落笔的合同,情况会更加惊人。Anthropic 和 OpenAI 明年将拿走高达 40% 到 50% 的算力。这种集中化趋势看起来并没有放缓或停止的迹象。事实上,它似乎只会加速。
为他们建造这些算力的厂商将会发生变化。明年,一个重要的新入局者就是 SpaceX,他们正在建设大量算力。他们很可能会主动将其中相当一部分租给 Anthropic 和 OpenAI,因为他们是最有能力支付最高价格的增量买家。此外,OpenAI 和 Anthropic 也开始自建算力——OpenAI 用自己的芯片,Anthropic 则使用从 Google 采购、并通过 Fluidstack 部署的 TPU。
于是你问:“嘿,全球新增算力什么时候会有一半只流向 OpenAI 和 Anthropic?”实际上到明年年底,新增算力的一半就已经流向 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 了。
因为算力增长太快,新增算力基本上将占据算力总量的大部分。所以很快——你是说大概一年半到两年之内——全球大部分算力就会被两家实验室掌控,或者至少是在为两家实验室的需求服务。
现在有这样一个趋势:全球算力(以吉瓦计)每年翻一番,但前沿实验室的算力每年翻三倍。如果保持当前趋势,从今年年初的 2 到今年年底接近 6,直接乘以 3 就行。到 2027 年底是 18,到 2028 年底是 54。你会不会觉得:“好吧,到那个时候,考虑到全球算力总量,他们根本不可能继续三倍增长了?”你如何看待未来几年全球算力的局面?
Dylan Patel
如果今年新增算力是 30 吉瓦,明年 50 吉瓦,后年大约 70 吉瓦,你就会看到一个非常有趣的现象。今年新部署的每一瓦算力,效率都远高于两年前部署的瓦数。全球算力中有很大比例是今年部署的。虽然部署的瓦数没有翻倍,但我部署的是 GB300、TPUv7 和 Trainium3,这些芯片的效率要高得多得多。它们每瓦性能是上一代芯片的 3-5 倍。
所以最终你面前有一个巨大的阶梯。如果 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 明年拿下 45% 的算力,那么到 2027 年 12 月,它们就已经拿下了全球新增算力的一半。但全球新增算力的这一半,实际性能比之前所有算力都更高。所以这上面还有另一个乘数效应。等到 2028 年底——如果这个趋势持续下去,而我看不到任何阻止它的因素——它们就会独自掌控全球大部分可用算力(flops)。
00:07:01 – 60亿美元的晶圆厂资本支出可撬动超过1万亿美元的最终收入
我感到困惑的是,为什么你认为如果我们进入一个算力价值大幅提升的世界,2028年我们只会新增80吉瓦。
Dylan Patel
顺便说一句,那是上限。那属于“我他妈的极度看多”的情形。
好,咱们来做个链式推理。几个月前我采访你时,你说要制造一吉瓦的,我记得是Vera Rubins,需要55,000片N3晶圆、6,000片N5晶圆和170,000片DRAM晶圆。我不知道这些数字现在有没有变化。
Dylan Patel
我要调侃你一下——你说“晶圆”的方式太印度了。“Vafers”。
顺便说一句,我们刚搬到美国的时候,我的v/w不分特别严重,而且我当时还是个素食主义者。
Dylan Patel
我记得你跟我讲过这件事。
在北达科他州,我上小学的时候,我会说——
Dylan Patel
能给我来个“wedgie”吗?
能给我来几个“wedgies”吗?
总之,那是针对一吉瓦的。我让一个大语言模型运行了你的晶圆厂设备模型,算出基本上每一年生产一吉瓦算力所需的工具成本是多少。它给出的数字是30到40亿美元。现在假设你再加上洁净室、厂房外壳以及晶圆厂的其他一切。那么60亿美元的晶圆厂资本支出每年就能产出一吉瓦。而一吉瓦目前能产生1000亿美元的收入。
而且这60亿美元的资本支出每年都在产出一吉瓦,这一吉瓦每年都在产生1000亿美元。所以在五年时间里,第一吉瓦已经产生了五年的利润,晶圆厂产出的第二吉瓦已经产生了四年的利润,以此类推。晶圆厂层面的60亿美元资本支出最终将产生超过一万亿美元的AI最终收入。
Dylan Patel
没错。但沿途有大量的运营支出。还有很多其他资本支出,比如数据中心、电力。
而且你还得为OpenAI的研发买单。
Dylan Patel
安装。这里有很多不同的人都需要分到钱。
把这些中间环节拿走一半,仍然意味着晶圆厂资本支出与最终产生的收入之间存在100倍的差距。实际上还不止,但我们只是非常保守地估计。结果是……这就是资本主义。存在如此巨大的差距,你可以把1美元变成100美元。他们难道想不出办法造出更多镜子吗?
Dylan Patel
他们确实在想。只是这些镜子需要时间才能造出来。
但紧迫性如此之大,Anthropic 和 OpenAI 都在说:“我们现在就能赚一万亿美元,但瓶颈就卡在进入 ASML 机器的镜子上。”如果我们在这上面花1000亿美元,怎么能造出更多镜子?这就是我们很快就要面对的局面。我们难道解决不了那个供应瓶颈吗?这似乎很难想象。
Dylan Patel
你见过有人在这里做有趣的套利——买下涡轮机然后试图转卖,因为涡轮机的价值要高得多,毕竟它是制约你数据中心的关键瓶颈。我觉得如果有人有4亿美元,并且有能力说服 ASML 卖给他们一台 EUV 光刻机,他们完全应该直接买一台,等着,然后以超过10亿美元的价格卖出去。
但归根结底,是的,资本主义会让这些东西扩张。但这像一条鞭子。鞭子的信号传到末端需要很长时间。供应链不会立即反应。事实上,你去跟 Carl Zeiss 的人聊,他们会说:“对对对,我们到本十年末需要造出100台 EUV 光刻机。”今年早些时候我们做那期节目时,他们甚至不认为自己需要造那么多——足以支撑每年100台 EUV 光刻机的镜子。现在他们说:“好吧,我们需要做到。”但实际上,考虑到正在发生的所有这些经济因素,应该还要更多。产能爬坡需要太长时间了。
假设这个产业链上的每一家公司都被私募股权收购了。某个极度信奉 AGI 的人进来后说:“我们要把产能最大化。”你觉得,在制造更多东西这件事上,物理层面的约束会是什么?我问这个问题的原因是,我们很快就要进入这样一个世界:实验室的收入,或者说仅仅是 AI 的现金流——因为显然加速器业务也有巨大的现金流——会大到你可以直接用这些现金流来为所有产能的极端扩张提供资金。
Dylan Patel
我大体上同意。显然存在一些物理约束。按照目前供应链扩张的方式,100 这个数字大致仍然是正确的。
针对 2030 年?
Dylan Patel
2030 年需要 100 台 ASML 设备。但如果你说:“卡尔蔡司,这是 100 亿美元。请给我拼命扩大产能。”那情况就会改变。你必须对供应链上的每一家公司都这么做。
但你不认为这会在明年发生?
Dylan Patel
我不认为今年会发生。我不认为明年会发生。我也不认为后年会发生,因为这个世界受资本约束。
但在这样一个世界里,比如说,顶级实验室明年合计产生一万亿美元的收入,它们却无法从中拿出 100 亿美元来——
Dylan Patel
我不认为它们会这么做,但是……
或者至少拿出数千亿?看起来它们似乎已经意识到世界正在朝哪个方向发展。我觉得它们完全可以……
Dylan Patel
问题是,实验室明年确实会产生数千亿美元的收入。但最终,明年的资本支出大约是 2 万亿美元。所以这里存在巨大的错配。晶圆制造设备供应链的规模大约在 2000 亿美元量级。数据中心市场供应链的规模会更大。加速器供应链的规模还会更大。能源供应链也会有一个不小的数字。把这些全部加起来,资本支出总额将远超 2 万亿美元。所以实验室的现金流还没有达到能够为这些东西提供资金的程度。
显然它们永远不会达到那个程度,因为你总是希望让你的资本支出高于你的回报。
Dylan Patel
是的,你要再投资。
00:13:08 – 如果各大实验室的出价超过所有人,算力价格将会上涨
我真正想理解的关键问题是:如果当前趋势持续下去,到 2028 年底,每个实验室的算力将超过 50 吉瓦。那么它们合计将拥有 100 吉瓦。正如你所说,这些吉瓦到 2028 年将带来比现在多出数倍的吞吐量或性能,因为硬件已经变得更好了。不仅每瓦特浮点运算次数增加了,而且硬件在处理 AI 工作负载方面的表现也更好了。
好的,那么到 2028 年底,实验室拥有 100 吉瓦。全球算力总量是多少?
Dylan Patel
我认为这可能有点困难,因为到 2028 年,它们已经拿走了增量算力的 70-80%。我不确定届时市场会发生什么。算力价格要飙升到什么程度,它们才能真正买下 70-80% 的算力?Google 或 Meta 或 Amazon 愿意卖出那么多吗?
另外,当我们谈论这些吉瓦数字时,有一个注意事项。当 Amazon 在提供 Bedrock Anthropic 模型服务时,在我们的世界观里,这算作 Anthropic 的算力,因为归根结底,它最终被计为 Anthropic 的收入,尽管存在收入分成和返点之类的安排。但最终到 2028 年,如果它们合计达到 100 吉瓦,它们就已经对市场做出了真正具有颠覆性的事情。
因为如今任何人都能靠每兆瓦 1000-1500 万美元的算力赚到钱。我没开玩笑,这并不难。去弄一个 GB300 机架,去下载 Kimi 的权重,去下载 vLLM 或 SGLang,把它搭起来。Codex 和 Fable 实际上可以帮你做到这一点。这相当简单。不是小菜一碟,但也不是什么高深莫测的事。把它放到 OpenRouter 上。非常简单。你开始产生的收入会超过你为算力支付的费用。
这已经导致这种算力定价——每兆瓦 1000-1500 万美元——开始向上拐头。要达到 2028 年的 100 吉瓦,你必须相信实验室能够为算力支付更高的价格,因为任何人都能在 1000 到 1500 万美元的价格下赚钱。算力现在会涨到每兆瓦 2500 万美元吗?会涨到每兆瓦 4000 万美元吗?
正如你所说,目前各大实验室每兆瓦产生的收入已经远超其他所有人。如果他们能保持目前这样的领先优势,那么这种情况预计会持续下去。如果存在某种递归式自我改进,让 AI 实验室相对获得提升——或者他们在内部拥有不对外发布的模型,用来帮助自己把下一代模型做得更好——那么这种情况预计会更加明显。
你不是已经看到这种情况了吗?SpaceX,或者其他稍微落后一点的机构,如果无法像实验室那样在内部把算力变现,就会把算力卖给出价最高的人?你可以预期他们会持续竞标,争取越来越大的算力市场份额。
Dylan Patel
我认为这就是我的世界观。他们会继续吞下越来越多的算力。但归根结底,他们不可能按当前价格或接近当前的价格做到这一点。他们确实必须开始支付每兆瓦 2500 万、3000 万、5000 万美元的价格,才能真正在 2028 年吞下全球 70% 的算力,到 2028 年达到 100 吉瓦——这是一个非常激进的目标。
这件事的另一个极具挑战性的方面在于,我们已经看到 AI 实验室出现了大幅放缓。他们所倡导的这项监管,实际上对实验室的拖累远大于对开源中文语言模型的拖累。OpenAI 没有发布 Astra。OpenAI 停止训练两周。Anthropic 没有发布其安全评估所认定的 Model 2——外界普遍认为那是 Mythos 的下一代版本。
他们显然没有发布自己最好的模型,在这种情况下,他们每兆瓦的收入会停滞,甚至可能再次开始下滑,因为其他模型又变得有竞争力了。并不是他们在落后,只是他们没有发布自己最顶尖的东西。
如果存在某种监管影响,阻止他们发布最好的模型呢?那么他们每兆瓦的收入就不会爬升得那么快。他们以高于其他人的价格购买增量算力的能力开始减弱,然后也许他们就无法达到那个 100 吉瓦的目标了。
但在一个安全无关紧要的世界里,我确实相信事情就会这样发展。他们每兆瓦可以产生1亿美元甚至更多的收入,也就能为每兆瓦支付5000万美元。其他任何人除了说“拜托,Dario,把我手里的算力全都拿走吧”之外,没有任何合乎逻辑的理由去用这些算力做别的事。但还有一些我们无法描述的势力在起作用,它们可能会减缓这一进程。
我觉得一个好的直觉启发是:如果AI模型真的能像一名完全自动化的软件工程师一样出色会怎样?它们目前还达不到那个水平。我认为它们距离完全自动化一名白领员工的全部工作还差得很远。但白领员工年收入在六位数或更高。如果你有一个吉瓦级的算力,能够支撑大约一百万白领员工的规模,那么由此带来的……那就是1000亿美元。这其实低得惊人。
Dylan Patel
对,每人10万美元,一百万人。
我不知道。但如果实现完全AGI,每吉瓦带来的价值将是数千亿美元。
00:18:22 —— 哪一层将捕获大部分剩余价值?
Dylan Patel
这件事的另一个方面——我们一直在看到这一点——是大部分价值捕获并没有发生。这些模型产生的大部分价值并没有落到OpenAI和Anthropic手里。值得庆幸的是,到目前为止,这些价值大部分只是被送给了用户。
Jane Street,凭借他们与OpenAI关于GPT-5.6超快速模式的独家合同,或者说Jane Street作为Anthropic最大的客户之一,从他们付费购买的token中产生的价值远远、远远、远远超过Anthropic所获得的利润,因为他们能从市场中赚到钱。
再比如Meta,它一度被传闻占Anthropic业务量的10%。他们通过优化广告算法之类的做法,让用户参与时长延长了5%,所有这些都带来了更高的效率。他们从使用这些模型中赚到的钱比Anthropic多得多。
这就是所需要的。当然,如果你有一百万名新的软件工程师,软件工程师的成本也会下降。
我感到困惑的一点是,市场会达到均衡状态吗?如果会达到均衡,你是否会预期算力的价格等于 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 能从中产生的收益,或者非常接近这个数值,只给 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 留出很小的加价空间?
目前很奇怪的是,算力的售价与 Anthropic 能从中赚到的钱之间存在 4 倍甚至更大的差距。在一个每吉瓦收入持续增长的世界里,如果 Anthropic 将每吉瓦变现的能力翻倍或翻三倍,那么差距继续扩大就很奇怪了。Anthropic 仅仅凭借一些权重,就能把花 10 美元买来的东西变成 100 美元。
Dylan Patel
这总是一个有趣的问题。价值在 AI 中流向何处?AI 正在创造所有这些价值。你有终端用户,我认为我们都同意他们创造的价值比任何人都多,因此他们为这些模型支付了很多钱。然后是应用层。到目前为止,应用层创造的价值非常少。然后是模型层,直到一年前它还在产生负毛利,而现在则产生了巨大的正毛利。看起来它正走在每兆瓦产生 1 亿美元收入的道路上。所以正如你所说,把 10-15 美元变成 100 美元。
但如果回到一年前,硬件供应链攫取了所有这些毛利,而其他所有人都在亏钱。OpenAI 和 Anthropic 只是在把风投的钱砸进去,许多其他初创公司也是如此。许多超大规模云厂商在不确定是否会有回报的情况下建设基础设施。
所以最终你在模型层创造了负价值,可以这么说,因为他们以低于基础设施成本的价格出售 token。所有价值都被芯片、晶圆厂捕获了。最初在 2023 年,存储厂商从 HBM 或 AI 存储中赚不到钱,尽管理论上他们交付的价值是巨大的。
现在你有了……嗯,实际上台积电从价值中分到的份额远不如存储厂商。所以价值捕获的分布发生了很大变化,这对追踪市场或参与市场的人来说非常有趣,比如 Jane Street 就是一个例子。这不是广告。这不是广告。这不是广告。
他们是赞助商,但你也不用这么卖力地给他们打广告。
Dylan Patel
那接下来会发生什么?Anthropic 和 OpenAI 已经开始逐渐膨胀它们在价值捕获中的份额。它们会继续膨胀并拿走全部价值吗?嗯,这曾经是一种想法,然后 Elon 证明了,“实际上,不是这样。我可以把我的算力以每兆瓦 2500 万美元或每兆瓦 4000 万美元的价格卖给 Anthropic 和 Google。即使这是短期交易,我也已经按这个价格卖出去了,一年之内我就能收回全部资本开支。”
你预测相关批次的算力——比如 SpaceX 以每吉瓦 400 亿美元卖给 Google 的 B300 或类似的东西——到明年年底会卖到什么价格?
Dylan Patel
我认为大多数算力交易仍将维持在每吉瓦低于 200 亿美元的水平。
即使到明年年底也是这样?
Dylan Patel
因为所有这些都必须靠融资来支撑。如果 Meta、微软、亚马逊、SpaceX 可以在不找到客户的情况下就建设算力,只是说一句,“管他呢,我就要建这些算力,”然后等到建好之后再回头找客户,那他们就掌控了局面。
大多数算力都是在建成之前就签好合同的。这就是 Elon 在市场上利用的机会。他实际上拥有所有这些算力。他就像在说,“嘿,Anthropic,我知道你们每吉瓦能赚 600 多亿美元。你们不如花一大笔钱把我的东西买了吧?”显然,这也不是 Elon 单方面决定的,也不是 Anthropic 单方面决定的。市场自己找到了平衡。
其他人呢,你去随便找一家云服务商,他们会说,“好,我要建一吉瓦的算力,或者 100 兆瓦的算力。我要投入这笔资本开支。我需要回头去找客户。如果我想找到客户,我就需要找到资金。谁会同时给我资金和客户?客户必须先签下合同。然后我拿着客户的承诺去信贷市场融资。”
所以存在一种完全不同的权力结构,Meta 实际上在囤积算力。他们和 SpaceX 是仅有的两个可能的第三名,因为他们囤积了所有这些算力。他们利用自己的资产负债表和能力来建设算力,却没有一个能大规模变现的终端客户。他们有真实的资产负债表,所以可以去信贷市场融资。你建一个吉瓦的算力,就能赚到利润,不是疯狂的利润,但也是不错的利润。现在我就拥有了所有这些算力。
现在 Meta 和 SpaceX 拥有了这种选择权,可以环顾四周然后想:“我的内部用例能让我赚更多钱,还是我应该把这些算力以疯狂的利润率卖给 Anthropic 或 OpenAI?”所以现在我们进入了一个新阶段,SpaceX 和 Meta 在说:“实际上,我要建算力,而且我可以不按 13 美元出租。我可以卖到 25 美元、50 美元,甚至更高。”
00:25:40 – 数据中心监管会拖慢 AI 的发展吗?
你觉得到 2027 年底,他们每吉瓦的收入会是多少?对 Anthropic 或 OpenAI 来说,到 27 年底。
Dylan Patel
我认为这在很大程度上取决于谁拥有最好的模型,以及他们是否被允许继续发布自己最好的模型。但我不认为每兆瓦的收入会低于 5000 多万美元。
到 27 年底。
Dylan Patel
哦,到 27 年底?那就更有挑战性了,但我认为可能会更高,达到每兆瓦 7000 万到 8000 万美元,按公司整体混合计算,甚至可能更高。
看起来低了。
Dylan Patel
如果是这样的话,那算力的价格会怎样变化?如果我是 Anthropic,增量算力是值得的。也许我会在 SpaceX 的算力上每兆瓦花 4000 万美元。如果我是 SpaceX,我会看向供应链,然后想:“嗯,我和 Jensen 达成了这笔交易(他现在突然开始用 Twitter 了)。”Elon 说他们只独家使用 Nvidia 的芯片,但为什么 Jensen 不涨价呢?然后 SK 海力士、美光和三星看到这种情况,也会想:“那我们为什么不涨价呢?”
关于价值获取,我认为这里存在一个“牛鞭效应”。仅仅因为有人提价,并不意味着整个供应链会立即重新平衡。但随着时间的推移,供应链会重新平衡,成本会越来越高。要获得那部分增量产能,你基本上不得不这样做。所以台积电提价非常缓慢,但内存公司提价非常快。基板公司提价也非常快。埃隆不会在15美元时出售,但他现在出售是因为价格已经超过25美元。所以显然他提价提得非常快。
我很惊讶你认为到明年年底,每吉瓦的营收增长幅度不会远超100美元。
迪伦·帕特尔
递归自我改进什么时候发生?起飞什么时候发生?
或者即使递归自我改进不发生,就说当前的发展速度继续保持。看看我们在过去一年半里取得了多少进展。一年半前的模型是什么?Claude 3.5 之类的?
迪伦·帕特尔
我对这个问题的看法是,世界上现存最好的模型是在二月份训练的。
所以你的意思是,也许我们根本不被允许发布实验室最好的模型。
迪伦·帕特尔
OpenAI 说他们两周内不训练模型,天哪。这到底是怎么回事?
有一件事是,在内部,他们是否获得了足够的使用量,以至于会推高算力的价格?另一件事是,AI 整体的进步是否会因为监管而放缓?
迪伦·帕特尔
是的,但他们甚至不允许在内部使用这个新模型。Astra 甚至没有在内部广泛部署。
但话说回来,如果你有一个模型是……去年年初发布的模型是什么?GPT……
迪伦·帕特尔
4o?是 4o 吗?
是的。你说的是,到2027年底,会再次实现从 GPT-4o 到 Mythos 2 级别的飞跃。
迪伦·帕特尔
是的,但 Mythos 2 还没发布。
或者甚至 Mythos。又是那种飞跃。
迪伦·帕特尔
甚至 Mythos 也不被允许发布。他们把它阉割了。我们不能用它来优化推理性能。我们不能用它来优化各种其他东西。
是的,也许AI进展或AI部署会出现一些放缓,这意味着每吉瓦的营收可以更低。但在我看来,这是唯一能让明年年底每兆瓦营收只有1亿美元的情况。
Dylan Patel
只要模型变得更好,它产生的价值就会变得更好。显然,谁能捕获这部分价值仍有争议,但最终每个人都会提高价格。因为他们可以这样做,而且这具有极强的通胀效应。
尤其是如果监管方式是……目前,到目前为止,监管方式还只是“不要发布模型”。但越来越多的监管方式是纽约禁止数据中心。得克萨斯州在实施暂停令。俄亥俄州在说,或者至少试图说,你必须支付一定半径内所有人的房产税。这类事情会减少供应并增加成本。这些成本也会被转嫁出去。
你最终会陷入这样一种局面:进展确实放缓了,至少从外部感知来看是这样,即使模型内部在持续变得更好。在爆发式增长的情景下,为什么Anthropic不把最好的模型比外部可用的版本提前六个月发布?因为安全和监管的原因,但也是因为竞争优势?如果进展在加速,那六个月的差距实际上是一个更大的差异。
所以,这就是会限制每兆瓦营收增长、使其远低于今年上半年增速的因素。
00:29:43 – 实验室正在将算力从推理转向研发
这是我很感兴趣的一点。随着这些公司上市并对投资者负责,假设到明年年底它们拥有接近20吉瓦的算力。那么10%的算力就是2吉瓦。
假设它们想把训练算力的占比从60%提高到70%。而它们的投资者会说:“如果你们每吉瓦能产生1000亿美元的营收,那你们为了增加训练算力,基本上就是在对2000亿美元的营收说不。”所以投资者会说:“搞什么?你们在训练上已经花了那么多钱。为什么还要在训练上花更多?”
作为一家上市公司,你觉得如果他们直接说“不,我们会继续提高用于训练的算力占比,以抵消每吉瓦算力带来的收入增长”,会发生什么?
Dylan Patel
这是我个人的看法。各大实验室会随着时间的推移,把越来越少的算力分配给推理。我认为这个观点非常非主流。大多数人的标准看法是:“哦,大部分算力都会用于推理。”但实际上,大部分算力会用于训练的前向传播,而不一定是产生收入的推理。
归根结底,如果今天每兆瓦能产生3000-4000万美元收入,你会把40%分配给推理。如果现在每兆瓦能产生6000-7000万美元收入,你还会把40%分配给推理,然后赚取所有这些利润,再做分红和股票回购吗?还是去造AGI?我认为Anthropic和OpenAI的答案很明显——不只是高管层,也包括董事会——就是去造AGI,因为那要赚钱得多。所以最终你会看到他们把用于训练的算力占比不断往上调——
而如果把这些算力用于推理,每一份新增算力都在产生越来越多的利润。
Dylan Patel
没错。关键在于,如果我在卖token……OpenAI推出Ultrafast模式只是给外部用,还是内部也在用?事实证明,不是的。实际上,我会把它同时分配给内部和外部,因为我从超快AI或最好AI模型中获得的内部价值,远超外部用户能带来的价值。
所以最终,当然,我每兆瓦能赚1亿美元,但如果我把这些算力转向AI研究,我能获得多少增量进展?那对我未来的盈利潜力、对我所做一切的折现现金流意味着什么?他们不会去做这种计算,但归根结底,把越来越多的算力投入内部更有意义。推理算力之所以要这么大,唯一的原因就是让你能扩大训练集群。
我认为这是一个很有意思的经济学问题,我觉得我们可以让模型来消化理解。在一个推理所消耗算力占比下降的世界里,需要满足哪些条件才可能成立?
Dylan Patel
我认为过去三个月他们已经在这么做了。我觉得在今年的一些时间段里,他们确实在提高算力占比……我们一个月一个月来看。你会同意,Anthropic 每个月新增的算力都比上个月多。可能在他们签下 SpaceX 之类的交易时会有些波动,但总体而言,算力总量是一条向上的曲线。
所以一月份,他们新增的算力比十二月份少,但他们的收入增长却飙升了。然后他们基本上进入了平台期。他们现在不是每个月都增加 250 亿美元的年度经常性收入(ARR)。这意味着他们获得的边际兆瓦电力,投入到研发的比例高于投入到推理的比例。所以事实上,他们今天正在把更多算力转向研发。我觉得只要你足够仔细地观察他们在做什么,这一点是不言自明的。
00:33:27 – 中国获得的新增算力不到 10%,但其实验室需求更少
如果我看你刚才说的全球算力增长速度的数字,有些事情我想搞清楚。似乎如果我把你刚才说的数字加起来,到 2028 年底全球算力会超过 200 吉瓦,对吧?
Dylan Patel
对,全球范围内。
好的。那 2028 年之后,全球 AI 算力还能以多快的速度继续增长?
Dylan Patel
今年 30,明年 50,2028 年 70。2029 年应该在 90-100 左右。
然后每年就再增加 100 左右?
Dylan Patel
我认为斜率可以继续向上。要预测四年以后的事情很难。谁知道我们是不是处于 RSI 阶段,或者世界经济什么时候能以每年 10% 的速度增长?因为如果你每年新增 100 多吉瓦,那就意味着荒谬的 GDP 增长率。
如果你认为 2028 年全球有 200 吉瓦,那到时候中国有多少?在整个趋势中,中国的算力是如何持续增长的?因为如果 RSI 相关的事情在中国拥有大量算力之前就在西方启动了,那我们可能生活在一个与不启动时截然不同的世界。
Dylan Patel
如果我们把时间拉回到2022年,美国当时新增算力约占全球的45-50%,中国约占30-35%,其余部分由世界其他地区占据。自2022年以来,美国对中国实施了大规模管制,同时美国本土算力大幅增长。所以如今,70%的电力部署在美国。中国所占的比例非常小,用于数据中心AI计算的电力部署不到10%。
展望未来,中国的占比仍然很小。其本土产量相当有限,从Nvidia的采购量也依然很小,而且其中很大一部分最终流向了其他地方,比如马来西亚之类的。
因此,归根结底,中国本土新增算力仍将保持在10%以下。我认为到2028年可能会开始出现拐点。但基本可以肯定的是,中国的AI算力将达到3000万千瓦或更少。
到2028年?
Dylan Patel
是的,2028年。
好的。那他们的增长曲线会以多快的速度飙升?
Dylan Patel
我确实认为在2028年,中国能够部署的算力会有大幅提升。在2026年,他们仍然主要依赖大量走私芯片,以及台积电为那些被认为不是华为、但最终被证实是华为的公司所制造的芯片,还有三星出货的大量HBM。
但到了2027年,晶圆厂开始投产。尤其是2028年,中芯国际和长鑫存储等厂商的晶圆厂开始放量,本土产量实际上将达到每年数百万颗的规模。仅2028年一年,他们就能新增500万到1000万千瓦的本土制造芯片。这些芯片的性能肯定不如Nvidia在2028年、Google在2028年或OpenAI在2028年所拥有的芯片。
所以你的意思是,即使是吉瓦这个数字也高估了实际情况。3000万千瓦没错,但芯片性能确实差得多。不过,如果你认为明年全球将新增1亿千瓦——我知道你说过很难预测那么远——那中国下一年能新增多少?基本上,我想知道的是:他们是在能够大规模出货算力的那一刻就迎来指数级增长,还是说他们的增长仍然会低于美国及其盟友?
Dylan Patel
美国能否通过《MATCH法案》、相关工具是否会继续受到出口管制、中国能以多快速度建成其开始具备本土生产能力的新设备,这些都还存在很大变数。但归根结底,中国必然会迎来爆发式增长。如果说中国最擅长什么,那就是以极快的速度扩大制造规模。
我预计中国将能够越来越多地把外国芯片的采购量转移到国内,或者至少在缩小美国允许英伟达向中国出售芯片的额度方面缩小差距,诸如此类。
但你认为中国在2029年能新增500亿瓦(50吉瓦)的算力吗?
Dylan Patel
我认为这完全合理。其中一部分也可能来自国外采购。但没错,我认为中国在2029年达到500亿瓦是完全合理的。但如果其中大部分是国产芯片,那么存在一个因素:这500亿瓦的实际价值大约只相当于美国芯片的200亿瓦。
对。所以你实际上在预测这样一个世界:如果按质量加权计算吉瓦数,2028年领先的实验室可能拥有比中国在2029年甚至2030年所拥有的全部算力还要多的计算资源。
Dylan Patel
这意味着没有任何措施来减缓美国实验室的发展。
没错。
Dylan Patel
但显然政府和政客们已经开始这么做了。而中国不会放慢AI发展的步伐。事实上,他们唯一会做的就是加速推进。
说实话,当我采访Jensen并问及出口管制时——我是一个自由意志主义者——我并不完全确定自己对这个问题的看法。我当时是在为他所持观点的对立面做最强有力的辩护,因为我认为把各种想法摊开来讨论很重要。我当时想的是:“是啊,也许存在这样一个世界:如果我们只是与中国合作,对我们反而更好,尤其是考虑到他们控制了供应链中如此多的环节,以及机器人技术未来所需的其他东西。”
但我之前没意识到算力状况像你说的这么糟糕。实际上,出口管制似乎确实起到了很大作用……如果他们真的按你说的那个量出货,那差别就大了。等我们有了自动化程序员、开始进入自动化研究员阶段时,中国在算力存量上会远远落后。如果最终真是这样,那这套做法就奏效了。我觉得这其实是一个相当显著的成功。
Dylan Patel
唯一的保留意见是,这里面一部分是出口管制的原因,但另一部分也跟金融体系有关。美国金融体系比中国金融体系更愿意把钱砸进初创公司。但一旦中国金融体系选定一个行业重点投入,它们会给予多得多的补贴。
所以中国半导体行业获得的补贴总额,比全球其他所有半导体行业加起来的补贴还要多得多。如果起飞速度没有你暗示的那么快,而是实际需要更长时间,那么中国最终会在半导体领域大幅追赶上来,而半导体在某个时间点上就等同于算力。
这件事另一个值得注意的方面是,中国公司今天在AI模型上并没有落后太多——至少公众感知上是这样——而考虑到他们拥有的算力量,这就更值得注意了。中国领先的实验室总共最多只有100-200兆瓦的算力,字节跳动的Seed是唯一的例外,他们的算力远超这个数。但Kimi并没有在运行千兆瓦级别的算力,连接近都谈不上。而Anthropic到今年年底会超过5千兆瓦。
所以问题是,这重要吗?我觉得目前这种算力差距没那么重要。当我们拆解一个实验室的算力比例或预算时,到目前为止大约是60%用于训练、40%用于推理。但训练部分还可以进一步拆分。实际上50%的算力用于研究,10%用于开发,然后40%用于推理。
我说的研究和开发是指:研究人员在产生想法、测试新架构、测试新的数据配比、测试新的超参数、新的注意力机制技术,等等等等。但最终当他们进行正式训练时——比如Anthropic训练Mythos时——功耗是低于200兆瓦的。
预训练还是整个流程?
Dylan Patel
预训练。大约不到200兆瓦,持续大概两个月。然后强化学习用的算力甚至更少。
你认为强化学习用的算力比预训练还少?
Dylan Patel
至少就单一地点的预训练而言,是的。
但总算力可能更高,对吧?
Dylan Patel
但这是按顺序进行的。他们在某个时间点最多用过的算力大概是200兆瓦。实际上他们拥有数千兆瓦的算力,所以他们大部分算力都用在了研究上,而不是模型开发上。
这其中有原因。协调所有这些集群很困难。把它们都放在同一地点很困难。做多地点训练很困难。做强化学习也很困难。在强化学习期间生成更多的展开样本并不一定会让它变得更好。有各种各样的原因导致你可能无法把你拥有的全部两千兆瓦算力都用在训练上。实际上,我只能用上200兆瓦。
随着我们在自动化编码和自动化研究方面走得越来越远,我实际上预计用于研究相对于训练的算力预算占比会变得更加模糊,甚至训练占比会更高。还有持续学习之类的事情。所有这些都开始意味着越来越多的算力实际上用在了训练模型上。
如果你最终进入一个每年消耗100吉瓦的世界,按当前价格计算,那将是每年5万亿美元的资本支出。
Dylan Patel
再加上你必须在更早之前就建好发电厂。而且那也是30年期的资产。再加上数据中心是15到20年期的资产,而且你当时也必须把它建好。所以那5万亿美元,一旦你把未来几年的增长考虑进去,实际上会更接近7万亿或10万亿美元的资本支出。
等等,我没明白。那还没有包括数据中心本身没有发电基础设施这个事实。
Dylan Patel
对,没错。谈到AI资本支出时,人们说的是400亿、500亿美元。但那其实只是核心IT部分:服务器、网络、光纤、收发器、光通信,诸如此类。它并没有把数据中心本身或发电厂算进去,而这些都是在提前建设的。
如果今年我建100吉瓦,明年建150吉瓦,那么这150吉瓦对应的所有建筑都需要在今年计入资本支出。如果后年我要建200吉瓦,那所有这些发电厂都需要投入……你今年就得买好涡轮机。所以实际上,如果你在建100吉瓦,这个数字甚至比5万亿美元还要大得多。
对。很有可能,到2030年底,每年的增量资本支出将接近10万亿美元,这将是世界经济总量的近十分之一。如果所有这些都发生在美国……美国经济届时也会增长。但即便如此,按美国经济目前的规模来看,这相当于美国经济的三分之一到四分之一都投向了数据中心。
我这么一说出口,自己都觉得:“也许你是对的,我们就是不会允许这种事发生,而这正是这件事不会成真的原因。”因为要让这种指数级增长持续下去,美国经济的四分之一都在建数据中心。
迪伦·帕特尔
我相信资本主义,相信资源会流向最有利可图的地方。但与此同时,政治是存在的,信贷市场是存在的,资本市场也是存在的。
所以,要实现比如说2030年那100吉瓦的目标……或者我们甚至把它缩减到2028年,那时所有这些项目的资本支出将达到3到4万亿美元:其中超过2.5万亿美元投向IT资本支出,另外1到2万亿美元投向数据中心和能源,以及下游的整个供应链,比如半导体之类的。如果你有3到4万亿美元的资本支出,这些现金从哪里来?目前还没有任何企业能从业务中产生这么多现金。
超大规模云厂商支撑了迄今为止的全部增长。谷歌、微软、亚马逊、Meta。它们承担了其中很大一部分。它们占了算力的一半以上,但如今它们自身并不产生现金流。实际上,它们把所有资金都花在了资本开支上。此外,它们还举债,并把借来的钱也全部投入资本开支。你已经看到Meta这么做了,甚至亚马逊、谷歌也是如此。微软很快也会跟上。所有人都在举债来支付资本开支。
那么,谁是那个以前没出钱、现在要新增出钱的人?以谷歌为例,它们停止回购股票,或者Meta停止回购股票,转而购买计算基础设施,这很简单。这对市场影响不算大,但确实有一定影响。然而,当你展望到2028年——届时超大规模云厂商要举债数千亿美元,它们的整个供应链也要举债数千亿美元——谁来为这一切买单?
有几种不同的方式。有半导体公司,比如英伟达、博通以及存储芯片公司,转身决定为部分资本开支提供资金。还有传统基础设施投资者,他们正在募集资金并投资于基础设施。只不过从桥梁变成了数据中心。
最后,还有经济中的每一个人,他们开始意识到:“也许我不该买房,也许我不该投资那些帮人买房的信贷,也许我不该买政府债券。我应该买超大规模云厂商的债券,或者买这个数据中心的债券,或者买Anthropic的债券。因为Anthropic愿意为新增的十亿美元产能支付20%的利率。因为他们知道由此带来的收入会非常可观,而且他们愿意付20%,因为这仍然比从SpaceX以每吉瓦500亿美元的价格租算力要划算。”
所以你会看到所有这些争夺。但如果你真的这么做,整个世界经济格局就会被彻底重塑。
00:48:48 —— AI会引发主权债务危机吗?
过去几天,你我私下一直在争论一个问题:AI 是否会导致主权债务危机。逻辑是这样的。正如我们刚才提到的,现在出现了一种局面——极少量的投资就能转化为巨额的财富。所以投资回报率——
Dylan Patel
这他妈是个多大的问题啊,兄弟。我的天。简直不敢相信。
不,这对其他那些没法用少量资金撬动巨额财富的人来说,是个天大的问题。所以投资回报率极高。哪怕只看数据中心层面,如果你建一个数据中心,想以折旧成本 10 倍的价格租给 Anthropic 或 OpenAI,这他妈简直离谱。你投 1 美元,年底就能变成 2 美元、甚至 10 美元。这会推高利率。
那么,如果利率走高,而且是对整个经济而言……人们借的钱越来越多。他们在跟政府原本会做的放贷竞争,跟其他公司原本会做的放贷竞争,也跟你作为消费者或房贷购房者原本会做的借贷竞争。这让其他所有人的借贷成本都变得更贵。这对千千万万的人都有巨大的影响。抱歉,我可能要在这儿多说几句,但这些问题是我们一起思考过的。
我觉得美国最终会没事。因为如果数据中心建在美国境内,你基本上可以直接对数据中心征税。但按照现行税制,企业所得税占联邦财政收入的比例不到 10%。超过 80% 来自工资税和所得税,而随着自动化程度越来越高,这部分税基会不断萎缩。
与此同时,在支出端,目前有 20% 的税收收入用于偿还债务,也就是支付债务利息。而现在很大一部分债务是短期的,所以每五年就要展期一次。你他妈笑什么?
Dylan Patel
因为这些都是你上个月才学到的东西。
说得好像你就不是一样。你可是拿了金融经济学学位的人。
Dylan Patel
我没有。网上的人都以为我是养蜂的。就几个月,就几个月的事。
这就是我们的行当,Dylan。
Dylan Patel
我知道,我知道。抱歉,抱歉。
这下我有点不自在了。靠。
Dylan Patel
不,挺好的。你做得很好。我只是觉得挺好笑。一百万人听这个家伙讲他上个月才刚学会的债务知识。
假设利率上升 1%。以五年为基准,用于偿还债务的税收收入占比会从 20% 上升到 25%。如果利率上升 5 个百分点,这个比例会超过 40%。但如果把政府每年借入 2 万亿美元这个事实也考虑进去,那就会从 40% 一路涨到 60% 以上。也就是说,60% 的税收收入仅仅用来支付债务利息。
不过,我认为美国会没事,因为如果我们允许数据中心在美国建设,税基就会扩大。在我看来,其他国家绝对完蛋了。我刚刚在看哪些国家债务很多、税收收入很少,而且债务偿还频率很高。像巴基斯坦或尼日利亚这样的国家,我觉得在这种新的利率环境下会非常惨。
Dylan Patel
正是这种挤出效应,才不是“管他呢,上 10 亿吉瓦”。你看有这么多行业和国家大量使用债务,你之前提到的那些贫困国家,它们就直接违约了。还有消费品行业,所有那些你在 Trader Joe‘s 之类地方看到的东西的生产公司,它们用了大量债务。所有电信公司也用了大量债务。银行也用了大量债务。
所以如果市场利率上升——不一定是政府设定的利率,而是政府公布的联邦利率与其他所有人收取的利率之间的利差,因为亚马逊明年想借 1000 亿美元债务,或者管它具体是多少,可能少一些——你就会面临一个非常棘手的问题:钱从哪来?
有一部分是靠现金流来支撑的,而且现金流还在持续增长。但合乎逻辑的做法是投资远超你现金流的规模,因为那样未来几年的回报会非常惊人。所以就有了这个差额。
那么,压低这个增量的,就是所有这些其他因素:针对数据中心的监管、消费者的不满、政客的不满、针对AI的监管,以及AI实验室出于安全原因不发布最新模型。利率上升对所有这些因素都有影响。所以,所有这些因素都在把曲线从资本主义在纯粹、简单的经济学意义上想要的方向,拉向我们这个复杂系统想要的方向,并且越拉越低,以至于最终建成的吉瓦数达不到本应建成的规模。
嗯,但利率本身就是资本主义的一部分,对吧?
Dylan Patel
对,但这是在简单经济模型和更复杂的现实情况之间的区别。
你觉得明年亚马逊或Anthropic之类的公司发行债券融资的利率会是多少?如果他们发行数千亿美元的债券。平均利率是多少?
Dylan Patel
我不认为亚马逊会发行数千亿美元的债券。
我是说总共。比如说所有大型科技公司加起来。
Dylan Patel
超大规模云厂商加起来,以及所有云服务商……在我们做的建模中,2024年到2029年的资本开支大约是11万亿美元。
总共?
Dylan Patel
总共。如果你尽可能多地用现金流来融资,最终仍然会有超过5万亿美元的信贷需要发行,来支撑这11万亿美元以上的建设规模。
所以你不认为AI收入能继续每年翻三倍增长?
Dylan Patel
AI收入确实在增长。但我不认为它能永远增长下去而不碰到某些约束。实验室会有某些激励。在很多情况下,实验室并不是所有算力的建设方,尽管他们越来越倾向于往那个方向走。
但他们会有这么多现金流。你说收入会是多少?你觉得他们不会有那么多收入吗?
Dylan Patel
不,我只是说,到2029年,资本开支的规模在11万亿美元左右。其中6万亿美元用现金融资,5万亿美元用债务融资。如果是这样的话,整个生态系统要筹集5万亿美元的债务,确实会推高利率。
那什么能阻止这种情况呢?有几件事。其一,实验室会不会提高每兆瓦的营收,并保持推理算力分配充足?如果是这样,他们就把标普500的全部利润都积累到自己手里,因为所有人都在花钱降本。当然,他们自己的利润也会上升,但现金总得有来源。所以,他们的营收增速相对于他们为世界创造的价值,是存在上限的。而且这项技术还有扩散效应。
但归根结底,实验室的营收会持续上涨。他们无法完全靠现金流来支撑一切。最优的方案其实是尽可能多地利用信贷来融资,因为即便实验室的现金流能支撑很多东西,你想建的规模比那更大。所以,总会有一定规模的信贷被创造出来。
我们目前的模型测算显示,到2029年,信贷规模为5万亿美元,现金出资的基础设施投资为6万亿美元。把这些算进去,相对于AI模型带来的需求增长,算力仍然不够。所以答案显而易见——每兆瓦的营收会持续上升。
有道理。那你觉得到2029年,这一切会把利率推高多少?
Dylan Patel
兄弟,这纯粹是拍脑袋估个数,但既然要拍……世界经济的增速在大幅上升,那亚马逊的利率凭什么不从现在的位置往上涨?
这个数字会非常拍脑袋,但最近Meta以5%到6%的利率融资。我看不出他们为什么不会付8%。他们会很乐意付8%,因为他们要建的算力带来的回报是巨大的。市场不希望他们付这么高,但他们自己愿意付8%。
反过来看,如果他们从现在的5%、5.5%、6%涨到8%——也就是250个基点的上升——那经济里的其他所有人也得跟着多付250个基点,这会引发一连串连锁反应。银行会叫苦连天,因为如果它们的信用利差扩大,债务的重新定价速度会快于资产的重新定价。如果信用利差爆掉,它们最终会亏掉大量资金。
这一点的另一个后果——这是你提出的观点——是如果利率上升,贴现率就会提高,这意味着所有股票的贴现现金流都会暴跌。也就是说,即使整个股市表现尚可——标普500没问题——任何一只个股的价值很可能也已经暴跌了,尤其是巴菲特、伯克希尔那种类型,即“未来30年持续产生良好现金流”的股票。
Dylan Patel
是的。就像在问:“我为什么要为强生付这么多钱?”它们被视为稳健股:现金流良好,会随时间逐步回馈现金流。或者一家铁路公司。如果我的贴现率不是3%或5%,我凭什么投那么多钱?现在已经是8%或10%了。
对于发展中国家……Basil Halperin,他是我的好朋友,也是一位经济学家,他提出我们会看到第二次沃尔克冲击。80年代,为了对抗通胀,美联储主席保罗·沃尔克把利率提高了5个百分点以上,实际利率大约达到8%。那导致那个十年里大约40个国家——主要位于拉丁美洲——发生违约。我认为这种情况很可能会再次发生。
好,现在我们开始聊奇点了。我们刚才一直在讨论利率上升会发生什么——
Dylan Patel
顺便说一句,我认为这一切都发生在奇点之前。
对,我就是这个意思。我们刚才说的是在奇点之前,利率上升2-3%等等。到了某个时点,我认为世界经济非常有可能每年翻一番。这不是五年内会发生的事,但最终会到来。有一位研究者叫Damon Binder,他在这方面做了很棒的工作。如果你去看一个完全自动化经济体的投入产出表……要让经济中全部物资存量每年翻一番,需要什么条件?
Dylan Patel
是的。如果经济每年增长3%,那么按70法则,就是20多年翻一番。
对。但他说的是:“好吧,现在我们的瓶颈在于人力,而且你不可能每年都让人员翻倍。”但在一个你也能每年让劳动力翻倍的世界里,经济能增长多快?我觉得它可以每年翻一番。至少也会是每年百分之几十的增长。
好吧。利率应该会非常接近增长率。不会完全相等,因为还有消费的因素,但应该会相当接近。然后我们会进入一个——我认为是在2030年代——利率达到百分之几十的世界。我脑子里有一部分在想:“可能会是百分之几百,”但我们就说至少是百分之几十吧。
我就想,好吧。每一个没有参与AI生产的国家都会违约。每一只不是AI股的股票基本上都一文不值,因为折现现金流毫无价值。如果联邦政府想不出办法对AI征税,那么偿债支出就会超过当前的税收收入。而且还有所有这些其他影响,我敢肯定我们甚至都没把它们计入价格:你贷不到房贷,等等等等。
从根本上说,这个世界正在发生什么?这全都是技术宅的黑话,对吧?但让我们退一步看。到底发生了什么?
Dylan Patel
现在才开始说黑话吗?
我们会进入一个完全不同的增长模式。经济基本上在说:“嘿,现在政府借钱给民众发养老金的的机会成本极高。因为那些钱本可以用来建一座机器人工厂,而这座工厂再去建另一座机器人工厂,那座再建下一座。”资本的机会成本会大幅上升。这从根本上就是我们刚才讨论的所有这些事情的根源。
Dylan Patel
随着利率上升,股票市场会受到重创。连AI公司也不例外。有些真正相信AI的人会说:“为什么美光、海力士或者铠侠的市盈率只有2到3倍?”答案是:“嗯,如果你真的被AI洗脑了,那经济里的每一样东西都应该以2到3倍的市盈率交易。”如果你没被AI洗脑,那当然,它们确实是超额盈利了。
这是一个论证,说明为什么——我认为内存股会表现很好——内存股不应该再涨10倍或类似幅度。因为如果我们处于一个对内存有如此巨大需求的市场——这意味着AI已经引发了经济的剧烈变革——那么所有东西都应该以2到3倍的市盈率交易,股市应该彻底崩盘。
从某种意义上说,Meta的估值……我认为他们是一家大约1.5万亿美元的公司。这算什么?太荒谬了。他们的价值远不止于此,至少在逻辑上是这样。你只要看看他们的现金流、他们囤积的所有基础设施,以及他们将要能够以每瓦特疯狂的价格出售的所有算力——要么以token的形式出售(因为他们的实验室成功了),要么直接卖给Anthropic和OpenAI。
这最终变成了一个问题:你必须把所有的资本重新配置给AGI。而做到这一点的方式,就是把其他所有人都挤出市场。所以AGI的瓶颈不在于研究工程师——比如我们的室友Sholto——能多快地转动齿轮。实际上真正的问题是,世界其他地方愿意让这件事走多远?
因为他们会进行监管。他们显然会提高利率。他们会说“不许建数据中心”。他们会说“停止建晶圆厂”。他们会说“天哪,每家公司的股权价值都在暴跌,那我怎么还能花钱买AI来提升我的业务?”
那么,Anthropic和OpenAI就必须开始自己建设这些东西。他们已经在打造自己的芯片了,或者至少在设计自己的芯片,而且这还会继续扩展。他们正在签订自己的数据中心合同,并在未来几年内建设自己的基础设施。
这里有一个问题,就是这种经济资源的重新分配会如何发生。即便模型本身具备实现“直线起飞”的能力,也存在很大的下行压力,阻止这种情况直接发生。我认为你我都相信,我们正处在一个模型具备这种能力的时代。但“慢速起飞”至少是我所希望的,因为经济领域和监管领域有各种因素在起作用。政府说“不要发布你们的模型”,政府说“实际上,你们甚至不能在内部过多使用你们的模型”,因为这种情况很快就会发生。他们已经在说你们不能发布模型了。
我最担心的是“奇点”的出现,而外部部署实际上有助于防止这一点。所以,我们阻止外部部署这件事,是愚蠢的。
Dylan Patel
那能阻止奇点吗?
目前来看,这会带来更多收入,因为模型还不具备递归自我改进(RSI)的能力。但我担心的是,到了2030年,政府会说:“你们要等六个月才能向公众发布你们最新的模型。”
Dylan Patel
六个月,100倍的算力增长。来吧。
在那六个月里,他们在内部进行递归自我改进。公司内部会发生各种疯狂的事情。与此同时,我们其他人只能被困在那些按当前速度来看落后了好几年的模型里。
我的想法是这样的。假设全世界都参与这个“阴谋”,试图减缓AI的发展。
Dylan Patel
我不认为这是阴谋。每个政客都公开写明了这一点。
假设他们把AI发展减缓了一年。如果算力每年增长2到3倍,他们阻止了一整年的AI部署,那么你就比你本应达到的水平落后了一年。而在递归自我改进期间,你可以在一年内获得3到6年的AI进展。
Dylan Patel
但他们不只是限制算力。他们还限制了实验室在内部发布模型的能力。我们看到了这一点。
如果他们那样做了,那将是理想的。
Dylan Patel
Anthropic 曾一度不得不停止向外国员工提供 Mythos。
我不知道这是真的,内部也是这样吗?
Dylan Patel
那是他们声称的。
我以为那只是一个不同的检查点,不是 Mythos,但基本上就是 Mythos。
Dylan Patel
但这类事情同样不会被允许。政府虽然笨,但我想他们至少不至于笨到那个地步。各国政府——至少是手握筹码的美国联邦政府——不会愿意让 Anthropic 内部使用 Mythos 4。他们会说:“等等,先停一下。”因为所有这些监管层面的原因。
每个当选的人都会讨厌 AI。就连现在已经当选的人都已经讨厌 AI 了。所有选民都是。我敢打赌,总有一天你父母会打电话给你说:“Dwarkesh 孩子,你干得太糟糕了。你让 AI 进展得太快了。”
因为我的播客,我在加速 AI 进展?
Dylan Patel
也许吧。你在教育人们。也许如果他们更聪明,他们就会更快地推进 AI。
总之,AI 的进展、开发和部署将会受到现实世界的种种约束。尽管这一切最终会发生,但在到达那一步之前,我们可能会先把自己撕裂。
01:07:52 —— 世界未来的劳动力会归属于少数几家公司吗?
这些情景中让我觉得疯狂的一点是,世界未来劳动力供给中有多大比例最终会集中在极少数公司手里,而且这个劳动力供给每年增长得有多快。如果前沿算力以 FLOP 计每年增长 4-5 倍——而且达到某一能力水平所需的算力每年下降 3 倍——基本上,前沿实验室的有效 AI 人口规模每年增长 10 倍。这在当下其实没那么重要,因为 AI 还不够好,无法胜任完整的工作,也无法像人一样在干活或搞阴谋等方面拥有同等自主性。
但如果当前趋势持续下去,你会看到一个这样的世界:OpenAI 从今年大约拥有 1000 万 AI 劳动力,到明年变成 1 亿,再到后年变成 10 亿。用不了多久,即使算力扩展放缓,也用不了几年,每家公司的劳动力当量就会超过地球上的人口总数。我认为到本十年末,这完全有可能实现——单个实验室内部的 AI 劳动力、有效人口规模,将超过地球上的人口总数。
我们经常谈论因国有化或其他原因导致的权力集中。但我们没有充分思考这样一个事实:我们实际上正在飞速进入一个阶段,在这个阶段里,大多数“人”——按工作产出计算——都集中在两个实验室中,而这两个实验室正在消耗全球越来越多的算力。如果这些 AI 出现对齐问题,那么基本上整个世界都是失对齐的,因为世界上大多数“心智”都在那里。但即使它们没有对齐问题,也只有极少数公司拥有很大的影响力或控制力。
Dylan Patel
最近有一场争论,我记得是 Gavin Baker 说:“Dario 认为世界上只会剩下一家公司。”然后 Sholto 和 Dario 出来澄清说:“不不不,我们没这么说过。”但归根结底,如果你相信 RSI,如果你相信实验室是算力最有效的使用者、能从中产生最大价值,那么唯一会发生的事情就是算力集中化。如果你相信 AI 研究者、RSI、AGI,那么这一切都存在,这一切都是基础。
即使没有 RSI,这一点也成立。在给定能力水平下,前沿领域的有效人口目前正以每年 10 倍的速度增长。所以如果你达到了一名非常能干的远程工作者、或一名非常能干的软件工程师、或一名非常能干的研究者的能力水平,那么这类“人口”在当前能力增长速度下,正以每年 10 倍的速度增长。
Dylan Patel
我明白了,而且这还是在不考虑 RSI 的情况下。一旦有了 RSI,那就更疯狂了。
然后它可能是每年增长100倍或1000倍。或者它们的智能在提升,但人口数量没有增加。又或者是这两者的某种混合,对吧?
Dylan Patel
Dwarkesh,你看到的是一个什么样的世界,在那里一切都不是中心化的?因为在我看来,每一种力量都在朝着中心化狂奔。这简直太可怕了。
我也希望它不要完全中心化。但也许这就是一台热爱优雅的机器的全部意义所在,对吧?它无处不在,让我们的生活变得美好。
思考未来实在太难了。但我同意你的看法。我认为根本问题在于,AI训练具有巨大的规模经济效应,因为你花在训练AI掌握某项特定技能或特定知识集上的任何努力,都会被分摊到数十亿次会话或数十亿用户身上。所以这是其中一个效应。
另一个效应是,如果你在AI竞赛中略微领先,而算力又处于短缺状态,你就可以收取高得多的加价,因为你能更好地利用这种稀缺资源。所以有两个效应会让AI竞赛中的领先者获得越来越多的优势。可能还有更多。如果模型从部署中学习,而一个模型的部署范围比另一个广泛得多,它就能获得多得多的真实世界数据。
Dylan Patel
我明白你的意思了,无论是用户部署和持续学习,无论是训练及其带来的规模经济效应,还是渐进式进步——最好的AI模型帮助你制造下一个最好的AI模型,RSI(递归自我改进),所有这些都指向中心化。
我认为,说实话,我们应该花些时间思考的重大智力课题之一——或者至少我会花些时间思考的——是:在AGI之后,一个去中心化、广泛赋能的未来愿景是什么样的,同时认真对待这些规模经济效应?另一种愿景是政府控制它,也许你认为你可以更信任政府,因为它不是私营企业。
Dylan Patel
我不信任政府,我也不信任Dario,我也不信任Sam。
这是个问题,对吧?显然,对未来做出判断是很容易出错的。你无法预见到某个关键效应,或者某件改变一切的事情。但事前来看,我们很难看到如何避免一种局面——我们不得不在某一种集权来源之间做出选择。
Dylan Patel
这就是资本主义之所以有效的原因,对吧?它是去中心化的决策和去中心化的权力。这也是为什么超级集权的资本主义经济体在某种程度上实际上比超级去中心化的资本主义经济体增长得更慢。你必须有法治等等这些。但AI把这一切彻底颠覆了。最终你会觉得:“其实,私有制可能不是最高效的经济形态,因此它比一个集权化的AI经济发展得更慢。”
嗯,这仍然是私有制,但真正参与这一经济份额的公司有多少家呢?大概只占目前经济的2%左右吧?1万亿美元除以30。英伟达占了其中很大一部分,还有Anthropic、OpenAI以及那些超大规模云厂商。显然还有其他公司参与其中,但AI领域的很大一部分业务实际上只来自极少数公司。所以它可以是私有财产,但参与其中的公司非常少。
Dylan Patel
我的意思是,这就是市场结构正在做的事情。那么什么能阻止它呢?我不知道。除非AI进展放缓,除非政府对它进行严厉监管,否则这就是将要发生的一切。在这种情况下,我们正走向一个世界——要么资源高度集中,我们祈祷那一家公司把所有事情都做对;要么政府拖慢一切、人们拖慢一切,希望以某种方式出现进展放缓,从而有更多的权力平衡。
即使在我们走向AGI、ASI、RSI的过程中,沿途的一切仍然会导致有人攫取更多资源。所以很难找到一个框架,让AI不会导致超级集中。
现在,这里唯一积极的一点是,如今 Anthropic 并没有攫取大部分价值。我们可以尽情讨论他们如何从每兆瓦 2000 万美元涨到每兆瓦 1 亿美元,但他们购买的大量算力仍然只支付 1300 万美元。但归根结底,他们之所以涨到每兆瓦 1 亿美元,是因为 Jane Street 正在每兆瓦赚取 3 亿美元或 5 亿美元。或者 Dwarkesh,通过研究他的播客和学习信用/信贷知识,每兆瓦能赚多少美元?而你能用多少呢?很难说。
但我认为这是唯一的可取之处,即经济体的其他部分从 Anthropic 中获得的利润可能要多得多——
不,但你之前阐述的整个逻辑——他们将推理算力重新分配给 AI 研发——那个逻辑的核心在于,AI 实验室内部的劳动回报远高于外部的回报。
Dylan Patel
是的。这是我的自我安慰。我同意。在世界上所有的情景中……有 8 万个世界,而其中只有一个世界里,Anthropic 没有拥有整个世界。再说一遍,权力会集中,因为我不想把 token 发送到外部。它们在内部更有价值。所以这是一回事。我为什么要让 Jane Street 从那些堕落的期权交易者身上赚走所有这些钱呢?
嘿,他们是赞助商,拜托。天哪。
Dylan Patel
不,我觉得这很好。让市场变得更高效,对世界来说是有价值的。Jane Street 通过正确理解世界图景赚了这么多钱,从堕落的期权交易者身上赚钱,不管是什么,Anthropic 为什么要为这个分配算力呢?如果 Jane Street 每兆瓦的最终变现是 2 亿美元,所以他们愿意付给 Anthropic 1 亿美元……那么,如果 Anthropic 在内部使用这些算力,每兆瓦就能产生数亿美元的收入呢?这就是正在发生的事情。
带着这个沉重的基调,我想我们要等到 RSI 正式启动时再见了。
Dylan Patel
你不会要过两个月才再请我上你的播客吧?
好的,酷。谢了,兄弟。
Had a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother Dylan Patel.
We went through lab economics over the next few years - the shift from inference to training as RSI draws near; and how Anthropic and OpenAI are on track to control most of the world’s usable FLOPs within the next few years (because they can monetize compute better and thus outbid everyone).
And then we discuss whether the >$10T of total AI capex we’ll see by the end of the decade will cause a sovereign debt crisis, where hyperscaler debt raises interest rates, drives non-AI exposed countries into bankruptcy, and crashes non-AI equities.
One question we weren’t able to resolve is whether there’s anything that can counter all the forces barrelling towards centralization in this industry - the economies of scale in training, the scarcity of compute, and eventually continual learning and RSI.
Sponsors
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Two labs will soon control most of the world’s compute
(00:07:01) – $6 billion in fab capex enables $1t+ of end revenue
(00:13:08) – Compute prices will rise if the labs outbid everyone
(00:18:22) – Which layer will capture most of the surplus?
(00:25:40) – What could slow down progress?
(00:29:43) – Labs are shifting compute from inference to R&D
(00:33:27) – China gets less than 10% of new compute, but its labs need less
(00:48:48) – Will AI cause a sovereign debt crisis?
(01:07:52) – Will the world’s future workforce belong to a few companies?
00:00:00 – Two labs will soon control most of the world’s compute
Okay, I’m back with Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis. Our version of a family Thanksgiving dinner is a regular yearly podcast. But we’re not actually related.
Dylan Patel
Don’t tell the people this.
It will destroy the myth. Basically where the world economy is headed is more and more becoming a function of where lab economics are headed, where the compute market is headed, et cetera. I want to understand where the crazy future ends up within a few years. But let’s start with where we are today. Walk me through lab compute and lab revenue right now, and maybe project out a year or two.
Dylan Patel
When we go back to last year, even at the end of the year, most of GDP growth in America was just AI infrastructure. As we look towards this year, about a third of the compute coming online is for the labs, for OpenAI and Anthropic. It may be built by others and then rented to them, but at the end customer, it’s them.
As we go forward into the future, the numbers for compute are ballooning. We’re at a little bit over a trillion dollars of CapEx this year. As we go out into ’28, it’s going to be more than $2 trillion. The labs are also taking an increasing percentage of this. So ultimately, you’ve got a very interesting situation where the labs are going from companies that spend tens of billions of dollars a year to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, to forecasting to spend trillions of dollars a year even towards the end of the decade. This is at least some of the contracts they’ve begun signing with their partners.
This requires a big reshaping of what happens with their economics. Up until now, they have been companies that mostly lost money. Anthropic started turning a profit in Q2. It’s believed at some point in Q3, OpenAI could start turning a profit even, with the bigger rise of Codex and 5.6 and all this. But if we go back a year ago, all the money they had was venture-funded losses. If we go back to even the beginning of this year, it was venture-funded losses. They’ve now turned the corner and are actually starting to profit.
That doesn’t mean they’re not taking in new capital. The new capital is still coming in to accelerate the growth further. But ultimately, more and more of their business is being funded off of their own revenue rather than capital injections into them. Over the last year and a half, their margins have really skyrocketed. The base cost of compute tends to be around $10 or $13 or $15 million per megawatt.
The most interesting aspect about what’s happening now is this: Before, if they served a model — GPT-4 being served on NvidiaHopperGPUs — it was generating negative gross margin for OpenAI. But now, when OpenAI serves GPT-5.6 or Anthropic serves Opus 5 or Fable 5, their revenue generation has passed well beyond the incremental $10-15 million per megawatt. In the case of Anthropic, the revenue has gone as high as $50 million per megawatt. What that now enables them to do is: “Hey, if I spend 10 bucks on inference capacity, I actually generate 50 bucks of revenue, and then I can turn around and incrementally spend all of that profit on training.”
One thing I’m very interested in understanding is how you see the centralization of compute happening at the labs, or the relative ratio of compute that goes to the world versus the labs. If you say right now a third of marginal compute is going to the labs, by when is over half of the incremental compute in the world going to the labs? By what point do the labs have basically a vast majority of the world’s compute?
Dylan Patel
At the beginning of this year, OpenAI started at 2 gigawatts and Anthropic at less than 2. End of this year, they’re both above 5. So they’ve 3-4x’d compute as a whole. When you look at the incremental compute added, that’s about 30% of the compute added this year.
As we step forward to next year, given what’s already been signed and penned and inked, you’ve got something even more dramatic. Anthropic and OpenAI are taking as much as 40% to 50% of compute next year. This centralization doesn’t look like it’s slowing down or stopping. In fact, it looks like it’s only accelerating.
Who’s building that compute for them will change. Next year, a big new entrant is, for example, SpaceX, which is building a ton of compute. They’re actively going to lease quite a bit of it to Anthropic and OpenAI, most likely, because they’re the ones who have the marginal capability to pay the highest price. In addition, OpenAI and Anthropic are also starting to build their own compute — OpenAI with their own chips, Anthropic with TPUs that they’re purchasing from Google and deploying with Fluidstack.
So you ask, “Hey, when does half of the world’s incremental new compute go to just OpenAI and Anthropic?” It’s really by the end of next year when half of the incremental compute is already going to Anthropic and OpenAI.
Because compute is growing so fast, incremental compute is going to be basically most of compute. So it’s very soon — you’re saying maybe within a year and a half or two years — that most of the world’s compute is owned by two labs, or at least is serving the demand from two labs.
There’s this trend where maybe world compute in gigawatts doubles every year, but the compute at the frontier labs triples every single year. If you keep the current trend going, it goes from 2 at the beginning of this year to close to 6 at the end of this year. Just multiplying out by 3. It’s 18 by the end of 2027, 54 by the end of 2028. Are you like, “Okay, at that point, they simply can’t continue tripling given the amount of world compute”? How do you see the world compute situation over the next few years?
Dylan Patel
If the incremental compute this year adds 30 gigawatts, next year 50 gigawatts, and the year after that roughly 70, you end up with this really interesting phenomenon. A new watt deployed this year is significantly more efficient than the watts deployed two years ago. A humongous percentage of the world’s compute was deployed this year. Even though it didn’t double the number of watts deployed, I’m deploying GB300s and TPUv7s and Trainium3s, which are way, way, way more efficient. They’re 3-5x more performance per watt than the prior-generation chips.
So ultimately you’ve got a huge ladder here. If Anthropic and OpenAI take on 45% of compute next year, you’ve got them in, let’s say, December ’27 having taken on half of the world’s incremental new compute. But that half of the world’s new incremental compute is actually at a higher performance than everything else before it. So you’ve got another multiplier on that. By the time you’re towards the end of 2028 — if this trend continues, and I see nothing that’s stopping it — you’ve got them just controlling most of the usable flops in the world on their own.
00:07:01 – $6 billion in fab capex enables $1t+ of end revenue
The thing I’m confused about is why you think we only add 80 gigawatts in 2028 if we enter a world in which the value of compute increases so much.
Dylan Patel
That’s the upper bound, by the way. That’s the like, “I’m so fucking bullish.”
Okay, let’s do some chain of thought here. When I interviewed you a few months ago, you said that in order to make a gigawatt of, I think, Vera Rubins, you need 55,000 N3wafers, 6K N5 wafers, and 170K DRAM wafers. I know if those numbers might have changed.
Dylan Patel
I’m going to troll you, but the way you said wafers was so fucking Indian. Vafers.
By the way, when we first moved to the US, I had the v/w thing pretty bad, and I was a vegetarian.
Dylan Patel
I remember you told me about this.
In North Dakota, I was in elementary school, and I’d be like—
Dylan Patel
Can I get a “wedgie”?
Can I get some “wedgies”?
Anyways, so that’s for one gigawatt. I had an LLM run your wafer fab equipment model and figure out how much the tooling costs to produce a gigawatt of compute basically every single year. It said $3-4 billion. Now suppose you add in cleanrooms and shell and everything else at the fab. So $6 billion of fab CapEx produces a gigawatt every single year. A gigawatt produces right now $100 billion of revenue.
But also that $6 billion in CapEx is producing a gigawatt every single year, and that gigawatt is producing $100 billion every single year. So over the course of five years, the first gigawatt has generated five years of profits, the second gigawatt the fab has produced has generated four years of profits, and so on. $6 billion of CapEx at the fab level will have generated over a trillion dollars of end AI revenue.
Dylan Patel
Yeah. There’s a lot of OpEx along the way. There’s a lot of other CapEx, like the data center, the power.
And you had to pay OpenAI for the R&D.
Dylan Patel
Installation. There’s a lot of different people who need money here.
Take away half of it for all these middlemen. That still means there’s a 100x discrepancy between fab CapEx and end revenue generated. More than that, actually, but we’re just being very conservative. As a result… This is capitalism. You have this huge discrepancy where you can turn $1 into $100. They’re not going to figure out a way to make more mirrors?
Dylan Patel
They are. It’s just that these mirrors take some time to make.
But the emergency is so big where Anthropic and OpenAI are like, “We could make a trillion dollars right now, but we’re just bottlenecked on the mirrors that go into the ASML machines.” How can we make more mirrors if we spend $100 billion on this? That’s the situation we’re going to be in pretty soon. We’re not going to be able to solve that supply constraint? That just seems quite hard to imagine.
Dylan Patel
You’ve seen people do funny arbitrages here where they buy turbines and then try and resell them, because the value of a turbine is way more since it’s the thing bottlenecking your data center. I think if anyone had $400 million and the ability to convince ASML to sell them an EUV tool, they should totally just go buy one, wait, and then sell it for north of a billion dollars.
But ultimately, yes, capitalism will cause these things to expand. But it’s a whip. It takes a long time for the whip signal to get to the tail end of that. The supply chain doesn’t react immediately. In fact, you go talk to someone at Carl Zeiss, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to make 100 EUV tools by the end of the decade.” When we had our episode earlier this year, they didn’t even think they needed to make that many, enough mirrors to make 100 EUV tools a year. Now they’re like, “Okay, we need to do that.” But in reality, because of all the economics of what’s going on, it should be even more. It takes so long to pill.
Suppose that every single company in the stack got private equitied. Somebody came in who was super AGI-pilled and was like, “We’re going to maximize production.” What do you think the physical constraints on making more things would be? The reason I ask is we’re pretty soon going to be in a world where the lab revenue, or just AI cash flows — because obviously the accelerators also have these huge cash flows — will be so big that you can just fund extreme expansion of all this production from cash flows themselves.
Dylan Patel
I do agree generally. There’s obviously some physical constraints. The way the supply chain is expanding currently, 100 is roughly still the right number.
For 2030?
Dylan Patel
100 ASML tools for 2030. But if you said, “Carl Zeiss, here’s $10 billion. Please fucking just expand production,” that would change things. You would have to do this with every company in the supply chain.
But you don’t think that’s gonna happen next year?
Dylan Patel
I don’t think it’ll happen this year. I don’t think it’ll happen next year. I don’t think it’ll happen the year after, because the world is capital constrained.
But in a world where, say, the top labs are generating, even combined, a trillion dollars in revenue next year, they’re not able to take $10B of that—
Dylan Patel
I don’t think they’re going to do that, but…
Or hundreds of billions at least? It just seems like they realize where the world is headed. I feel like they could just make…
Dylan Patel
The thing is, the labs are going to generate hundreds of billions of revenue next year. But ultimately, CapEx next year is like $2 trillion. So you’ve got this big mismatch. The wafer fabrication equipment supply chain will do something on the order of $200 billion. The data center market supply chain will do even more. The accelerator supply chain will do even more. The energy supply chain will do a number. You sum all this up, it’s going to be well north of $2 trillion of CapEx. So the labs have not yet gotten to the point where their cash flows can fund this stuff.
Obviously they will never get to that point, because you want to keep your CapEx higher than your returns.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, you reinvest.
00:13:08 – Compute prices will rise if the labs outbid everyone
The key question I really want to understand is: if the current trend continues, it’d be north of 50 gigawatts per lab by the end of 2028. So between them they’d have 100 gigawatts. Those gigawatts, as you’re saying, drive many-fold more throughput or performance by 2028 than they do now, because the hardware’s gotten better. Not only have flops per watt increased, but also the hardware gets better at working with AI workloads.
Okay, so 100 gigawatts for the labs by the end of 2028. How much is world compute?
Dylan Patel
I think that may be a little difficult, given that by 2028 they’ve taken 70-80% of incremental compute. And I’m not sure what happens to markets then. How much does the price of compute skyrocket for them to actually be able to buy 70-80% of compute? Is Google or Meta or Amazon willing to sell even that much?
Also, there’s one caveat when we’re talking about these gigawatt numbers. When Amazon is serving Bedrock Anthropic models, that counts as Anthropic compute in our worldview, because it is effectively, at the end of the day, counted as revenue for Anthropic even though there’s a revenue share and credit back all that. But ultimately in 2028, if they get to 100 gigawatts combined, they have done really disruptive things to the market.
Because anyone can make money off of $10-15 million per megawatt compute today. I kid you not, it’s not that hard. Go get a GB300 rack, go download the Kimi weights, go download vLLM or SGLang, set it up. Codex and Fable can actually help you do this. It’s pretty simple. It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science. Go put it on OpenRouter. It’s very simple. You’ll start generating more revenue than you’re paying for the compute.
This has already led to this compute pricing, $10-15 million per megawatt, starting to inflect up. To get to that 100 gigawatts in 2028, you have to believe that the labs can outpay for compute, because anyone can make money at $10 to $15. Does compute now get to $25 million a megawatt? Does it get to $40 million a megawatt?
As you’re saying, it’s already the case that the labs are generating way more revenue per megawatt than everybody else. If they stay as far ahead as they are currently, you would expect that to continue being the case. If there’s some kind of recursive self-improvement where the AI labs are relatively uplifted — or they have models internally they’re not releasing externally that are helping them make their next model better — you’d expect that to be even more the case.
Aren’t you already seeing this, where SpaceX, or whoever is slightly further behind, will just sell compute to the highest bidder if they can’t internally monetize it as well as the labs? You’d expect them to keep bidding for larger and larger shares of the compute market.
Dylan Patel
I think that is my worldview. They will continue to gobble up more of the compute. But ultimately they can’t do it at current pricing or anywhere close to it. They do have to start paying $25, $30, $50 million a megawatt to really gobble up 70% of the world’s compute in 2028, to get to 100 gigawatts by 2028, which is a very aggressive goal.
The other aspect of this that’s really challenging is that we’ve already seen a huge slowdown for the AI labs. This regulation that they advocate for is actually slowing down the labs a lot more than it slows down the open-source Chinese language models. OpenAI not releasing Astra. OpenAI stopping training for two weeks. Anthropic not releasing what their safety assessment says is Model 2, which is widely believed to be the next version of Mythos.
They’re clearly not releasing their best models, in which case their revenue per megawatt stalls or can even start to decline again because other models are competitive again. It’s not that they’re falling behind. It’s just that they’re not releasing their best stuff.
What if there is some regulatory impact that prevents them from releasing their best models? Now their revenue per megawatt does not climb as fast. Their ability to buy that incremental compute for a higher price than everyone else starts to diminish, and then maybe they can’t get to that 100 gigawatts.
But in a world where safety doesn’t matter, I do believe that’s exactly what happens. They can start generating $100 million per megawatt or more, and they can pay $50 million a megawatt. No one else has any logical reason to do anything with their compute besides say, “Please, Dario, take everything off of my hands.” But there are forces at play, which we cannot describe, that would potentially slow this down.
I think a good intuition pump is: what if the AI models were literally as good as a fully automated software engineer? They’re not currently there yet. I think they’re far from being able to fully automate the job of a full white-collar worker. But white-collar workers earn six figures or north of that a year. If you have a gigawatt that can sustain a population of, say, roughly a million white-collar workers. Then off the back of that…That would be $100 billion. That’s actually surprisingly low.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, $100K per person, million population.
I don’t know. But it would be many hundreds of billions of dollars per gigawatt if you get full AGI.
00:18:22 – Which layer will capture most of the surplus?
Dylan Patel
The other aspect of this — and we’ve continued to see this — is that most of the value capture is not happening. Most of the value that these models generate does not get given to OpenAI and Anthropic. Thankfully, so far it is mostly just being given to the users.
Jane Street, with their exclusive contract with OpenAI for GPT-5.6 Ultrafast mode, or Jane Street where they’re one of Anthropic’s biggest customers, is generating way, way, way more value out of the tokens they’re paying for than Anthropic is generating in terms of profit, because they get to make money off of the market.
Or take Meta, who at one point was rumored to be as much as 10% of Anthropic’s business. They’re generating way more efficiencies by optimizing their ad algorithms or what have you, getting engagement time 5% longer, all these things. They’re making way more money off of using these models than Anthropic is.
That’s what’s required. Sure, if you had a million new software engineers, the cost for a software engineer would also fall.
One thing I’m confused about is, does the market come into equilibrium? If it comes into equilibrium, would you just expect the price of compute to equal whatever Anthropic and OpenAI can generate from it, or be very close to it with a small amount of markup for Anthropic and OpenAI?
Right now it’s really weird that there is a 4x or more difference between what compute sells for and how much money Anthropic can make from it. In a world where the revenue per gigawatt continues to increase, if Anthropic’s ability to monetize a gigawatt doubles or triples, it’d be weird if the gap continued to increase. Anthropic, just by having some weights, can take something that cost them $10 and turn it into $100.
Dylan Patel
This is always a fun question. Where does the value go in AI? AI’s generating all this value. You’ve got the end user, which I think we all agree is generating more value than anyone else, hence they’re paying a lot for these models. Then you have the app layer. So far the app layer’s generated very little value. Then you’ve got the model layer, which up until a year ago was generating negative gross margins and is now generating massive positive gross margins. It looks like it’s on the path to generating $100 million per megawatt. So turning $10-15 into $100, as you said.
But if we go back a year ago, the hardware supply chain was generating all this gross margin while literally everyone else was losing money on it. OpenAI and Anthropic were just plowing VC money in, as were many other startups. Many of these hyperscalers were building infrastructure without knowing if there was going to be a payoff.
So ultimately you had this negative value being created on the model layer, if you will, because they were selling the tokens for less than it cost them on the infra side. All the value was being captured at the chip, the fab. Initially in 2023, the memory guys were making no money off of HBM or memory for AI, even though theoretically the value they were delivering was humongous.
Now you’ve got… Well, actually TSMC captures way less value than the memory guys. So the value capture’s shifted around a lot, which is very fun for people tracking the market or participating in the market, like Jane Street as an example. This is not an ad. This is not an ad. This is not an ad.
They’re a sponsor but you don’t have to plug them that hard.
Dylan Patel
So what happens going forward? Anthropic and OpenAI have slowly started to balloon in value capture. Do they balloon and take all the value capture? Well, that was a thought, and then Elon showed, “Actually, no. I can sell my compute for $25 million a megawatt or $40 million a megawatt to Anthropic and Google. Even if it’s a short-term thing, I’ve sold it for this price, and I’ll recoup my entire CapEx in a year.”
What’s your prediction of how much the relevant tranche of compute — B300s or whatever that SpaceX sold for $40B a gigawatt to Google — what does that sell for at the end of next year?
Dylan Patel
I think most compute will still continue to transact at sub-$20 billion a gigawatt.
Even at the end of next year?
Dylan Patel
Because all of it has to be financed. If Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, SpaceX can build compute without finding a customer, just saying, “Fuck it, I’m going to build this compute,” and then turn around and wait till it’s already built, they now control what’s going on.
Most compute is contracted well before it’s built. This is what Elon took advantage of in the market. He actually had all this compute. He was like, “Hey, Anthropic, I know you’re making $60-plus billion per gigawatt. Why don’t you just buy my stuff for a crazy amount of money?” Obviously it’s not like Elon decided this or Anthropic decided this. The market figured itself out.
Other people, you go to a random cloud, they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to build a gigawatt of compute or 100 megawatts of compute. I’m going to spend the CapEx. I need to turn around and find a customer. If I want to find a customer, I need to find the capital. Who’s going to give me the capital and the customer? The customer has to sign a deal. Then I take the customer’s commitment to the credit markets and I raise the capital.”
So there’s this completely different power structure where Meta is effectively hoarding compute. Them and SpaceX are the only plausible #3, because they’re hoarding all this compute. They’re using their balance sheets and capabilities to build compute without an end customer that’s monetizing at a huge degree. They have an actual balance sheet, so they can go to the credit market. You build a gigawatt, you can make your margin, not a crazy margin, but a good margin. Now I have all this compute.
Now Meta and SpaceX have this optionality of looking around and being like, “Is my internal use case going to make me more money, or should I go out there and sell it to Anthropic or OpenAI at crazy margins?” So now we’ve entered a regime where SpaceX and Meta are saying, “Actually, I’m going to build the compute, and I can rent it out for not $13. I can sell it for $25, $50, and more.”
00:25:40 – Will datacenter regulation slow down AI?
What do you think their revenue per gigawatt is by the end of 2027? For Anthropic or OpenAI, by the end of ’27.
Dylan Patel
I think it’s highly dependent on who has the best model, if they’re allowed to keep releasing their best models. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t be $50-plus million a megawatt.
By the end of ’27.
Dylan Patel
Oh, by the end of ‘27? That’s where it gets more challenging, but I think it could get higher than that, to like $70, $80 million a megawatt, blended across the company, if not higher.
Seems low.
Dylan Patel
So if that’s the case, then what happens to the price of compute? Well, if I’m Anthropic, incremental compute is worth it. Maybe I spend $40 million a megawatt on SpaceX compute. If I’m SpaceX, I look to the supply chain and I’m like, “Well, I’ve struck this deal with Jensen (where he’s now all of a sudden using Twitter).” And Elon’s saying they’re exclusive to Nvidia, but why doesn’t Jensen raise his prices? Then SK Hynix and Micron and Samsung look at it and they’re like, “Well, why don’t we raise our prices?”
So with the value capture, I think there’s a bullwhip effect here. Just because someone has raised prices doesn’t mean the entire supply chain rebalances immediately. But over time, the supply chain will rebalance and things will cost more and more. To get that incremental capacity, you sort of have to. So TSMC raising prices very slowly, but memory companies raising prices very quickly. Substrate companies raising prices very quickly. Elon wouldn’t have sold if it was $15, but he’s selling because it’s $25+. So obviously he raised his prices really quickly.
I’m surprised you think that revenue per gigawatt doesn’t increase way more than even 100 per gigawatt by the end of next year.
Dylan Patel
When does RSI happen? When does takeoff happen?
Or even if RSI doesn’t happen, just say the current rate of progress continues. Just look at how much progress we’ve made in, let’s say, the last year and a half. What was the model from a year and a half ago? Claude 3.5 or something?
Dylan Patel
My problem with this is that the best model that exists in the world was trained in February.
So you’re saying maybe we just won’t be allowed to release the labs’ best models.
Dylan Patel
OpenAI says they’re not training models for two weeks, man. What the hell?
There’s one thing where internally, are they getting enough use for it that they’ll bid up the price of compute? Another is, does AI progress as a whole slow down because of regulation?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, but they’re not even allowed to use this new model internally. Astra’s not even widely deployed internally.
But still, if you have a model that is… What was the model released at the beginning of last year? GPT…
Dylan Patel
4o? Was that 4o?
Yeah. You’re talking about a GPT-4o to Mythos 2-size leap by this point, again, by the end of 2027.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, but Mythos 2’s not out.
Or even Mythos. That leap again.
Dylan Patel
Even Mythos is not allowed to be out. They’ve neutered it. We can’t use it to optimize inference performance. We can’t use it to optimize all sorts of things.
Yeah, maybe there’s some slowdown in AI progress or the deployment of AI that means the revenue per gigawatt can be lower. But that’s the only way I could see it being only $100 million per megawatt by the end of next year.
Dylan Patel
As long as the model gets better, the value generated out of it gets better. Obviously, who captures the value is still up for debate, but ultimately everyone’s going to raise their prices. Because they can, and it’s super inflationary.
Especially if the method of regulation is… Right now, so far, it’s just “don’t release the models.” But more and more, the method of regulation is New York’s banning data centers. Texas is holding moratoriums. Ohio’s saying, or at least trying to say, you have to pay everyone’s property tax in a certain radius. These sorts of things are going to decrease supply and increase cost. That’s going to get passed on as well.
You start to end up in a spot where progress does slow, at least in the external sense, even if the models internally keep getting better and better. In a takeoff scenario, why would Anthropic not have their best model six months ahead of what is externally available? Because of safety and regulation, but also the competitive advantage? That six-month difference, if progress accelerates, is actually a bigger differential.
So that’s the thing that would cap revenue-per-megawatt gains to much lower growth than we’ve seen in the first half of this year.
00:29:43 – Labs are shifting compute from inference to R&D
Here’s something I’m very interested in. As these companies go public and they’re accountable to investors, let’s say by the end of next year they have close to 20 gigawatts. So 10% of compute is 2 gigawatts.
Let’s say they want to go from 60% of compute to training to 70% of compute to training. And their investors are like, “Well, if you’re going to be able to generate $100 billion per gigawatt, you’re basically saying no to $200 billion of revenue in order to increase your training compute.” So investors are like, “What the fuck? You’re already spending so much on training. Why are you spending even more on training?”
As a public company, what do you think would happen if they’re just like, “No, we will keep increasing the share of compute we spend on training to offset the increase in revenue that each gigawatt of compute is giving us”?
Dylan Patel
This is what I personally believe. The labs are going to allocate less and less compute to inference over time. I think that’s very non-consensus. The standard belief of most people is, “Oh, most compute will go to inference.” Most of it will go to forward passes for training, not necessarily revenue-generating inference.
Ultimately, if they’re generating $30-40 million per megawatt today, you allocate 40% to inference. If you now get to generating $60-70 million per megawatt, do you still allocate 40% to inference and generate all this profit and then do dividends and share buybacks? Or do you go build AGI? I think the obvious answer from Anthropic and OpenAI, not just at the executive level but also their board, is to go build AGI, because it’s way more profitable. So ultimately you’re going to see them ratchet up their percentage of compute dedicated to training—
While each increment of compute is getting more and more profit-generating if they had dedicated it to inference.
Dylan Patel
Right. The whole point is, if I’m selling tokens… Is OpenAI releasing Ultrafast mode for just external, or are they doing it internally too? It turns out, no. Actually, I’m going to allocate it to internal and external, because the internal value I’m generating from super-fast AI or the best AI model is way more than what someone external is.
So ultimately, sure, I could generate $100 million per megawatt, but if I turn that towards AI research, what is the incremental progress that I get? What does that do towards my future earnings potential, the discounted cash flows of whatever the hell I’ve done? They’re not going through that calculation, but ultimately it makes more sense to dedicate more and more compute internally. The only reason to have inference compute be so large is so you can grow your training fleet.
I think this is an interesting economics question that I feel we can have the models digest. What would have to be true about a world where they reduce the fraction of compute spent on inference?
Dylan Patel
I think they have been over the last three months already. I think at parts of this year, they were increasing the fraction of compute… Let’s just take it month by month. You would agree that every month, Anthropic has added more compute than the prior month. There might be some noise when they sign a SpaceX deal or whatever, but in general, the amount of compute is a curve up.
So in January, they added less compute than December, and yet their revenue adds skyrocketed. Then they’ve sort of plateaued. They’re not adding $25 billion of ARR every month now. That means the marginal megawatt they’re getting is going as a higher percentage to R&D than it is to inference. So they are factually increasing their compute towards R&D today. I think this is self-evident if you look enough at what they’re doing.
00:33:27 – China gets less than 10% of new compute, but its labs need less
If I look at the numbers you said for how fast world compute grows, here are some things I want to understand. It seems like if I add up the numbers you just said, it would be over 200 gigawatts of world compute by the end of 2028, right?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, globally.
Okay. How fast can that continue growing, global AI compute after 2028?
Dylan Patel
30 this year, 50 next year, 70 in ’28. ’29 should be on the order of 90-100.
Then just 100 more every single year or something?
Dylan Patel
I think the slope can continue to go upwards. It’s hard to predict anything more than four years out. Who knows whether we’re in an RSI regime, or when is the world economy growing at 10% a year? Because if you’re at 100+ gigawatts a year, you’re at absurd GDP growth.
If you think there’s 200 gigawatts globally in 2028, how much is in China by that point? How does Chinese compute continue increasing through this whole trend? Because if the RSI stuff kicks off in the West before China has a large amount of compute, maybe we’re living in a different world than when it doesn’t.
Dylan Patel
If we level-set back to 2022, the US was adding about 45-50% of the world’s compute. China was adding about 30-35%. The rest was being taken up by the rest of the world. Since 2022, we’ve had big regulations against China and a dramatic increase in America. So today, 70% of watts are being deployed in America. China is really a very small number. Sub-10% of watts being deployed for data center AI compute is in China.
As we step forward, they’re still at a very small number. Their domestic production is quite small. Their purchasing from Nvidia is still quite small, and a lot of that ends up in other places as well, Malaysia or what have you.
So ultimately, China domestically still continues to have sub-10% of incremental new compute. In 2028 it might start to inflect up, I think. But it’s pretty easy to say China will have 30 gigawatts of AI compute or less.
By 2028?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, in 2028.
Okay. And then how fast does their hockey stick go up?
Dylan Patel
I do think in 2028, they have a big uplift in what compute they’re able to deploy. In 2026, they’re still mostly relying on a lot of the smuggled chips, a lot of the chips that TSMC made for companies that they thought weren’t Huawei but ended up being Huawei, or a lot of HBM that Samsung is shipping.
But in ’27, fabs start to go up. In ’28 especially, fabs start to go up from SMIC and CXMT and such, where domestic production is actually reaching many millions of units a year. Now they’re incrementally adding 5-10 gigawatts, in just 2028, of domestically produced chips. Those chips are definitely worse than the chips that Nvidia will have in ’28, or Google will have in ’28, or OpenAI will have in 2028.
So even the gigawatt number overstates things, you’re saying. It’s 30 gigawatts, but it’s really much worse chips. But if you think the world is going to add 100 gigawatts the following year — I know you said you can’t really say that far out — how much is China able to add the subsequent year? Basically, I want to know: do they just hockey stick at the point at which they are able to start shipping large amounts of compute, or is it still going to be less than US plus allies?
Dylan Patel
There’s a lot left to whether or not the US passes the MATCH Act, whether or not tools continue to get export-controlled, how fast China can build their new equipment that they’re starting to be able to produce domestically. But ultimately, China is definitely going to hockey stick. If there’s anything China’s really good at, it’s scaling manufacturing really, really quickly.
I imagine China will start to be able to extract more and more purchasing of even foreign chips into domestic China, or at least close the gap in what the US is allowing Nvidia to sell them, or what have you.
But do you think China could be adding 50 incremental gigawatts in 2029?
Dylan Patel
I think that’s completely reasonable. Part of that could also be purchased from foreign. But yeah, I think it’s completely reasonable that China in 2029 can do 50 gigs. But if most of those are domestic chips, there is some factor there where that 50 gigawatts is really worth as much as 20 gigawatts from American chips.
Right. So you’re actually projecting a world where maybe the leading lab in 2028 has more compute than all of China will have in ’29 or even ’30, if you weighted gigawatts by their quality.
Dylan Patel
Implying that there’s nothing done to slow down the US labs.
That’s right.
Dylan Patel
But clearly the government and politicians are starting to do that. Whereas China’s not going to slow down AI. In fact, the only thing they’re going to do is accelerate it.
Honestly, when I interviewed Jensen and asked about export controls — I am a libertarian person — I wasn’t genuinely sure what I thought about this issue. I was steelmanning the opposite view from what he has, because I think it’s important to hash out ideas. I’m like, “Yeah, maybe there’s a world where if we just cooperated with China, it would be better for us, especially since they control so much of the supply chain and the other things that will be needed for robotics.”
But I didn’t realize the compute situation was as fucked as you’re saying. Actually, the export controls do seem to have really… If they ship the amount that you’re saying, that’s a huge difference. By the time we have automated coder and are getting into automated researcher, China is way far behind on the compute stock. If that ends up being the case, that would have worked. I think that’s actually a notable success.
Dylan Patel
The only caveat there is that some of it is export controls, but some of it is also just financial systems. American financial systems are more willing to YOLO into startups than Chinese financial systems. But once Chinese financial systems choose an industry to focus on, they’ll subsidize it a hell of a lot more.
So the Chinese semiconductor industry has significantly more subsidies than the rest of the world’s semiconductor industries combined. If takeoff is not as fast as you’re implying but actually takes longer, then ultimately China will catch up drastically on the semiconductor side, which then is compute at some point.
The other noteworthy aspect of this is that Chinese companies today are not that far behind in AI models, at least perceivably by the public, relative to the amount of compute they have. The leading Chinese labs have 100-200 megawatts total of compute at most, ByteDance Seed being the one outlier where they have significantly more than that. But Kimi is not running a gigawatt or anywhere close to it. Whereas Anthropic is more than 5 gigawatts by the end of the year.
So the question is, does it matter? I think right now this difference in compute doesn’t matter that much. When we break down the compute ratio or budget of a lab, so far it’s been 60% training, 40% inference. But that training gets broken down further. Actually 50% of the compute is research, 10% of the compute is development, and then 40% is inference.
What I mean by research and development is: researchers are generating ideas, testing new architectures, testing new data mixes, testing new hyperparameters, new attention techniques, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately when they do the training run, when Anthropic trains Mythos, it’s sub-200 megawatts.
The pre-train or the whole thing?
Dylan Patel
The pre-train. It’s sub-200 megawatts for, call it, two months. Then the RL is even less.
You think the RL was less compute than the pre-train?
Dylan Patel
At least in terms of single site of pre-training, yeah.
But total compute was probably higher, right?
Dylan Patel
But it’s sequential. At most, the most they ever used at one point in time was maybe 200 megawatts. In reality they had multiple gigawatts, so most of their compute was going to the research, not the development of a model.
There’s reasons for this. It’s hard to coordinate all these clusters. It’s hard to co-locate all of them. It’s hard to do multi-site training. It’s hard to do RL. Generating even more rollouts during RL does not necessarily make it better. There’s all sorts of reasons why you may not be able to leverage all two gigawatts that you have onto training. Actually, I can only leverage 200 megawatts.
As we get further and further down automated coding and automated researcher, I actually expect the percentage of the compute budget that goes to research versus training to become a lot more fuzzy, or even higher for training. Also things like continual learning. All of these things start to mean that more and more is actually going to training the model.
If you end up in a world where you’re doing 100 gigawatts a year, at current prices, that would be $5 trillion of CapEx every single year.
Dylan Patel
Then stack on the fact that you have to build the power plants way before then. It’s also a 30-year asset. You stack on the fact that the data centers are a 15-, 20-year asset, and you have to build that then too. So the $5 trillion, once you account for future years’ growth, is actually going to be more like $7 or $10 trillion of CapEx.
Wait, I didn’t understand. That doesn’t include the fact that there’s not the infrastructure for the power generation in the data center itself.
Dylan Patel
Right, exactly. When you talk about AI CapEx, people are saying $40, $50 billion. But that’s really just the critical IT: the servers, the networking, the fiber, the transceivers, optical communications, all this sort of stuff. It doesn’t account for the data center itself or the power plants themselves, which are being built ahead of time.
If I’m building 100 gigawatts this year and 150 gigawatts next year, then all of the buildings for that 150 gigawatts need to be built in CapEx this year. If I’m building 200 gigawatts the year after that, all those power plants need to be spent… You have to buy the turbines this year. So actually, it’s much bigger than even $5 trillion if you’re building 100 gigawatts.
Right. Very plausibly, incremental CapEx every year is getting close to $10 trillion by the end of 2030, which is going to be close to a tenth of the world economy. If all of it’s going up in the US… The US economy will have grown as well. But still, at the current size of the US economy, it’ll be like a third to a quarter of the US economy just going towards data centers.
As I say that out loud, I’m like, “Maybe you’re right and we just won’t allow it, and that’s the reason this doesn’t happen.” Because for this exponential to continue, a quarter of America’s economy is just building data centers.
Dylan Patel
I believe in capitalism and reallocation of resources towards the most profitable thing. But at the same time, politics exist, credit markets exist, and capital markets exist.
So to enable, let’s say, that 100 gigawatts by 2030… Or let’s even pare it down to 2028, where it’s like $3 or $4 trillion of CapEx across all of these items: over $2.5 trillion towards IT CapEx, and then another $1 to $2 trillion on data center and energy, and all the supply chain downstream, like semiconductors and all that stuff. If you’re at $3 or $4 trillion of CapEx, where does all this cash come from? No one is generating that much cash from the business yet.
Hyperscalers funded all of the growth up until now. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta. They funded a huge percentage of it. They were more than half of compute, but they now don’t generate cash. They actually spend everything on CapEx. In addition, they raise debt and spend everything on CapEx. You’ve seen Meta do it, even Amazon, even Google. Microsoft will be there soon. Everyone is raising debt to pay for their CapEx.
Now who is the incremental person to pay for this that was not doing it before? In the case of Google, it was pretty simple for them to stop doing buybacks, or Meta stop doing buybacks, and turn around and buy computer infrastructure. That doesn’t have a huge effect on the market, but it does have some effect. But as you step forward to 2028 — where the hyperscalers are now raising hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, and then all of their supply chain is raising hundreds of billions of dollars of debt — who pays for this?
So there’s a few different ways. There’s semiconductor companies like Nvidia and Broadcom and the memory companies turning around and deciding to fund some of this CapEx. There’s the traditional infrastructure investors who are gathering capital and investing in infrastructure. Instead of bridges, it’s data centers.
Then lastly, there’s everyone in the economy who’s realizing, “Maybe I shouldn’t buy a home, or maybe I shouldn’t invest in credit that’s helping people buy homes, or maybe I shouldn’t buy government debt. I should just buy hyperscaler debt, or I should buy this data center’s debt, or I should buy Anthropic’s debt. Because Anthropic’s willing to pay 20% rates for the incremental billion dollars to build their capacity. Because they know their revenue from it’s going to be huge, and they’re going to pay 20% because it’s still better than renting it from SpaceX for $50 billion a gigawatt.”
So you’ve got all of this contention. But if you now do this, the whole world economy is really shifted around.
00:48:48 – Will AI cause a sovereign debt crisis?
You and I have been debating off air for the last few days whether there will be a sovereign debt crisis as a result of AI. The logic is this. As we were mentioning, you have a situation where very little investment turns into a lot of money. So the rate of return—
Dylan Patel
What a fucking problem, dude. Oh my God. Can’t believe it.
No, it is a huge problem for everybody else who can’t turn a little money into a lot of money. So the rate of return is incredibly high. Even at the data center level, if you build a data center and you’re trying to get rented out to an Anthropic or an OpenAI for 10x what it costs you on a depreciated basis to build it, it’s fucking crazy. You turn $1 into $2 or $10 or something at the end of the year. That raises the rate of interest higher.
Now, if the rate of interest goes higher, and if it does that for the entire economy… People are borrowing more and more money. They’re competing against the other lending that the government would’ve done, or that other companies would’ve done, or that you as a consumer or a mortgage buyer would’ve done. That’s making it more expensive for everybody else to borrow. This has huge implications for tons and tons of people. Sorry, I’m going to go on a bit of a monologue here, but we’ve been thinking about this together.
I think the US will be fine at the end of the day. Because if the data centers are built in America, you can fundamentally just tax the data centers. But the way the current tax system is set up, corporate income is less than 10% of federal revenues. 80%-plus is payroll taxes and income taxes, which, as more and more automation happens, will shrink.
At the same time, on the spending side, currently 20% of tax revenue spending goes towards servicing the debt, paying interest payments on the debt. Now, a lot of the debt is short duration, so it rolls over every five years. Why are you fucking laughing?
Dylan Patel
Because it’s things you’ve learned in the last month.
Like it’s any different for you. Like you got a degree in fucking financial economics.
Dylan Patel
I didn’t. The internet thinks I’m a beekeeper. Few months, few months.
This is our business, Dylan.
Dylan Patel
I know, I know. Sorry, sorry.
Now I’m self-conscious. Fuck.
Dylan Patel
No, it’s good. You’re doing good. I just think it’s funny. A million people listen to this guy who just learned about debt this month.
Suppose the interest rates rise 1%. Over a five-year basis, the fraction of tax revenue that goes towards servicing the debt goes from 20% to 25%. If it rises 5 percentage points, that would go north of 40%. But if you take into account the fact that the government is borrowing $2 trillion every single year, then that goes from 40% to north of 60%. So 60% of tax revenue just goes towards paying interest payments on the debt.
Now, I think the US is going to be fine because the tax base will increase if we let data centers get built in America. Other countries are absolutely fucked, in my opinion. I was just looking at which countries have a lot of debt, have very little tax revenue, and also a lot of their debt is serviced quite often. Those countries, like Pakistan or Nigeria, I think are just going to be very fucked in this new interest-rate regime.
Dylan Patel
This crowding-out effect is the reason it’s not YOLO 1 billion gigawatts. You’ve got all these industries and countries that use a lot of debt, all these impoverished countries that you mentioned earlier that are just going to default. You’ve got consumer packaged goods, all of these companies that make things you see at Trader Joe’s or wherever. They use a lot of debt. All these telecom companies use a lot of debt. Banks use a lot of debt.
So if interest rates go up in the market — not necessarily the government-set interest rate, but the spread between what the government says their federal rate is versus what everyone else is charging, because Amazon wants to raise $100 billion of debt next year or whatever the hell the number is, probably less — you end up with this really challenging problem of, where does the cash come from?
There is some level that is funded by cash flows and the cash flows keep going up. But the logical thing to do is to invest way more than your cash flows because then the returns in future years will be amazing. So you have this delta.
Then what’s pushing down on the delta is all of these other things: regulations against data centers, consumers getting mad, politicians getting mad, regulations against AI, the AI labs not releasing their latest models because of safety reasons. Interest rates going up are an influence on all of these things. So all of these things bend the curve from what capitalism wants in terms of pure, simple economics to what the complex system that we have wants, and bend it lower and lower to where not as many gigawatts as should be built will be built.
Well, the interest rate is part of capitalism, right?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, but in the simple economic model versus the more complex what we have.
What is the rate at which you think Amazon or Anthropic or whatever will be issuing bonds for debt next year? If they do hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. What is the average rate?
Dylan Patel
I don’t think Amazon will do hundreds of billions of dollars of debt.
In total. Let’s say the big tech guys.
Dylan Patel
The hyperscalers in total, and all the clouds… In the modeling that we do, we have about $11 trillion of CapEx from 2024 to 2029.
Total?
Dylan Patel
Total. If you fund a lot of this with cash flows, as much as you can, you still end up with north of $5 trillion of credit that needs to be issued for this $11 trillion-plus build out.
So you don’t think the AI revenue continues even 3x-ing year over year?
Dylan Patel
AI revenue does go up. I don’t think it can go up forever without certain constraints being hit. Labs will have certain incentives. Labs are not the ones building all the compute in many cases, even though they’re increasingly trying to go that way.
But they’ll have all this cash flow. How much did you say the revenue will be? You think they’ll not have that much revenue?
Dylan Patel
No, I’m just saying till 2029 there’s something on the order of $11 trillion of CapEx. $6 trillion of that is funded with cash, and $5 trillion of that is funded with debt. If that’s the case, $5 trillion of debt being raised across the whole ecosystem does make interest rates go up.
Then what prevents that? There’s a couple things. One, do labs increase their revenue per megawatt more and keep inference allocations large? In which case, they’re accumulating all the profit across the S&P 500 because everyone’s paying to reduce their costs. Of course, their profits will also go up, but cash has to come from somewhere. So there’s an upper limit on how fast their revenue can grow versus the value they deliver into the world. And there’s a diffusion aspect of the technology.
But ultimately labs’ revenues keep going up. They can’t cash-flow fund everything. The optimal scenario is you actually use credit as much as you can to fund, because even if cash flows from the labs fund a lot of stuff, you want to build more than that. So there is some amount of credit that gets built.
Our current modeling has $5 trillion of credit and $6 trillion of cash-funded infrastructure investments through ’29. When you take that, this is not enough compute relative to what the demand growth is from the AI models. So you’ve got the obvious answer, which is revenue per megawatt keeps going up.
That makes sense. How much do you think interest rates will increase by 2029 as a result of all this?
Dylan Patel
Dude, this is vibing a number, but if you’re vibing a number out… Growth in the world economy is going up a lot, so why wouldn’t interest rates for Amazon go up from where they are today?
This is going to be extremely vibed out, but recently Meta’s raised at 5 to 6%. I don’t see why they wouldn’t pay 8%. They would happily pay 8% because the return from the compute that they’re going to build is humongous. The market won’t want them to, but they’ll want to pay 8%.
The flip side is that if they pay 8% versus the 5%, 5.5%, 6% they do today — a 250 bps increase — that makes everyone else in the economy also pay 250 bps more, which then causes a lot of things. Banks will scream, because if their credit spread goes up, their debt reprices faster than their assets reprice. They ultimately end up losing tons of money if their credit spread blows up.
The other consequence of this — this is a point you made — is that if interest rates rise, the discount rate increases, which means that the discounted cash flows of all equities crater. Which means that even though the stock market as a whole might be doing fine — the S&P 500 will be fine — any individual stock will probably have just cratered in value, especially the Buffett, Berkshire type, pay-good-cash-flows-for-30-years type stocks.
Dylan Patel
Yeah. It’s like, “Why would I pay this much for Johnson & Johnson?” They’re seen as a stable stock: good cash flows, they’ll return their cash flows over time. Or a railway company. Why the fuck would I invest that much if my discount rate isn’t 3% or 5%?” It’s now 8% or 10%.
For developing countries… Basil Halperin, who’s a good friend and an economist, made this point that we’ll see a second Volcker shock. In the ’80s, to fight inflation, Fed Chair Paul Volcker raised interest rates more than 5%, something like 8% real interest rate. That caused some 40 different countries, mostly in Latin America, to default in that decade. I think that will probably happen again.
Okay, now we’re getting into singularity talk. We’ve been talking about what happens if interest rates rise—
Dylan Patel
I think this all happens before singularity, by the way.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. We were talking about before singularity, interest rates rise 2-3%, et cetera. At some point, I think it’s very likely that the world economy will be doubling every single year. This is not happening in five years. But it’ll happen eventually. There’s this researcher, Damon Binder, who’s done great work on this. If you look at input-output tables in a fully automated economy… What would it take to double the entire stock of things in the economy every single year?
Dylan Patel
Yeah. If the economy grows at 3% a year, then rule of 70, that’s 20-something years.
Right. But he was like, “Okay, right now we’re bottlenecked by the fact that there’s people, and you can’t double people every single year.” But in a world where you can also double the labor force every single year, how fast can the economy grow? I think it could double every single year. At the very least it would be tens of percent every single year.
Okay. The rate of interest should be pretty close to the growth rate. It won’t be exactly that because of consumption, but it should be pretty similar. Then we’ll go into a world, I think in the 2030s, where the rate of interest is tens of percent. Part of my brain is like, “It might be hundreds of percent,” but let’s say it’s at least tens of percent.
I’m just like, okay. Every country that is not involved in the production of AI defaults. Every stock that is not an AI stock is worth basically zero because discounted cash flows are worth nothing. If the federal government can’t figure out a way to tax AI, servicing the debt is more than the current tax revenue. And you have all these other effects that I’m sure we’re not even pricing in: you can’t get a mortgage, et cetera, et cetera.
Fundamentally, what is happening in this world? This is all nerd speak, right? But let’s step back. What’s happening?
Dylan Patel
Just now it started, the nerd speak?
We’d be entering a totally different growth regime. The economy’s basically saying, “Hey, the opportunity cost of the government borrowing money to pay people pensions is extremely high now. Because that money could be spent building a robot factory that builds a robot factory that builds a robot factory.” The opportunity cost of capital is going to increase a ton. That’s fundamentally the cause of all of these things we’re talking about.
Dylan Patel
As interest rates go up, equity markets get pummeled. Even AI companies. Some people who really believe in AI are like, “Why does Micron or Hynix or Kioxia trade at 2 or 3 times earnings?” It’s like, “Well, if you’re really AI-pilled, everything in the economy should trade at 2 or 3 times earnings.” If you’re not AI-pilled, then sure, they’re over-earning.
It’s an argument for why — I think memory is going to do great — memory stocks shouldn’t 10x or whatever again. Because if we’re in the market where there’s that much demand for memory — which means AI’s caused this drastic change in the economy — then everything should trade at 2 or 3x multiples and the stock market should fucking crash.
In a sense, Meta trading at… I think they’re like a $1.5 trillion company. It’s like, what? Silly. They’re worth way more than that, at least in a logical sense. You just look at their cash flows, all the infrastructure they’re hoarding, and all the compute that they’re going to be able to sell for crazy amounts of dollars per watt, either as tokens because their lab works, or just to Anthropic and OpenAI.
It ultimately becomes a question of, you have to reallocate all the capital to the AGI. You do that by pricing everyone else out. So the limiter on AGI is not how fast the research engineers, like our roommate Sholto, can crank the gears. It’s actually just how much does the rest of the world let that happen?
Because they’re going to regulate. They’re going to obviously increase interest rates. They’re going to say, “No data centers.” They’re going to say, “Stop building fabs.” They’re going to say, “Oh shit, every company’s equity value is tanking, so how can I pay for AI to increase my business?”
Well then, Anthropic and OpenAI have to start building their own stuff. They’re building their own chips already, or at least designing their own chips, and it’ll expand out. They’re contracting their own data centers and building their own infra in the next couple years.
There’s the question of how this reallocation of the economy happens. There’s a lot of downward pressure on it not being just straight takeoff, even if the models were capable of it. I think you and I believe we’re in a world where models are capable of that. But slow takeoff is, at least my hope, possible, because of everything in the economy and regulatory world. Government saying, “Don’t release your models,” the government saying, “Actually, you can’t even use your models internally that much,” because that’s going to happen soon. They’re already saying you can’t release your models.
The thing I’m most worried about is a singularity, which external deployment is actually helping. So the fact that we’re preventing external deployment is stupid.
Dylan Patel
Does that prevent singularity?
Right now it would lead to more revenue, because the models are incapable of RSI. But I’m worried about a world where it’s 2030 and the government’s like, “We’re going to wait six months before you can release your newest model to the public.”
Dylan Patel
Six months, 100x. Let’s go.
In that six months, they do recursive self-improvement internally. They just have all kinds of crazy shit happening in the company. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck with models that are, at current pace, years behind.
Here’s my thought. Suppose that the whole world gets in on this conspiracy to try to slow down AI.
Dylan Patel
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s outwardly written from every politician.
Suppose they slow down AI by a year. If compute is increasing 2 to 3x every single year, they prevent a whole year of AI deployment such that you’re a year behind where you would otherwise have been. During RSI, you’re getting 3 to 6 years of AI progress in a single year.
Dylan Patel
But they don’t just limit compute. They also limit the lab’s ability to release the model internally. We saw that.
If they did that, that would be ideal.
Dylan Patel
Anthropic had to stop giving Mythos to foreign employees for a bit.
I didn’t know that was true, internally as well?
Dylan Patel
That’s what they claimed.
I thought that was just a different checkpoint that was not Mythos, but it was basically Mythos.
Dylan Patel
But stuff like that is not going to be allowed either. The government is dumb, but they’re not that dumb, I would hope, at least. Governments — at least the US government, which has the cards here — are not going to want Anthropic to use Mythos 4 internally. They’re going to be like, “Hold the fuck on. Slow down,” because of all of these regulatory reasons.
Everyone who’s elected is going to hate AI. Even the people who are elected already hate AI. All the constituents. I bet you at some point your parents are going to call you and be like, “Dwarkesh beta, you’re doing a terrible job. You’re making AI progress happen faster.”
Because of my podcast I’m accelerating AI progress?
Dylan Patel
Maybe. You educate people. Maybe if they’re smarter, they’re progressing AI faster.
Anyway, you’re going to have real-world constraints on the progress and development and deployment of AI. Even though it will happen eventually, we could tear ourselves apart before we get there.
01:07:52 – Will the world’s future workforce belong to a few companies?
One thing I find crazy about these scenarios is just how much of the world’s future labor supply ends up in very few companies, and also how fast that labor supply grows year over year. If compute at the frontier in FLOP terms is growing 4-5x a year — and further the compute required to achieve a level of capabilities is decreasing 3x a year — basically the effective AI population size at the frontier labs is increasing 10x year over year. That doesn’t really matter that much right now, because AIs are not good enough to do full jobs or be as autonomous as people in their capacity to do work or pull off schemes or whatever.
But if the current trend continues, you have a world where OpenAI goes from having, say, basically 10 million AI laborers this year to 100 million the next year, to a billion the year after that. Pretty soon, even if compute scaling slows down, it doesn’t take many more years before each company individually has more labor equivalence than there are people on Earth. I think that’s very plausible by the end of this decade, that there’s more AI labor, more effective population, within a single lab than there are people on Earth.
We talk often about centralization of power because of nationalization or whatever. But we don’t think enough about the fact that we’re actually moving very fast into a regime where most “people”, in terms of work output, are concentrated within two labs who are consuming more and more of the world’s compute. If these AIs are misaligned, then most of the world is misaligned, basically, because most of the world’s minds are there. But even if they’re not, very few companies have a lot of influence or a lot of control.
Dylan Patel
There was the whole spat recently where I think Gavin Baker was like, “Dario believes that there’s only going to be one company in the world.” Then Sholto and Dario came out and were like, “No, no, no. We didn’t say that.” But ultimately, if you believe in RSI, if you believe the labs are the most effective user of compute and can generate the most value from the compute, then the only thing that’s going to happen is centralization of compute. If you believe in AI researchers, RSI, AGI, then all of this exists, all of this is the base.
This is even true if there’s no RSI. The effective population of the frontier is currently increasing 10x year over year for a given level of capabilities. So if you get to the level of capabilities of a very competent remote worker or a very competent software engineer or a very competent researcher, the population of those is increasing 10x year over year at the current rate of capabilities growth.
Dylan Patel
I see, and without RSI. Then once you have RSI, it’s even crazier.
Then it’s maybe growing 100x a year or 1,000x a year. Or their intelligence is increasing but the population isn’t increasing. Or some mixture of the two, right?
Dylan Patel
What world do you see, Dwarkesh, where everything is not centralized? Because it seems to me that every force is screeching towards centralization. And that’s scary as hell.
I would love for it not to be centralized completely. But maybe that’s the whole point of a machine that loves grace, right? It is everything and it makes our lives great.
It’s so hard to think about the future. But I agree with you. I think the fundamental problem is that AI training has huge economies of scale, because any effort you spend on training an AI for a specific skill or a specific set of knowledge gets amortized across billions of sessions or billions of users. So that’s one effect.
The other effect is that if you’re slightly ahead in the AI race and compute is in shortage, you can charge a much higher markup because you can better economize this scarce resource. So there are two effects which give more and more to the person who’s ahead in the AI race. There may be more. If models are learning from deployment, and one model is deployed much more widely than another one, it’s getting much more real-world data.
Dylan Patel
Your point is taken that whether it’s user deployment and continual learning, whether it’s training and having these economies of scale, whether it’s the incremental progress where the best AI model helps you to make the next best AI model, RSI, all of these things point to centralization.
I think one of the big intellectual projects, honestly, that we should spend some time thinking about — or at least I’ll spend some time thinking about — is: what is a vision of a decentralized, broadly empowered future after AGI that takes these economies of scale seriously? The alternative vision is that the government controls it, and maybe you think that you can trust the government more because it’s not a private corporation.
Dylan Patel
I don’t trust the government, and I don’t trust Dario, and I don’t trust Sam.
That’s a problem, right? Obviously it’s very easy to be wrong about the future. You don’t anticipate a key effect or something that changes everything. But ex ante, it’s very hard to see how we avoid a scenario where we have to choose one source of centralization.
Dylan Patel
It’s why capitalism worked, right? It’s decentralized decision-making and decentralized power. And it’s why super-centralized capitalistic economies actually grew slower than super-decentralized capitalist economies, to some extent. You have to have rule of law and all this. But then AI flips all this on its head. And ultimately you’re like, “Actually, private ownership is probably not the most efficient economy, and therefore it grows slower than an AI economy, which is centralized.”
Well, it’s still private ownership, but how many firms are really involved in this share of the economy? It’s, what, maybe 2% of the economy right now? $1 trillion divided by 30. Nvidia is a huge share of it, and Anthropic and OpenAI and these hyperscalers. Obviously there are other firms involved, but a large share of the AI stuff is just happening from very few companies. So it could be private property, but very few companies are involved.
Dylan Patel
I mean, this is what the structure of the market is doing. So what can prevent it? I don’t know. Unless AI progress slows down, unless governments regulate the fuck out of it, this is all that happens. In which case, we’re headed for a world where either we have super concentration of resources and we pray that that one company gets everything right, or we have governments slow everything down and people slow everything down, and you have a slowdown of progress somehow hopefully, and there is more of a balance of power.
Even as we go towards AGI, ASI, RSI, everything along the way will still lead to someone capturing more resources. So it’s kind of hard to find a framework in which AI doesn’t lead to super concentration.
Now, the one positive thing here is that today Anthropic does not capture most of the value. We can talk all we want about how they went from $20 million per megawatt to $100 million per megawatt, but they’re still paying $13 million for a lot of the compute they’re buying. But at the end of the day, the reason they’ve gone to $100 million per megawatt is because Jane Street is capturing $300 million per megawatt or $500 million per megawatt. Or Dwarkesh, from researching his podcast and learning about credit, is capturing how many dollars per megawatt? Now how much can you use? Tough.
But I think that’s the one saving grace, that the rest of the economy maybe profits so much more from Anthropic—
No, but the whole logic you were laying out earlier — them reallocating inference to AI R&D — the whole logic of that is that the returns to labor inside AI labs are much higher than the returns outside.
Dylan Patel
Yes. This is my cope. I agree. In all scenarios of the world… There’s 80,000 worlds and in only one of them, Anthropic doesn’t own the whole world. Again, power concentrates because I don’t want to send the tokens outside. They’re more valuable inside. So it’s the same thing. Why would I let Jane Street make all this money off of these degenerate options traders?
Hey, they’re a sponsor, come on. Jesus Christ.
Dylan Patel
No, I think it’s great. It’s a good value for the world to make it an efficient market. Jane Street making all this money off of getting the worldview correctly, making money off of degenerate options traders, whatever it is, why would Anthropic allocate compute to that? If the end monetization that Jane Street has per megawatt is $200 million, so they’re willing to pay Anthropic $100 million… Well, what if Anthropic can just generate hundreds of millions of dollars per megawatt by using that compute internally? That’s what’s happening.
On that somber note, I guess we’ll meet again when the RSI is officially kicked off.
Dylan Patel
You’re not going to have me on your podcast again for like two months?
Alright, cool. Thanks, dude.