Dylan Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Genuinely though. In the amount of information that is compressed, it might be petabytes. The brain is an extremely sparse MoE. But anyways, imagine a human knowledge worker can produce six figures a year of value. If an H100 can produce something close to that, if we had actual humans on a server, the value of an H100 is such that it can repay itself in the course of a couple of months. So when I interviewed Dario, the point I was trying to make is not that I think the singularity is two years away and therefore Dario desperately needs to buy more compute, although the revenue is certainly there that he needs to buy more compute. The point I was trying to make is that given what Dario seems to be saying—given his statements that we’re two years away from a data center of geniuses, and certainly not more than five years away, and a data center of geniuses should be earning trillions upon trillions of dollars of revenue—it just does not make sense why he keeps making these statements about being more conservative on compute or, to your point, being less aggressive than OpenAI on compute. I guess that point got lost because then people were roasting me, saying, “Oh, this podcaster is trying to convince this multi-hundred billion dollar company CEO to YOLO it, bro.” I was just trying to say that internally, his statements are inconsistent. Anyway, it’s good to iron it out. I think going back to the earlier view that if the models are so powerful, the value of a GPU goes up over time, right now only OpenAI and Anthropic have that viewpoint. But as we approach further out, everyone is going to be able to see that value skyrocket per GPU. So in that sense, you should commit now to compute. Interestingly, in Anthropic fashion, there’s a bit of a meme that they have commitment issues and are sort of polyamorous. Not Dario, but this is a bit of a meme. Explains everything. By the way, there’s this interesting economic effect called Alchian-Allen, which is the idea that if you increase the fixed cost of different goods, one of which is higher quality and one which is lower quality, that will make people choose the higher quality good, on the margin. To give a specific example, suppose the better-tasting apple costs two dollars and the shittier apple costs one dollar. Now suppose you put an import tariff on them. Now it’s $3 versus $2 for a great apple versus a medium apple.…

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