Dylan Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…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? 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?…

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