Dwarkesh Patel: preference

Transcript context

…fficult as that. That’s the most difficult case. But there’s a real dilemma here. Where I’ve settled on it is that it will be faster than anything we’ve seen in the world, but it still has its limits. So when we go to buying data centers, again, the curve I’m looking at is: we’ve had a 10x a year increase every year. At the beginning of this year, we’re looking at $10 billion in annualized revenue. We have to decide how much compute to buy. It takes a year or two to actually build out the data centers, to reserve the data center. Basically I’m saying, “In 2027, how much compute do I get?” I could assume that the revenue will continue growing 10x a year, so it’ll be $100 billion at the end of 2026 and $1 trillion at the end of 2027. Actually it would be $5 trillion dollars of compute because it would be $1 trillion a year for five years. I could buy $1 trillion of compute that starts at the end of 2027. If my revenue is not $1 trillion dollars, if it’s even $800 billion, there’s no force on earth, there’s no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute. Even though a part of my brain wonders if it’s going to keep growing 10x, I can’t buy $1 trillion a year of compute in 2027. If I’m just off by a year in that rate of growth, or if the growth rate is 5x a year instead of 10x a year, then you go bankrupt. So you end up in a world where you’re supporting hundreds of billions, not trillions. You accept some risk that there’s so much demand that you can’t support the revenue, and you accept some risk that you got it wrong and it’s still slow. When I talked about behaving responsibly, what I meant actually was not the absolute amount. I think it is true we’re spending somewhat less than some of the other players. It’s actually the other things, like have we been thoughtful about it or are we YOLOing and saying, “We’re going to do $100 billion here or $100 billion there”? I get the impression that some of the other companies have not written down the spreadsheet, that they don’t really understand the risks they’re taking. They’re just doing stuff because it sounds cool. We’ve thought carefully about it. We’re an enterprise business. Therefore, we can rely more on revenue. It’s less fickle than consumer. We have better margins, which is the buffer between buying too much and buying too little. I think we bought an amount that allows us to capture pretty strong upside worlds. It won’t capture the full 10x a year. Things would have to go pretty badly for us to be in financial trouble. So we’ve thought carefully and we’ve made that balance. That’s what I mean when I say that we’re being responsible. So it seems like it’s possible that we actually just have different definitions of the “country of a genius in a data center”. Because when I think of actual human geniuses, an actual country of human geniuses in a data center, I would happily buy $5 trillion worth of compute to run an actual country of human geniuses in a data center. Let’s say JPMorgan or Moderna or whatever doesn’t want to use them. I’ve got a country of geniuses. They’ll start their own company. If they can’t start their own company and they’re bottlenecked by clinical trials… It is worth stating that with clinical trials, most clinical trials fail because the drug doesn’t work. There’s not efficacy. I make exactly that point in “Machines of Loving Grace”, I say the clinical trials are going to go much faster than we’re used to, but not infinitely fast.…

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