Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
28 published records
01 / evaluation
“TSMC’s margins on high-performance computing—HPC, AI chips, et cetera—are higher than they are for mobile, because they have a bigger advantage in HPC than they do in mobile.”
02 / evaluation
“4 is both way cheaper to run than GPT-4 and has fewer active parameters. It’s much smaller, in that sense of active parameter, because it’s a sparser MoE versus GPT-4 being a coarser MoE.”
03 / evaluation
“If a Hopper can make a million tokens of Opus and it can make two million tokens of Sonnet, the price differential between Opus and Sonnet has decreased because the price of the GPU has increased by a dollar from $2 to $3.”
04 / prediction
“As a result, that will push people to be willing to pay higher margins for slightly better models. Because the calculus is, I’m going to be paying all this money for the compute anyway.”
05 / uncertainty
“When did ASML start shipping EUV tools, when 7 nm started? I don’t know when that was exactly.”
06 / belief
“As we get to the end of the decade, we think something like half of the capacity that’s being added will be behind the meter.”
07 / uncertainty
“If we end up in this world in 2030 where the West has the most advanced process technology but has not ramped it up as much, whereas China… I don’t know if you think by 2030 they would have EUV and 2 nm or whatever.”
08 / belief
“Take a gigawatt of Nvidia’s Rubin chips. Rubin is announced at GTC, I believe the week this podcast goes live.”
09 / belief
“I think according to your numbers, by ‘27, Nvidia is going to have +70% of N3 wafer capacity, or around that area.”
10 / observation
“The problem is that getting the heat out of that dense area means you have to move away from standard air and liquid cooling to more exotic forms of liquid cooling, or even immersion, to get to higher power densities.”
11 / belief
“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.”
12 / belief
“There are a couple of companies and I think that could be a big disruption to the industry beyond EUV.”
13 / belief
“I think there are a couple factors here. ASML has not decided to just go YOLO, let’s expand capacity as fast as possible.”
14 / observation
“I heard a theory that the reason is that Nvidia’s scale-ups have just not had that much memory capacity.”
15 / belief
“If you’re Jensen or Sam Altman, or whoever stands to gain a lot from scaling up AI compute, there are these stories that they’d go to TSMC and say, “Why can’t we access Y and Z?” But I think the point you’re making is that it doesn’t really matter what TSMC does in some sense.”
16 / evaluation
“If that doesn’t work, there are all these other alternatives that people fall back on.”
17 / uncertainty
“Then you’ll have this insane margin that ASML and TSMC should have been charging. But the thing is, I don’t know if ASML and TSMC will ever agree to this.”
18 / commitment
“I won’t even ask you about the dirty rooms thing, but let’s say they build the clean rooms.”
19 / prediction
“In 2024, we were banging on the drums that reasoning means long context, which means a large KV cache, which means you need a lot of memory demand.”
20 / prediction
“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.”
21 / prediction
“In some cases, the argument people are making is if you didn’t sign a long-term deal, because every two years NVIDIA is tripling or quadrupling the performance while only 2X-ing or 50% increasing the price… Then the price of an H100… Sure maybe the value in the market was $2 at 35% gross margins in 2024, but in 2026, when Blackwell is in super high volume and deploying millions a year, you’re actually now worth $1/hour.”
22 / evaluation
“You can look across the space at hedge funds and look at their 13Fs and see they own, maybe not exactly what Leopold does, because it’s always a question of what is the most constrained thing.”
23 / prediction
“I think space data centers will eventually be a 10X gain as Earth’s resources get more and more contentious, but that’s not this decade.”
24 / evaluation
“Maybe it’s because the technology is improving so fast, but it in fact makes sense to have two-year depreciation cycles for these GPUs,” which increases the reported amortized CapEx in a given year and makes it financially less lucrative to build all these clouds.”
25 / commitment
“We’ll purposely undershoot what we think we can possibly do and be conservative because we don’t want to potentially go bankrupt.”
26 / prediction
“Even if you halve smartphone volumes, because of the shape of the halving, the low end gets cut by more than half, while the high end gets cut by less than half, because you and I will still buy the high-end phones that cost north of a thousand dollars.”
27 / evaluation
“If you look at PJM, which I think is the largest grid in America—covering the Midwest and some of the Northeast area—in their models they want to have roughly 20 percent excess capacity.”
28 / evaluation
“Google even had to go to TSMC and explain to them why they needed this increase in capacity because it was so sudden.”