Bastian Lehmann 🇺🇸

1) Trying again. 
TLDR: Everyone can win. Open-source, frontier labs, infrastructure, applications and most importantly the American people.   I understand all of the jitters about Anthropic losing share, real rates, spreads and second derivatives. Still think the most likely future outcome is a hybrid, multi-model future where almost everyone wins, open-weight tokens are likely the overwhelming majority of tokens, the dominant frontier model companies still do well albeit perhaps not the outcome that seemed possible in May and AI infrastructure/applications benefit immensely from the increased fragmentation, competition and lower margins at the model layer.   Lower margins at the model layer mechanically drive higher compute demand as long as someone is willing to pay for the training. And Jensen is obviously willing to be the “trainer of last resort.” As below-market compute contracts signed in 24/25 roll-off and reprice higher, cloud and neocloud revenue should continue to accelerate which will help address financing fears; I think we may be near peak external financing for this buildout. Noteworthy that using data from 3Fourteen Research, B200 clusters will generate a 37% IRR *if* their rental price declines 40% per year. Prices are still going up, but that IRR math is too ridiculous to print. 37% IRRs available at scale should get funded. Re: this weekends controversy about MOUs, Anthropic’s $413 billion of real contractual commitments sounds scary. Reality is that it works out to roughly $31 billion of annual cloud spend, which is easily internally financed given their reported ARR, and $161 billion of spend at Broadcom which will be financed by Broadcom and private credit. Continue to believe fragmentation at the model layer is the best outcome for ordinary Americans and humans everywhere. As I have said before, do not trust any 5-20 individuals to make the best possible decisions about the direction of this technology. I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that they encompass the diversity of human values across the world and richness of human variation. And I want an AI that shares my own personal values. Safety, freedom and the maximization of human agency through democratization, distribution and diffusion vs. centralization. History has spoken on the dangers of the latter path. Finally, from my perspective anything that slows this buildout down is net positive over the long-term as the biggest risk and worst outcome is an *actual* overbuild. We are structurally short watts, wafers and increasingly capital. That is all good. God forbid we were still in ZIRP, TSM ramped capex to 3x their current plan and we weren’t short turbine blades: there would almost certainly be an overbuild and a bubble. That would be terrible. Slower and smoother for longer is better both for investors and for the world. A terrible cyber event is the most plausible near term bear case IMHO, but AI cyberdefense ramping quickly and I was happy to hear Sholto say that cyber probably becomes defense dominant in the near future.   Longer, threaded version follows: