#大佬观点

What a Week! Anthropic Opens the Books, Intel Raises More Questions, Marvell and Lumentum? With @benbajarin and @jaygoldberg Chapters: (00:00) Welcome: A Packed Week for The Circuit (00:29) Anthropic’s S-1: Growth, Spending, and Existential Risk (03:46) Anthropic’s Bet on Scaling Laws (05:43) Enterprise Adoption and Anthropic’s Growth Engine (09:26) Our CIO Survey: AI ROI and the Skills Gap (12:16) How AI Budgets Grow Beyond IT (18:55) Anthropic Direct: Taking Control of Compute (20:23) Anthropic’s Multi-Chip Strategy (25:32) When Custom Silicon Becomes a Strategic Advantage (30:58) Does Anthropic Look More Like a Foundry Than a Software Company? (32:49) Compute Commitments, Cloud Discounts, and Token Economics (37:37) Anthropic’s Governance and Founder Control (41:23) Hyperscaler Earnings: Strong AI Demand, Mixed Results (47:39) Whose AI Flywheel Needs to Work the Most? (51:45) Google Search, AI Advertising, and Platform Risk (54:55) Intel’s Strong Quarter and Weak Guidance (56:47) Allocating Capacity: PCs Versus AI Servers (60:22) The PC Downturn and Intel’s Delayed Response (62:53) Intel’s Recovery: Better Foundations, Longer Timeline (66:02) Chiplets and the Challenge of Planning Across Nodes (68:24) Substrate Constraints and Supply Chain Planning (71:00) Rebuilding Confidence in Intel (74:20) Marvell–Lumentum: Making Sense of a Potential Deal (76:30) Why Optical Networking May Need More Vertical Integration (79:13) Will Optical Components Become Commodities? (82:25) NVIDIA’s Role and the Battle Against Broadcom (84:55) Closing Thoughts

We are about to experience the dot-com bust all over again. If this mania feels sustainable to you, you need to wake up and go touch some grass. AI will change the world, but it will be slowly over the next 20 years. Just like the internet. Hold on tight and keep cash on hand.

“AI has provided ‘zero payoff’ to corporate America outside of the technology sector, according to Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok.” What Slok and many others are missing is that the massive boosts in software creation and reasoning are elemental, and can be extended across all knowledge work (work in front of a computer) and then across any work that requires intelligence over 5-10 years, and eventually manual labor and dexterity as it’s the software that’s holding back robots from being useful. Astra and upcoming robot foundation models will change this. Major tech firms don’t make big bets on fads and herding-they’re just the first to see the productivity boosts (revenue per employee sharply up) and this will extend to the Fortune 1000 over 5-10 years.

If $LITE really accepts the $MRVL merger offer, it'll be proof that its moat was vastly overstated by many analysts There's no way they'd agree to this if they had the dominant position many have been claiming they do

Production is Deterrence.

The American Dynamism 50 is a16z's annual list of companies building for America's future. This year's edition covers the industrial base end to end, from the inputs that come out of the ground to factories that make things and systems that deter conflict. a16z's Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love join Elena Burger to break down this year's list and its theme, Production is Deterrence, built around a simple idea: "You don't have a defense industrial base without an industrial base." 0:50 From mines to factories and systems 3:05 How the internet and nuclear was built 5:05 Drones built DJI into a robotics giant 6:50 Defense dollars pay for new factories 8:30 SpaceX and Tesla lessons on scale 10:15 How Mariana runs a mine on software 12:20 "AI cannot turn a wrench yet" 14:10 Retooling in 20 mins, not 3 months 17:45 Startups build before Pentagon asks 20:35 Why hard tech can be more valuable 24:45 The race for the biggest American flag 28:25 How defense parts unlock US robotics 32:05 The rise of the "manufacturing middle" 37:25 Anduril and SpaceX founder mafias 41:05 Private capital: USA's edge over China 46:30 The buildout must hit Middle America YouTube: https://youtu.be/cRJ7CfaK1Vc @espricewright @ConnorLoveCA @VirtualElena

Mark Cuban scaled Cost Plus Drugs from about 100 generics to roughly 4,000 at a flat 15% markup, forcing incumbents to change prices in ways decades of policy never did. He thinks AI could transform healthcare, but it won't fix opaque prices and broken incentives on its own. Mark sits down with a16z's Julie Yoo and Erik Torenberg to discuss what he's learned building Cost Plus Drugs, why trust is its core product, and how greater transparency could put pressure on healthcare costs. They also explore why drugs designed for your DNA could cost close to nothing, the football field-sized drug plant his team shrank into tractor trailer-sized pods, his plan to make generics in Dallas for less than he pays manufacturers in India, and why every company will either be great at AI or go out of business. 0:50 Cost Plus beat decades of policy 3:15 111 generics to 4,000 drugs 5:00 A drug plant shrunk to 5K sq ft 5:55 $20M drug factories in a trailer 8:10 Hospital deals with zero denials 9:50 Why health plans are rigged 14:05 1,335 pages no human can check 18:35 "Where are they f**king me over?" 22:45 Making drugs cheaper than India 26:50 Why you still need entry-level hires 31:45 Nonprofit hospitals must offer aid 35:55 DNA-matched drugs for near $0 39:30 Why AI will mean more doctors 48:00 Mark's plan: "bye bye insurers" 52:25 Why AI labs' ads are useless 56:35 Get good at AI or go out of business YouTube: https://youtu.be/5UWDUD6qaM4 @mcuban @julesyoo @eriktorenberg

Bloomberg: "A new anxiety is gripping Wall Street as it bankrolls the vast network of data centers and chips behind the artificial intelligence boom: Early signs suggest that the credit market is approaching the limits of how much more debt it can absorb. One after another, yields are soaring into the double digits on bonds and loans funding the AI infrastructure buildout. Bankers are finding it more difficult to offload risk to insurers and other investors." #economy #markets #debt #ai #ArtificialIntelligence #bonds

A lot of ink has been spilled on GPU financing lately. I spent over a decade trading ABS on Wall St, and structured over $2B+ of debt financings as an operator (including at @tryramp). Figured I'd try to make sense of this market, so I went back to a framework I knew well: aircraft ABS and aircraft engine ABS. My take: a GPU neocloud runs on airline economics, and the debt behind it looks a lot like aircraft engine ABS. The parallels: • Perishable inventory. An empty seat after the door closes is gone forever. So is an idle hour on an energized H100 rack. • 85%+ of cost is fixed (servers, 10-year rack leases, 10-14% debt service). One more hour of compute costs pennies of power. • Utilization is everything. Airlines break even around 80% load factor, a levered GPU cluster around 65-75%. The returns live in those last 25 percentage points. • NVIDIA is Boeing and Airbus rolled into one. Powered shells and grid interconnects are the new airport slots. • Wall St copied the aircraft financing playbook: take-or-pay contract plus servers in a bankruptcy-remote SPV, 70-80% LTV. Part 1 of my blog post goes into a lot more detail: http://alexyangsong.com/blog/aluminum-to-silicon/

https://x.com/i/article/2115078093488709632

NEW Ramp data: Opus 5.5 has somewhat reaccelerated demand for Anthropic, but it might not be enough. Spend on Anthropic models remains 1.6% below its July peak, according to Ramp data. Opus 5.5 now accounts for 63% of Anthropic spend, so frontier models do matter. The idea that AI is already "good enough" is probably overrated as a concern IMO. But price cuts / competition at all intelligence levels are still the most significant threats to AI model companies, and continue to form cracks in the AI thesis.