The fact that voters are universally saying their #1 issue is the economy while markets are basically at all-time highs is the single worst omen imaginable for the future of American capitalism as we’ve known it The good news is someone already built you an exit for this exact moment

*ANTHROPIC INVESTORS PUSH FOR VALUATION CLOSER TO $1.5T: WSJ This means it’s less

everyone believes intelligence has unlimited demand, not just the maxis. but what the maxis get wrong is that the intelligence anthropic and openai and frontier models are building isn’t the generic kind you’re picturing. let me explain- the two biggest uses of compute are crudely either training or inference. the “generic intelligence” everyone says has unlimited demand comes from mainly inference, and inference needs very different power and utilization than training. inference comes in bursts, so you have to by default overbuild capacity to handle the peaks until the utilization problem is solved, which means almost by definition we are going to overbuild. but training doesn’t have that problem: the workload is steady and the demand curve is knowable. so data centers end up overbuilt right now precisely because utilization isn’t optimized yet. so anthropic and the other frontier labs are building their future on training, which is why they are saying they can soak up all this excess capacity. but their “intelligence” isn’t workplace productivity. it’s the leap toward singularity-type outcomes: new drug discoveries, cyber capabilities, recursive self-improvement. these are true 1-of-1s. that’s why when anthropic talks about “existential threats to humanity,” it isn’t talking about job losses, not really. it’s saying they’re on the precipice of unbelievable discoveries, because they’re still TRAINING MORE MODELS. but distillation is real and open source is real. the half-life of any frontier model is tiny because nothing protects it the way IP protects a patent. imagine a rare disease drug company that spends billions on research, and two months after a breakthrough a generic shows up. that company can never recoup its investment, unless it can discover an infinite number of rare disease drugs. THAT is the kind of intelligence anthropic is betting on. that’s what the $800bn of compute spend is betting on. so the questions you need to ask are: 1) if intelligence is two-tiered, what does each tier cost? what’s the cost of AGI, and what’s the cost of the generic intelligence that has infinite demand? and 2) are we allocating capital with the right risk curve and decay function to find out whether the AGI payoff is real? and if it is real, could a private company ever truly own it? that’s the cognitive dissonance at the heart of this entire paradox: everyone is gaslighting each other about what intelligence is as the unit of measurement is purposely kept vague by both the users and the suppliers. generic intelligence has unlimited demand, but it’s a certain race to the bottom. "superintelligence" is the opposite: it can't have unlimited demand by definition, but if it delivers even half of what it promises, no private company will ever get to keep it, at least not without the government stepping in to guard the moat (which is why anthropic keeps playing this angle up, without having shown any demonstration they are near this level of discovery at all). and at that point you have to ask who is going to hold the bag, and whether that was in fact, very intelligent at all.

Every now and then you get a rare moment where you realize one person’s bull thesis is exactly the same as another’s bear thesis And after everything we just experienced over the past 72 hours, the fact of the matter is I like Bitcoin here

the most credible path to save this market is to nationalize anthropic because the only way to end the circular financing doom loop is to coerce the lender of last resort that happens when all options run out and the market has spoken that the options are indeed running out fast

As I’ve said before and will continue to say, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings

People assume investing is about being right or wrong within a deterministic lens But the ingenuity of great investors is the stochastic ability to change your mind when new information surfaces I’ve never been more bullish that the great investors will remain irreducibly human

Bubbles are not determined by demand itself. We always know there is a demand curve. Bubbles are determined by the wrong cost of capital that computes excess demand. Bubbles are when you sell $1 for 20c and your payback becomes due before you can convert the $1 to $2, and pop.

If we take the view that power becomes the ultimate bottleneck, the capex optimization constraint shifts to the one input China has in greater abundance vs US (who has relatively more chips) Then if you take the view that global token spend increasingly flows to cheap power and open weights, spot market is likely where China’s marginal impact would show up first via token dumping, esp if the future of work is mostly inference based not training (which also requires excess capacity with lower utilization rates) So the compute forward curve actually becomes an epic industrial duration battle where China competes at the front end and the US holds the long end. The question then becomes who is the dog and who is the tail, and which strategic advantage will roll down the curve faster- chips or power? I think anyone who understands the leverage of depreciation knows the answer. In other words this is a warning to US policymakers: the long end of the compute curve was never really about contracted chips security. It’s about energized megawatts and that’s basically the one duration the US is shortest vs its biggest geopolitical rival

The opportunity for crypto in the age of AI has never been higher Security, privacy, identity, provenance, payments, coordination, compute If AI makes intelligence abundant then value migrates to scarcity, and crypto is the only tech that can prove it It’s time double down