Edit:
The AI bubble panel: Ed Zitron, Gary Marcus and Julien Garran join George Noble, Jack Gamble (Nobody Special Finance) and Alessandro (Risk Takers) to ask whether the AI boom is the biggest misallocation of capital ever, and who is left holding it if it breaks.
Ed Zitron explains why he says you can’t trust Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s numbers until they are audited, why $1.3 trillion of compute commitments don’t add up, and his estimate that $200 billion to $350 billion of GPUs are sitting in warehouses and unpowered data centers, and why that is nothing like the dark fiber of the dot-com bubble.
Gary Marcus explains why “rogue AI” is really badly built software, why large language models can’t reliably follow instructions, and why he says AI stocks now trade like meme stocks.
Julien Garran of MacroStrategy Partnership lays out the $1.7 trillion Big Tech has already spent on AI capex, another trillion a year planned, and his estimate that on a generous depreciation schedule it wipes out 98% of their non-AI income by 2034.
Jack Gamble breaks down the creative financing behind the data center build-out, including Amazon’s chip sale-leaseback, and the Navier-Stokes proof story. George Noble asks what it means for gold, the dollar, Treasuries and the Fed when it unwinds.
We also get into OpenAI, Anthropic and the Anthropic IPO, Nvidia, Broadcom and Google’s TPUs, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, GPU depreciation and rental prices, private credit, pensions and 401(k)s, how this compares with the dot-com bubble, and what it all means for gold and the US dollar.