<p>Gavin Baker with Patrick O'Shaughnessy provides one of the best analyses of what is currently happening with the AI economy.</p>
<p>Baker is an investor, an early investor in Cerebras, and focuses on national security investing. His perspective on numbers and market dynamics is a rare combination of depth and specificity.</p>
<p>Here are a few theses that seemed the most non-obvious:</p>
<ul>
<li>Anthropic added $11B ARR in just one month. This is more than what Palantir, Snowflake, and Databricks built together over 10 years. The current ARR is around $50B, with a 1000% year-over-year growth. Moreover, Anthropic is compute-constrained - if there were enough hardware, the ARR would already be $100-200B.</li>
<li>Anthropic burned 80% less capital than OpenAI to reach comparable revenue. And the token value is lower. OpenAI compensates for this with aggressive compute acquisition.</li>
<li>Disaggregating the prefill and decode phases of inference can extend the life of GPUs from 3-4 years to 10-15. According to Baker, this alone could save private credit - the cost of financing GPU clusters would drop from 7%+ to 5-6%.</li>
<li>The main indicator of whether a bubble is inflating is TSMC's discipline regarding capacity. Nvidia could sell $2-3T worth of GPUs in 2026-27 if TSMC agreed to everything Jensen asks for. TSMC's decisions on capacity expansion are cleaner than any other signal.</li>
<li>Frontier labs are capturing almost all the economy at the model level. At the application level, on the contrary: trillions of dollars of value have been destroyed by AI, and Cursor and Cognition are no exceptions.</li>
</ul>
<p>And separately - a metaphor that Baker repeats: AI is a machine gun, while most are still fencing. Even a master swordsman loses to a peasant with a machine gun. We need to master new weapons, not refine the old ones.</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Mmj_G9RlW-I">Watch the full discussion here</a></p>
<p>#ai #anthropic #openai #nvidia #tsmc #gavin_baker</p>
