one where AI agents run in the background for hours or days at a time rather than answering a human in real time. In that world, latency matters less and cost matters more, and Neil has built the whole company around driving the cost of a token as low as it can possibly go.
why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.
We have fewer firehouses today than we had in the 1960s and the population has nearly doubled since then. There needs to be a holistic approach to how and where we build and to how we provide safety.
China's overall plan is to use technology, to use finance building infrastructure for countries in the developing world and then through these services that China gives to the developing world, China wants to bind these countries to it politically and use their agency to counterbalance the west.
The bottleneck isn't in the production of natural gas — there's plenty of gas in the ground. The bottleneck is in the infrastructure to move it, process it, and export it. And that infrastructure takes years to permit, finance, and build.
Drones enable us to have a complete digital picture of the grid to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And if it does happen, we can know about it sooner and faster and mitigate the response.
AI's capex boom is the second largest share of use GDP in history. bigger than the railroads, second only to the I think the Louisiana purchase, and there's the build out of the electrical grid, the highway system, uh the Apollo program, although that wasn't very big, and then the internet and sort of the telco infrastructure.
AI's capex boom is the second largest share of use GDP in history. bigger than the railroads, second only to the I think the Louisiana purchase... unlike past tech booms, Facebook, Instagram, Door Dash, it's fundamentally a supply side story about making chips, building data centers, and powering them. It's money creating demand for energy, not the reverse.
The problem is what you don't see on the box, the resilience, sovereignty and competition risks that come when a growing chunk of rural New Zealand's connectivity, including some mobile towers, schools and businesses, depends on a single foreign owned satellite provider.
For the first time, we have such a common infrastructure powering all of them with our Gemini models and the underlying AI infrastructure. So we are more able to, with intent, do things which cut across things.
Outside of defense and a few security sensitive corners of government, there's been remarkably little strategic thinking about what happens if Starlink stumbles, changes its business model, or simply decides New Zealand isn't a priority market anymore.
the two physical constraints that in Gavin's view will dictate the next phase of AI. On power, he thinks the near-term shortage starts to ease in 2027 and 2028 as new sources of energy come online, and that orbital compute solves it in the long term. On wafers, he explains what is different this time from the dotcom bubble and why TSMC's capacity decisions may be the single most important variable to watch.
With the US more than 50 years behind China in critical mineral supply and grid infrastructure built on systems designed a century ago, they examine where the real bottlenecks are and how to move faster.
maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor
Billions of Saudi dollars were already reshaping the US economy. And now many of those tech companies are vulnerable as Iran targets their infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in the ongoing war.
Probably the most obvious investment in the middle class is investments in infrastructure. Because when people can get to work, when people have more opportunities, when people can spend more time with their families, when people have an absence of stress, when they can take their kids to Disneyland, you know, that's that's accretive to the prosperity of their life.
As the battlefield becomes more distributed and electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure, built around diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, is struggling to keep up.
And it is kind of a city in a jungle. A city-state home to 6 million people and all kinds of high-tech companies all surrounded by trees and waterways.
When infrastructure doesn't work for people, it hurts the family. It hurts her home budget money out of her rent or child care. And so for me, it was that that moment where it really crystallized when the fundamentals aren't working. People on the margins pay the dearest price for it.
roughly 20% of the world's oil production is flowing through that every day and so whether you're looking backward or looking forward there is no replacement whatsoever for opening that strait and keeping it open.
So what if you could build a living, breathing, physics based model of the entire grid, every pole line and transformer and watch how it actually behaves in a storm or when you plug in a wind farm or aluminum smelter sized data center.
So what if you could build a living, breathing, physics based model of the entire grid, every pole line and transformer and watch how it actually behaves in a storm or when you plug in and you wind farm or aluminum smelter sized data center.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
