A bonanza on the semiconductor industry and hardware scaling to AGI by the end of the decade.
Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis, the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware. Jon Y runs Asianometry, the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business history.
* What Xi would do if he became scaling pilled
* $ 1T+ in datacenter buildout by end of decade
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Sponsors:
* Jane Street is looking to hire their next generation of leaders. Their deep learning team is looking for FPGA programmers, CUDA programmers, and ML researchers. To learn more about their full time roles, internship, tech podcast, and upcoming Kaggle competition, go here.
* This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.
If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.
Timestamps
00:00:00 – Xi's path to AGI
00:04:20 – Liang Mong Song
00:08:25 – How semiconductors get better
00:11:16 – China can centralize compute
00:18:50 – Export controls & sanctions
00:32:51 – Huawei's intense culture
00:38:51 – Why the semiconductor industry is so stratified
00:40:58 – N2 should not exist
00:45:53 – Taiwan invasion hypothetical
00:49:21 – Mind-boggling complexity of semiconductors
00:59:13 – Chip architecture design
01:04:36 – Architectures lead to different AI models? China vs. US
01:10:12 – Being head of compute at an AI lab
01:16:24 – Scaling costs and power demand
01:37:05 – Are we financing an AI bubble?
01:50:20 – Starting Asianometry and SemiAnalysis
02:06:10 – Opportunities in the semiconductor stack
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
