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Not Financial Advice
Joined March 2020
"the only economist you should ever trust is the trader" @Josh_NBT @WOLF_Terminal
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In rapidly growing markets you shouldn't have a scarcity mindset about competition. Share of the pie is meaningless when the pie is still rapidly growing. Applies to both AI and self driving right now. @edels0n
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X bulls complain in comments when something only runs 50% and not 100%. But X bears when they make 2% -
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Agreed. But to be fair, the comment he is responding to is pretty stupid. Wtf is "true value"? Fundamental value? Stocks only align with fundamentals temporarily once or twice over any decade ever. And the tech to know the book value of any given stock at any given time has been around since the 2010's. That's not how you should be using AI for edge. You don't need AI to do that.
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NoBellTrading retweeted
BREAKING: Hackers target the US Federal Election Commission, knocking its electronic filing system offline just 1 week before the midterm elections. — Reuters
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It's not a terrible thesis but it's not really supported by the data. Even when we look at the flattening in spend - actual usage is still rising. Which doesn't imply an overall slowdown. Could just as easily imply Jevons is kicking in as it does with most tech. Which we can see in the September recovery in spend and suggested in the Oct numbers as well.
People are having trouble following the logic in my posts so let me explain 1) top AI spenders are spending less on AI 2) even if overall AI token usage is going up, spend is not going up in line. Their spend = AI related revenue 3) LLMs becoming more efficient = less revenue for more usage 4) the amount companies spent and continue to spend on AI capex is fixed and expects certain amount of revenue to pay it back 5) even with LLMs getting cheaper, and usage going up, companies are spending less because they are cost-conscious and must spend on tokens responsibly. Recent trend shows reigning in costs. Also, note that this is during the "VC subsidized" era of AI compute. Meaning if the real pricing was passed through, companies would be using a lot less as they could not afford/justify the bill. You can be bullish AI token usage but skeptical on the sustainability of the capex given the expected revenue. It isn't economical. Trillions spent on capex, todays use cases will not pay it back for some time. Revenue from top 1% is already declining, and Ant ARR slower than est which lines up. People will mention open source models, but fail to understand those are even cheaper options which means even less revenue generated in the ecosystem. Also, much of the top 1% spenders are early stage start ups that require even more VC funding to keep going and burn the cash. If money dries up, people are underestimating the near term impacts on AI compute demand. You can extend this one step further to the frontier labs who are driving a ton of the overall compute demand for internal model development (which does not have tangible ROI to justify/foot the bill). These companies are not able to fund this tens of billions of dollars of spend themselves. This again requires tons of external capital. What happens if that capital is also fleeting? This is also where all the S&P earnings growth is coming from (AI infra, $MU, $NVDA) - aka contagion and earnings could roll over. The capital is key. It's not infinite. It's not being paid back fast enough to replenish spend. The true demand is being subsidized. The top users are already showing declining spend. This has a big air pocket until the next wave of demand hits (like physical AI). If you can't fund the model training at frontiers, or start ups can't raise as much, we could possibly go from compute constrained to supply glut. Big risk, and you're talking trillions in capex + leverage in the ecosystem. And again the potentially profitable AI revenue from profitable companies is already being optimized for spend (lowering costs).
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Cause AI demand is definitely slowing down so much. Keep in mind - this is only what open router can check. Actual growth is much larger.
DeepSeek is making AI inference ridiculously cheap. Lower inference costs leads to less compute required per task which means fewer GPUs needed to serve the same demand. If AI demand doesn’t grow fast enough to offset these efficiency gains it will lead to compute glut.
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It's not a terrible thesis but it's not really supported by the data. Even when we look at the flattening in spend - actual usage is still rising. Which doesn't imply an overall slowdown. Could just as easily imply Jevons is kicking in as it does with most tech. Which we can see in the September recovery in spend and suggested in the Oct numbers as well.
People are having trouble following the logic in my posts so let me explain 1) top AI spenders are spending less on AI 2) even if overall AI token usage is going up, spend is not going up in line. Their spend = AI related revenue 3) LLMs becoming more efficient = less revenue for more usage 4) the amount companies spent and continue to spend on AI capex is fixed and expects certain amount of revenue to pay it back 5) even with LLMs getting cheaper, and usage going up, companies are spending less because they are cost-conscious and must spend on tokens responsibly. Recent trend shows reigning in costs. Also, note that this is during the "VC subsidized" era of AI compute. Meaning if the real pricing was passed through, companies would be using a lot less as they could not afford/justify the bill. You can be bullish AI token usage but skeptical on the sustainability of the capex given the expected revenue. It isn't economical. Trillions spent on capex, todays use cases will not pay it back for some time. Revenue from top 1% is already declining, and Ant ARR slower than est which lines up. People will mention open source models, but fail to understand those are even cheaper options which means even less revenue generated in the ecosystem. Also, much of the top 1% spenders are early stage start ups that require even more VC funding to keep going and burn the cash. If money dries up, people are underestimating the near term impacts on AI compute demand. You can extend this one step further to the frontier labs who are driving a ton of the overall compute demand for internal model development (which does not have tangible ROI to justify/foot the bill). These companies are not able to fund this tens of billions of dollars of spend themselves. This again requires tons of external capital. What happens if that capital is also fleeting? This is also where all the S&P earnings growth is coming from (AI infra, $MU, $NVDA) - aka contagion and earnings could roll over. The capital is key. It's not infinite. It's not being paid back fast enough to replenish spend. The true demand is being subsidized. The top users are already showing declining spend. This has a big air pocket until the next wave of demand hits (like physical AI). If you can't fund the model training at frontiers, or start ups can't raise as much, we could possibly go from compute constrained to supply glut. Big risk, and you're talking trillions in capex + leverage in the ecosystem. And again the potentially profitable AI revenue from profitable companies is already being optimized for spend (lowering costs).
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big two weeks ahead of us. rate decision this week and big tech earnings. Then midterms next week. boy oh boy. volatility should be JUICY.
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We have yet to watch this (we will) but the data clearly shows labor breaks before AI goes to zero. Which means pivot in rates comes before the fundamentals do. Which aligns with our thesis that the last bull phase is ahead and not behind. And it likely ends in a global financial crisis. The data below is from our EMBER app.
HOW @citrini SEES THINGS RIGHT NOW: AI can design drugs like scorpion antivenom largely on its own (he did it with @claudeai) but the new bottlenecks here are monkeys/testing (rather than compute). The reflexive risk in financing the AI buildout is REAL. ^it's not 2023 anymore & cash flows can't fund the whole thing so buildout is dependent on financial conditions whose tightening affects fundamentals. The trade from AI Drug Discovery is to be LONG EXPERIMENTS rather than long the IP itself. Citrini actually thinks the value of early stage assets is going to GO DOWN. The stock he mentions is Charles River (a preclinical testing company that has monkeys is in a shortage that Citrini expects to get more extreme). More names in the piece. $CRL ENJOY. Apple podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Spotify open.spotify.com/episode/405… YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=rzQhjayC… CITRINI'S PIECE, "Citrini Therapeutics We Wanted to Use Claude to Create a New Drug. Here’s What Happened.": citriniresearch.com/p/citrin… Anthropic's Technical Blog Post, "How Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins": anthropic.com/research/claud…
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Sell today because of an issue in 2030 ? And this isn't '97 ? Are you sure? Nothing bullish will happen before then? Anthropic definitely doesn't have a model release lined up to boost the IPO and OpenAI will just roll over... are we really, really sure?
Replying to @DeItaone
By 2030. Lol. Economists are so useless.
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SO IMPORTANT. This is true *IF* the AI story is dead. The rotation right now is bullish on the AI story. GDP is only growing because of AI spending. Take that away and we are in a recession. Rotation trade blows up. That's only not happening because money is seeking temporary safety while waiting to buy the dip on the AI names. Hence why I keep talking about being bullish AI.
S&P 500 could plunge 30% if AI stocks go bust, warns TS Lombard 🚨
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People keep saying this bs yet no one can show you data saying demand is actually falling off or that there is less token usage. Cause there isn't. It's still rapidly growing. Jevons in play and most of the new data centers aren't even built yet. If this is the thesis it's '97 not 2000.
DeepSeek is causing a compute glut. Unfortunately, this looks more and more like the 2000's internet boom, where a massive bandwidth glut led to the downfall of companies like Cisco, JDSU, Nortel and WorldCom.
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A big part of this video is to also remind that if the AI story fails the rotations will fail too. Explained below.
Record margin debt. Record leveraged ETFs. "It's dot-com all over again." Every AI bubble warning sign you're being fed is misleading you. I spent 30 minutes going through them one by one, receipts included. New video: youtu.be/F_oo7n3I2Js
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Record margin debt. Record leveraged ETFs. "It's dot-com all over again." Every AI bubble warning sign you're being fed is misleading you. I spent 30 minutes going through them one by one, receipts included. New video: youtu.be/F_oo7n3I2Js
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There continue to be 0 cases of AI doing something it wasn't told to do. And yes, that includes the Hugging hack.
JUST IN: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns AI agents could soon make unauthorized financial decisions, saying “You can't stop it.”
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Every new model has seen a pop. If the next model comes out and market gets no reaction - that's when I get worried.
OpenAI (Perp - so live) ...that's not good
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And keep in mind most of these bears expect other areas of the market like healthcare to benefit from AI. How they going to do that? With a $20/mo fee? $200/mo fee? No. They will use agent systems that are likely overseen by frontier models through the API. Which needs data centers. And energy. All the things they are bearish on. Everything says bubble later - still parabolic for now.
This - and people "reverse engineering" income off of monthly subscriptions.. I mean that's just incompetence. Corporations and small businesses are paying per token through the API. Not a monthly fee. @gnoble79 @edzitron I like hearing bear cases but it never feels like they understand the bull case. If you don't know the other side then you don't know the trade. Sorry.
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This - and people "reverse engineering" income off of monthly subscriptions.. I mean that's just incompetence. Corporations and small businesses are paying per token through the API. Not a monthly fee. @gnoble79 @edzitron I like hearing bear cases but it never feels like they understand the bull case. If you don't know the other side then you don't know the trade. Sorry.
George @gnoble79, you say that "pricing on compute and tokens is collapsing at a breathtaking rate".. What data do you have that shows compute prices collapsing? Every chart I see on GPU hourly rental rates is up and to the right. I agree that token prices are falling, but can you explain how OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue continues to grow at pretty healthy rates if token prices are collapsing? You also claim that Anthropic is selling dollar bills for 20 cents. What data or numbers are you looking at which suggest that Anthropic has negative gross margins and is spending more on compute than revenue? For reference, I saw in the WSJ this week that for the first 6 months of 2026, Anthropic recorded $16.3 billion in revenue with $9 billion spent on computing capacity and infrastructure. Bloomberg, amongst others, also reported that in Q3-26, Anthropic's revenue was $16.8 billion, with 85% gross margins, "compute margins" of 40%+, and positive free cash flow. I assume gross margins only deduct for inference-serving compute costs, while "compute margin" is further burdened for model training costs. In any event, it would seem that Anthropic's revenue is (significantly) greater than its total compute costs, so I would love to know what you're looking at when you state that Anthropic is selling dollar bills for 20 cents.
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