Home Speakers David Cahn Quote On the one hand, it will be a year of delays, first in data center buildouts, many of which will fall behind schedule, and second, in the AGI timeline. At the same time, AI adoption will continue its relentless rise.
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More from David Cahn Essay AI in 2026: A Tale of Two AIs Dec 3, 2025
Dwarkesh Patel’s recent podcast interviews with Richard Sutton, Andrej Karpathy, and Ilya Sutskever are a demarcating line; the new consensus is that the AGI window will be in the 2030s, at earliest. Essay AI in 2026: A Tale of Two AIs Dec 3, 2025
In 2026, we’re going to see the emergence of a $0 to $1B club. Essay AI in 2026: A Tale of Two AIs Dec 3, 2025
My prediction, especially coming off of the successful Gemini 3 launch and hype around TPUs, is that the TSMC constraint could become material in 2026. Essay AI's $600B Question Jun 20, 2024
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But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs. Essay AI's $600B Question Jun 20, 2024
GPU computing is increasingly turning into a commodity, metered per hour. Unlike the CPU cloud, which became an oligopoly, new entrants building dedicated AI clouds continue to flood the market. Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to marginal cost (e.g., airlines).
On the same topics Blog Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models? Sep 22, 2026
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute. Blog Frontier Overhangs Sep 21, 2026
A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure. Blog Why I still haven't bought into true RSI Sep 19, 2026
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If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar. About this quote