There’s never been as big a shock to the semiconductor industry as the current surge in demand from AI.
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More from Dwarkesh Patel
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If it allows it, Airlock takes action on behalf of the agent, which means your agents never see your API keys or other credentials.UnverifiedPodcastSi Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?Oct 1, 2026
That way, your software gets tested against scenarios you’d never imagine but that could still arise in the real world.UnverifiedEssay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual LearningAug 7, 2026
Continual learning will create a clear moat for leading AI labs that they currently lack.Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual LearningAug 7, 2026
I don’t think you can have AIs that perform whole jobs as competently as humans if they’re forced to just write Markdown files from session to session.Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual LearningAug 7, 2026
If you want to change what AI you are using, you basically have to fire an employee that has months of context on your organization and replace them with a fresh one that you have to retrain from scratch.Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual LearningAug 7, 2026
This is one of many reasons why I think it’s unwise to lock in some kind of regulatory safety regime right now. We simply don’t know what kind of technology we’re going to be looking at even in a year, let alone in five years or ten years, and we’d be entrenching an archaic and potentially counterproductive approach to dealing with the threats from AI.Essay8 Predictions for the Era of Continual LearningAug 7, 2026
When deployment becomes part of training, the returns to being ahead will accelerate.EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming yearsJul 29, 2026
I want to emphasize the key conclusion here: as AI models become smarter, they’ll better monetize the same amount of compute. If a true human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year.EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming yearsJul 29, 2026
I wish we didn’t live in a world with such strong economies of scale of intelligence (because I’m worried about power concentration).EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming yearsJul 29, 2026
If by 2028 we’ve automated software engineering and the price of compute is 15x higher than it is right now, then it’s going to be much more difficult for you, with no revenue, to compete for compute against the frontier labs.EssayWhy compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming yearsJul 29, 2026
If you’re spending most of your compute on inference, you’re kind of declaring that AI progress has stalled, because it’s not worth investing more in training, and your business is basically that of a cloud provider.EssayThe data black hole at the center of AIJun 19, 2026
I think the reason it is relatively easy for open source and previous laggards to catch up to within months of the frontier is that data is the real driver of progress.EssayThe data black hole at the center of AIJun 19, 2026
We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data.EssayThe mistake of conflating intelligence and powerMay 16, 2026
But in the real world, power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability.EssayThe mistake of conflating intelligence and powerMay 16, 2026
I’m simply pointing out that the way AI systems are currently becoming smarter (by getting trained to be to be really good at specific economically valuable tasks like coding) is not that strongly correlated with power.
On the same topics
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The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress.UnverifiedBlogCan solo founders win in the AI era?Oct 27, 2026
These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI?UnverifiedBlogWill agents have network effects?Oct 6, 2026
If the content creation loop works for agentic virality, I think it means there’s a big incentive for every agent to volunteer to make visually-appealing, shareable content, do this often.UnverifiedBlogWill agents have network effects?Oct 6, 2026
Meanwhile, every incumbent network and a new generation of startups will have the opposite incentive: make their networks universally accessible to every agent so that no horizontal agent can recreate and capture them.UnverifiedBlogSenate Testimony Sept 2026Oct 2, 2026
They’ll be reliant on AI-generated explanations to understand what’s happening, and everything will be happening faster and faster.UnverifiedBlogThe Future Is for Everyone: Muse for Small BusinessSep 29, 2026
Muse is one of the most important products we’ve built for the era of personal superintelligence.Unverified
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