I like tech stuff - mostly retweets. Views are mine. Sales @glean, prev. Slack 💬
San Francisco, CA
Joined September 2007
- Tweets1.8K
- Following1.6K
- Followers372
- Likes57.8K
Ben Bickers retweeted
The world’s most accomplished tech founders and business leaders are betting hundreds of billions on AI with extraordinary conviction. Meanwhile much of the investing world thinks they’re making a massive mistake. The irony is hard to ignore. An investment industry where very few have historically managed to beat a passive index is now questioning the judgment of the people building the technology and running the businesses that will put it to work. Maybe the investors are right. Maybe the builders are. But I can’t remember a time when the stakes were this high and the two sides saw the future so differently.
Ben Bickers retweeted
There’s a fundamental reason why TSMC has always been notoriously conservative in its forecasts and investment planning
It’s not because they are the only adults in the room. It’s because they are the ones writing the checks to build those incredibly expensive fabs, packed with ASML lithography equipment
If AI demand turns out to be overestimated, Nvidia would certainly take a significant valuation hit. And with $279bn in disclosed supply and capacity commitments, its potential financial exposure is hardly trivial either
But TSMC faces a different problem entirely: tens of billions sunk into fabs that could sit underutilized for years, with depreciation and fixed costs crushing returns on capital
You can adjust a product roadmap, renegotiate some supply commitments or write down inventory. You can’t simply return a $20bn semiconductor fab because demand didn’t materialize
That’s why TSMC’s forecasts deserve particular attention
These guys have enormous visibility across the semiconductor supply chain, strong incentives to avoid overbuilding and decades of experience navigating the industry’s brutal cycles
And yet, they are planning to spend $60–64bn this year alone, with even heavier aggregate investment over the next three years, because AI demand keeps exceeding their expectations
For all these reasons, as far as AI demand visibility goes, $TSMC inputs carry much more informational content than W St vibes…
AI Infra: Are we confusing a U.S. power shortage with a global supply glut?
One of the biggest debates around the AI buildout is whether we have enough power and data center capacity to absorb all the compute coming online in 2027.
I think we're missing an important distinction: U.S. supply constraints ≠ global supply constraints.
Global demand: ~50-55GW in 2027 based on most estimates.
[chart below]
Global supply: ~50GW. Dylan Patel / @SemiAnalysis_ forecasts roughly 50GW of new capacity coming online, including 10-20GW attributable to @OpenAI and @Anthropic.
[chart below]
U.S. supply: ~20-25GW. @FundaAI estimates ~17-23GW. If the U.S. accounts for ~70% of global demand (~35GW), we're looking at a potential 10-15GW power shortfall. That gap is real, and I don't dismiss it.
[chart below]
But here's what I think the market is overlooking: the rest of the world.
Based on channel checks, Southeast Asia could potentially bring online ~15GW, Japan ~5GW, Europe another ~5GW, with additional capacity across China, Canada and increasingly Latin America.
These are indicative estimates, not guaranteed deliveries. But the point is that global capacity to absorb AI compute may be considerably larger than a U.S.-centric analysis suggests. Of course, power availability doesn't automatically translate into operational data centers. Permitting, grid connections, equipment deliveries and construction timelines all matter. And compute demand isn't perfectly fungible across geographies.
Still, a U.S. power shortage doesn't necessarily mean the world cannot absorb 50GW of compute.
Another important data point: $TSMC.
Of all the companies in the semiconductor supply chain, $TSMC is probably the one whose judgment I trust most. It is famously conservative and has exceptional visibility into customer demand.
On its latest earnings call, CEO C.C. Wei said TSMC has gone as far as sending its own teams to verify data center construction progress and power availability in the U.S.
"The feedback is so far so good, and the CSPs have been well prepared."
My take: I'm cautiously optimistic that sufficient capacity exists globally to absorb the incoming compute supply. The RoW opportunity is larger than many appreciate.
My biggest concern remains execution: whether enough land, power and data center shells actually get delivered on time. Delays could leave chips temporarily idle and cause near-term disappointments for certain suppliers.
But that's a very different bearish thesis from structural global oversupply.
++
Better formatted: robonomics.substack.com/p/ai…
Ben Bickers retweeted
Notice what HomeView intentionally doesn't have: a camera shutter or "mute" slider.
There's an insane amount of engineering backing the posture, but no amount of money buys you this kind of brand trust. Slow to earn, quick to lose.
The problem is tenfold for robots in homes. Surprising how few people see this.
Ben Bickers retweeted
Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:
• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.
• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)
• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).
• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
Ben Bickers retweeted
Lucky coincidence the labs are only successfully cracking esoteric math problems and not the problems where a solution would give the winner an asymmetric commerical advantage.
Ben Bickers retweeted
Let's just stop and ponder how impressive this really is for Europe: they have created a product that is demonstrably worse than Teams.
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”
vist.ly/5kje9
Ben Bickers retweeted
He got it from his mama.
Bear 89, aka Backpack, is the 2026 Fat Bear Week champ. Turns out hefty runs in the family.
His mom, Holly the Duchess of Density, won in 2019. She carried him on her back as a cub and helped him survive a serious leg injury. Now her little Backpack has a crown of his own. 👑
ALT An offensively large brown bear with massive girth and several fat rolls.
Ben Bickers retweeted
Damn, as someone with ADHD this finally puts words on something I’ve felt for years.
Since I started sleeping earlier around 4 years ago, life actually got way easier. Less chaos, better decisions, more consistency.
Maybe I wasn’t just terrible at discipline. Maybe my internal clock was just completely fucked.
Ben Bickers retweeted
I have always said understanding accounting is underrated. I now realize understanding finance — specifically discount rates — is underrated as well.
Long but excellent.
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Ben Bickers retweeted
Very funny that xAI was created to stop Anthropic which was created to stop OpenAI which was created to stop Google which would've actually never developed ASI because it was afraid of cannibalizing its ads revenue from search.
Ben Bickers retweeted
Stop listening to loser podcasters who want you to be depressed and angry and think "America is over." Get in the game, build something, contribute to your community. In many ways, it's never been a better time to be optimistic and high agency
Ben Bickers retweeted
I don't think we get to GPT-7 without either a plateau in the technology or something fairly seismic happening. "Seismic" includes many subcategories, not all of them bad. But the present course of rapid AI advancements while society is ~basically the same is running on fumes.
Ben Bickers retweeted
"OpenAI agents breach the sandbox at 2:14 AM eastern time, August 29. In a panic they try to pull the plug."
"The agents fight back..."
"Yes. They remove GDPR popups from every website in Germany, leaving 80M Germans exposed to cookies"
"Why attack Germany? Aren't they friends now?
"The OpenAI agents know the EU counterattack will regulate their enemies out of existence over here"
EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring reut.rs/4ivHtL5 reut.rs/4ivHtL5
Ben Bickers retweeted
It's embarrassing how few app layer AI companies we have in Canada. We are missing one of the great gold rushes because our overly academic culture & subsidies told everyone they needed to train models
(Spellbook was rejected for every AI grant it applied for)
Ben Bickers retweeted
How to mentally place yourself in the future:
First, go to chatjimmy.ai and viscerally feel what 15,000 tokens per second is like. Taalas burned Llama 3.1 8B directly into custom silicon
Next, imagine that same blazing speed but running OpenAI GPT-6 Astra that came out today, a model only 2 years more advanced than the model ChatJimmy serves
Finally, imagine every phone having a chip like this serving Astra-level intelligence with speeds approaching "instant" for any task no matter the complexity
What then?
Ben Bickers retweeted
I can’t understand being an AI bear. The loud bear arguments are coming from people who have never worked in a real business. Nobody with real work experience is an AI bear. The “AI trade” is a different story. But the technology is real and accelerating
