YouSaid · the spoken record

Gavin Baker

lines on the record: 115
first: 2025-12-09
most recent: 2025-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You need to get as many GPUs deployed and one data center as fast as possible in a coherent cluster so you can work out the bugs. And so this is what XAI effectively does for NVIDIA because they build the data centers the fastest. They can deploy Blackwells at scale the fastest and they can help work with NVIDIA to work out the bugs for everyone else. So because they're the fastest, they'll have the first Blackwell model. We know that scaling laws for pre-training are intact. And this means the Black Wall models are going to be amazing. Blackwell is, I mean, it's not an F35 versus an F4 Phantom, but from my perspective, it is a better chip. You know, maybe it's like an F35 versus a Raphael. And so now that we know pre-skilling holding, we know that these Blackwell models are going to be really good based on the Rosspecs. They should probably be better. And then something even more important happens. So the GB200 was really hard to.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of the AI ecosystem, which is an extremely rational strategy for them. And for anyone who's the low-cost producer, let's make life really hard for our competitors. So what happens now? I think this has pretty profound implications. One, we'll see the first models trained on Blackwell in early 2026. I think the first Blackwell model will come from XAI. And the reason for that is just, according to Jensen, no one builds data centers faster than Elon. Jensen has said this on the record. And even once you have the Blackwells, it takes six to nine months to get them performing at the level of Hopper. Because Hopper is finally tuned. Everybody knows how to use it. The software is perfect for it. The engineers know all its quirks. Everybody knows how to architect as Hopper data center at this point. And by the way, when Hopper came out, it took six to 12 months for it to really outperform Ampere, which was generation before. So if your Jinsen are in...”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Blackwell was such a complicated product and so hard to ramp, Google was training Gemini 3 on 24 and 25 era TPUs, which are like four phantoms. Blackwell, it's like an F35. It just took a really long time to get it going. So I think Google for sure has this temporary advantage right now from pre-training perspective. I think it's also important that they've been the lowest cost producer of tokens. And this is really important because AI is the first time in my career as a tech investor that being the low-cost producers ever matter. Apple is not worth trillions because they're a low cost producer of phones. Microsoft is not worth trillions because they're low cost producer of software. NVIDIA is not worth trillions because they're the low-cost producer of AI accelerators. It's never mattered. And this is really important because what Google has been doing has the low cost producer is they have been sucking the economic oxygen.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a World War II era airplane. And it was by far the best World War II era airplane. It's a P51 Mustang with a Merlin engine. And two years later, in semiconductor time, that's like you're an F4 phantom, okay?”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black hole is so complicated and it was so hard for everyone to get these exquisitely complex racks working consistently. Had reasoning not come along, there would have been no AI progress from mid twenty twenty four through essentially Gemini 3. There would have been none. Everything would have stalled. And you can imagine what that would have meant to the markets. For sure, we would have lived in a very different environment. So reasoning kind of bridged this 18-month gap. Reasoning kind of saved AI because it let AI make progress without Blackwell or the next generation of TPU, which were necessary for the scaling laws for pre-training to continue. Google came out with TPUv6 in 2024, and the TPU V7 in 2025 in semiconductor time, imagine like Hopper.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 American homes. I analogize it to imagine if to get a new iPhone, you had to change all the outlets in your house to 220 volt, put in a Tesla power wall, put in a generator, put in solar panels. That's the power, you know, put in a whole home humidification system, and then reinforce the floor because the floor can't handle this. So it was a huge product transition and then just the rack was so dense. It was really hard for them to get the heat out. So Blackwells have only really started to be deployed and really scaled deployments over the last three or four months.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These two new reinforcement learning verified rewards and test time compute to much better base models. There's a lot of misunderstanding about Gemini 3 that I think is really important. So the most important thing to conceptualize everything in AI has a struggle between Google and Nvidia. And Google has the TPU and VIDIA has their GPUs and Google only has a TPU and they use a bunch of other chips for networking. Nvidia has the full stack. Blackwell was delayed. Blackwell was NVIDIA's next generation chip. The first iteration of that was the Blackwell 200. A lot of different SKUs were canceled. And the reason for that is it was by far the most complex product transition we've ever gone through in technology. Going from Hopper to Blackwell, first you go from air-cooled to liquid-cooled. The rack goes from weighing round numbers 1,000 pounds to 3,000 pounds. It goes from round numbers 30 kilowatts, which is 30 American homes to 130 kilowatts, which is 100.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“model came out from openai we have these two new scaling laws of post training which is just reinforcement learning with verified rewards verified is such an important concept in ai like one of carpathy's great things was with software anything you can specify you can automate with ai anything you can verify you can automate it's such an important concept and i think important distinction and then test time compute and so all the progress we've had and we've had immense progress since october 24th through today was based entirely on these two new scaling laws. And Jim and I three was arguably the first test since Hopper came out of the scaling law for pre-training.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our God at a chariot. And so it's really important every time we get a confirmation of that. So Gemini 3 was very important in that way. But I'd say, I think there's been a big misunderstanding of maybe in the public equity investing community or the broader more generalist community based on the scaling laws of pre-training, there really should have been no progress in 24 and 25. And the reason for that is after XAI figured out how to get 200,000 hoppers coherent, you had to wait for the next generation of chips because you really can't get more than 200,000 hoppers coherent. And coherent just means you could just think of it as HTTPU knows what every other GPU is thinking. They kind of are sharing memory, you know, they're connected. They scale up networks and then scale out. And they have to be coherent during the pre-training process. The reason we've had all this progress, maybe we could show like the ARC AGI slide where you had zero to eight over four years, zero to eight percent intelligence. And then you went from 8% to 95% in three months when the first reason.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I do think Jim and I3 was very important because it showed us that scaling laws for pre-trading are intact. They stated that unequivocally. And that's important because no one on planet Earth knows how or why scaling laws for pre-training work. It's actually not a law. It's an empirical observation. And it's an empirical observation that we've measured extremely precisely and has held for a long time. But our understanding of scaling laws for pre-training and maybe this is a little bit controversial with 20% of researchers, but probably not more than that. It's kind of like the ancient British people's understanding of the sun are the ancient Egyptians understanding the sun. They can measure it so precisely that the east-west axis of the Great Pyramids are perfectly aligned with the equinoxes, and so are the east-west axis of Stone Age. Perfect measurement. They didn't understand she had orbital mechanics. They had no idea how or why it rose in the east set in the west and, you know, moved across the horizon.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. It's like somebody said on X, you know, like we imbued these rocks with crazy spells and now we can summon super intelligent genie. On our phones over the air, you know, it's crazy.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I would say anytime one of those labs, the four labs that matter, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic and XAI, which are clearly the four leading labs, anytime somebody from one of those labs goes on a podcast, I just think it's so important to listen. For me, one of the best use cases of AI is to keep up with all of this. Listen to a podcast. And then if there are parts that I thought were interesting, just talk about it with AI. I think it's really important to have as little friction as possible. I'll bring it up. I can either press this button and pull up Grok or I have this. It's amazing.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Publicly say no one from my lab is allowed to say bad things about the other lab and I respect them and that is the end of that the companies are all commenting on each other's posts you know the research papers come out There's a list of, you know, if on planet Earth there's 500 to 1,000 people who really, really understand this and are the cutting edge of it. And a good number of them live in China. I just think you have to follow those people closely. And I think there is incredible signal. Everything in AI is just downstream”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you could just pay, and I do think actually you do need to pay for the highest tier, whether it's Jim Myltra, Super Grock, whatever it is, you have to pay the $200 per month tiers. Whereas those are like a fully fledged 30, 35 year old. It's really hard to extrapolate from an eight or a 10-year-old to the 35-year-old, and yet a lot of people are doing that. And the second thing is there was an insider post about open AI, and they said to a large degree OpenAI runs on Twitter vibes. And I just think AI happens on X. There have been some really memorable moments. Like there was a giant fight between the PyTorch team at Meta and the Jax team at Google on X. And the leaders of each lab had to step in.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the first thing is you have to use it yourself. And I would just say I'm amazed at how many famous and August investors are reaching really definitive conclusions about AI. Well, no, based on the free tier. The free tier is like you're dealing with a 10-year-old and you're making conclusions about the 10-year-old's capabilities as an adult.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source