Derek Thompson

What trajectory would the hyperscalers need to keep growing?

Operating income from plummeting in the next few years in a way that essentially caused a huge sell-off of the biggest tech companies.

What kind of revenue growth would be necessary and where might it come from?

As long as we're talking about revenue growth, I think it's absolutely critical that we acknowledge that some folks think we're on the cusp of the last invention, AGI, which if we invent essentially an intelligence in silicon that can do anything, surely one would expect that one of those many things that it does is earn a lot of revenue.

So maybe give me a sense of if this technology really does take a leap in the next two to five years,

and we build what some folks called autonomous agents, essentially AI white collar workers that can do 99% of the job of any white collar human in the next few years, how would that change the picture here?

I do think that one of the disconnects between folks like Paul Kudrowski that are writing about AI being a bubble and folks like, let's say, Dario Amadei, the CEO, or Sam Altman, folks at OpenAI and Anthropic that are building this technology and believe that they are on the cusp of building artificial general intelligence, a true super intelligence, is that, look, if you think that your mere months from inventing God

Like what time do you have for concerns about a brief economic bubble?

It's like you think we're reaching like the end of like an end phase of human technological development.

Like you're not interested in the question of like, oh, is CapEx slightly outpacing revenue growth?

It's like, no, like behind this curtain that is mere inches from our fingers lies a technology that will absolutely change the world.

That's the only thing that I'm focused on.

And so I do think that one of the things that maybe could get us in trouble, us as the economy in trouble, is that the folks building this technology have a faith in it that is psychologically, philosophically distinct than the people who are building it.

or laying fiber optic cable.

Even the folks who were building pets.com didn't think that they were ending human employment.

People who were building the railroads certainly thought they were doing something quite grand, but they knew exactly what they were doing.

They were taking a carriage and putting it on rail and sending it across the country.

Maybe before we go to the next gauge here, I do just want to pause

and sit in the fact that one thing that could contribute to an economic bubble is the rather unprecedented confidence of the people building this technology, that the thing that they're building exists in a kind of biblical sense as the last thing we ever have to build.

Your next and fourth gauge you title Valuation Heat.