Ed Cole

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303 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Ed Cole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Merryn Talks Money · Man Group's Ed Cole: How to Adapt Your Portfolio to a Changing World · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

I would take a step back and say that those earnings revisions today are predicated on an assumption that compute is scarce.

And that if you are an Asian semiconductor manufacturing company, your capacity to keep your price moving in a world where it previously was very deflationary is high, and therefore both volume and price are in your favor, and that's a phenomenal environment to be selling the hardware that people need.

If we discover that compute is not scarce, then I think the picture will change pretty materially.

Now, why would compute not be scarce?

So I think the first thing is, you've alluded to it, is actually an understanding that perhaps you just don't need these leading edge LLMs to perform the kind of tasks that we're performing.

um you know we use ai to an enormous extent at work we have you know kind of coding co-pilots all of us can use and it's incredibly powerful but actually as a portfolio manager rather than a quant developer i don't need to use the leading edge models it's absolutely clear and so you can do a very simple tweak which is just say well let's start moving away from the leading edge so we don't have to use you know take up all of that um capacity in the most expensive part of the stack

So that's one, which is just not using the leading edge.

The other is perhaps not using the LLMs at all.

So small language models, ways of actually dealing with discrete tasks.

The other angle is not using the US models that are the premium price.

So of course we all know that the cost of a Chinese model is much, much closer to the cost of production of that model.

And I think it's entirely conceivable that certain businesses and enterprises are going to carry on using the premium models all the time, but there will be other applications that don't.

And then I think the other thing is actually fascinating news that came out overnight, which was the sort of world ranking of supercomputers.

I don't know if you saw this, but there's a Chinese supercomputer called Lineshine in Shenzhen that's just won the crown of most powerful supercomputer competition.

It's entirely powered by CPUs, not GPUs.

Again, demonstrating that actually it isn't all about how much compute you throw at something.

It's often about the way that the thing's engineered and implemented.

There are enough reasons to think it's possible that we could end up with a serious headwind for this if the market continues to be driven by the idea that actually compute is scarce and therefore

you know, those names in Asia that we've talked about continue to be the leaders.

Yeah, so GPUs are called graphics processing units, and those are kind of just much, much more advanced, much powerful, much more powerful.

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