🤖 Moore's law never ended - it moved to GPUs and expert systems go next level
Chamath's framing (credited to Adam D'Angelo): Moore's law did not end, it shifted to GPUs, because parallelization solves what CPU scaling could not. That moves the surface area of compute innovation to machine-learned models you can now brute-force - DALL-E and GPT-3 are the visible output - so 'all kinds of expert systems' become dramatically more capable, compounded by the training corpora and cloud capacity now available. The economics accrue to the accelerated-compute supply chain.
also touching these tickers, same direction: AI compute capex supercycle has 12-24 months of runway 87 (NVDA) · AI compute capex supercycle has 12-24 months of runway 87 (SMH) · Nvidia + Hugging Face makes NVDA the open-source AI champion 58 (NVDA) · Nvidia + Hugging Face makes NVDA the open-source AI champion 58 (SMH) · DRAM/HBM: the bottleneck that matters 45 (SMH)
⚖ Why this verdict
fully deterministic — evaluate.py replays this from daily closes; nothing below is editable or hand-set
- Window: 2022-09-01 → 2023-09-01 — first mention + 12-month horizon, then the window locks.
- The call: ▲ LONG NVDA (primary play). NVDA rose 248.3% over the window → direction-adjusted R = +248.3% (the call made money).
- Benchmark: holding SPY over the same window returned +15.7% → α = +248.3 − (+15.7) = +232.7% — what this call made or lost against just owning the index. This is the number the verdict uses.
- Rule fired:
▶ HIT — R ≥ +10% AND α ≥ +5 ✓ (R 248.3, α 232.7)· PARTIAL — R ≥ +5% OR α ≥ 0· MISS — everything else
- Credit: supporters of a HIT earn 1.0 each, opposers the inverse — this feeds the scoreboard weights. supported: Brad Gerstner, Chamath, Friedberg, Sacks | opposed: Jason
Conviction timeline
bands: green ≥ 65 · watch ≥ 45 · ember ≥ 15
Plays vs SPY · % since first mention (2022-09-01)
Plays
| expression | symbol | kind | relevance | rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ▲ LONG | NVDA | stock | PRIMARY | the GPU franchise Chamath's 'Moore's law shifted to GPUs' claim is literally about |
| ▲ LONG | AMD | stock | adjacent | second merchant accelerator supplier, levered to the same parallel-compute shift |
| ▲ LONG | SMH | etf | adjacent | semiconductor complex captures the compute-demand shift without single-name risk |
Mention log
“the way that he described it to me, which is so true the minute he said it, I was like, my gosh, it's like Moore's law never ended, it just shifted to GPUs. Because the inherent lack of parallelization that CPUs have, you solve the GPUs. And so that's why the surface area of compute of innovation has actually shifted, Jason, to what you're saying, which is all of these new kinds of machine-learned models, because you can just now brute force and create such a tonnage of compute capabilities and resources to solve these problems that weren't possible before.”
“You look at the data sets that are available to train. So you have the GPUs still escalating massively the amount of computer power can do. You have cloud computing at the same time, and then you have these data sets.”
“So this is just an observation that I think that we are continuing to compound knowledge and intelligence effectively at the same rate as Moore's Law and we will continue to be able to do that because this makes it a problem of power and a problem of money. So as long as you can buy enough GPUs from Nvidia or build your own, and as long as you can get access to enough power to run those computers, there really isn't many problems you can't solve.”
“One is that the marginal cost of energy goes to zero, and the second is that the marginal cost of compute goes to zero. And the second one is really about shifting compute to more parallelism on GPUs and ASICs and FPGAs. But that's why all of this stuff is possible.”
“The ability to run this at scale is going to happen because we're getting better and better at creating silicon that specializes in doing things in a massively parallelized way and the cost of energy at the same time is getting cheaper and cheaper along with it.”
“I think it's at the silicon layer, because you need to really re-architect how compute will actually work in a world of all of these models. Those folks will get paid. If you look at AMD and Nvidia, they've been getting paid for years.”
“Well, I mean, I was talking with the CEO and CFO of a major data center REIT, and they shared with me that they're seeing more demand in the last couple of months than they've seen in the prior 10 years.”
“But when you look at the valuation of the business, they are currently trading at 70 times the next 12 months EBITDA. So how do you think about valuation, even at a trillion dollar market cap, at a trillion dollar market cap, they're trading at 70 times next 12 months EBITDA.”
“So I think what I'm waiting for, Friedberg, is like in the next two quarters, if AMD, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon don't announce something substantive, there's a very good chance that Nvidia runs away with this.”
“Look, I think as performance improves, as cost declines, like any economic model, there's a pretty nonlinear relationship with demand. So we'll find new ways to apply this technology. I think the demand is only going to go nonlinear.”
“I've told this story before, but I pinged those guys and I was basically like, I just wanna meet the team that built the TPU. Long story short, a year later, I put them in business. And we've been building silicon for this moment for years.”
“I don't think there's any problems with NVIDIA. I think they're going to continue to perform. I think they'll beat their numbers for the balance of the year.”
Who built this conviction
each voice's total force on the score — supports and opposes from every mention, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of all mention-driven movement
⏳ decay drained -76.0 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one
Score events
| episode | kind | Δ | after | note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E94 2022-09-01 | init | +31.6 | 31.6 | E94 born by Chamath (explicit_prediction x2) [w=0.90] |
| E94 2022-09-01 | reinforce | +16.2 | 47.8 | E94 Jason support x2 (new voice) [w=1.05] |
| E95 2022-09-10 | decay | -1.9 | 45.9 | E95 silent |
| E96 2022-09-17 | decay | -1.8 | 44.1 | E96 silent |
| E97 2022-09-23 | decay | -1.8 | 42.3 | E97 silent |
| E98 2022-10-01 | decay | -1.7 | 40.6 | E98 silent |
| E99 2022-10-07 | reinforce | +9.7 | 50.3 | E99 Chamath support x3 [w=0.90] |
| E100 2022-10-14 | decay | -2.0 | 48.3 | E100 silent |
| E101 2022-10-22 | decay | -1.9 | 46.3 | E101 silent |
| E102 2022-10-29 | decay | -1.9 | 44.5 | E102 silent |
| E103 2022-11-05 | reinforce | +9.0 | 53.5 | E103 Chamath support x3 [w=0.90] |
| E105 2022-11-19 | decay | -2.1 | 51.4 | E105 silent |
| E106 2022-12-03 | reinforce | +6.6 | 58.0 | E106 Chamath support x2 [w=0.90] |
| E107 2022-12-10 | decay | -2.3 | 55.6 | E107 silent |
| E108 2022-12-16 | decay | -2.2 | 53.4 | E108 silent |
| E109 2022-12-24 | decay | -2.1 | 51.3 | E109 silent |
| E110 2023-01-06 | decay | -2.1 | 49.2 | E110 silent |
| E111 2023-01-13 | reinforce | +5.5 | 54.7 | E111 Chamath support x1 [w=0.90] |
| E112 2023-01-20 | decay | -2.2 | 52.5 | E112 silent |
| E113 2023-01-27 | decay | -2.1 | 50.4 | E113 silent |
| E114 2023-02-04 | decay | -2.0 | 48.4 | E114 silent |
| E115 2023-02-11 | reinforce | +7.0 | 55.4 | E115 Chamath support x2 [w=0.90] |
| E116 2023-02-17 | decay | -2.2 | 53.2 | E116 silent |
| E118 2023-03-03 | reinforce | +7.6 | 60.8 | E118 Chamath support x3 [w=0.90] |
| E119 2023-03-11 | decay | -2.4 | 58.4 | E119 silent |
| E120 2023-03-17 | decay | -2.3 | 56.0 | E120 silent |
| E121 2023-03-24 | decay | -2.2 | 53.8 | E121 silent |
| E122 2023-03-31 | decay | -2.2 | 51.7 | E122 silent |
| E123 2023-04-07 | decay | -2.1 | 49.6 | E123 silent |
| E124 2023-04-14 | reinforce | +6.8 | 56.4 | E124 Chamath support x2 [w=0.90] |
| E125 2023-04-21 | decay | -2.3 | 54.2 | E125 silent |
| E126 2023-04-28 | decay | -2.2 | 52.0 | E126 silent |
| E128 2023-05-12 | decay | -2.1 | 49.9 | E128 silent |
| E129 2023-05-19 | decay | -2.0 | 47.9 | E129 silent |
| E130 2023-05-26 | reinforce | +15.1 | 63.1 | E130 Friedberg support x3 (new voice) [w=1.08] |
| E130 2023-05-26 | reinforce | +7.0 | 70.1 | E130 Jason support x3 [w=1.05] |
| E130 2023-05-26 | reinforce | +5.2 | 75.3 | E130 Sacks support x2 (new voice) [w=0.77] |
| E130 2023-05-26 | reversal | -45.2 | 30.1 | E130 Chamath flips |
| E131 2023-06-02 | oppose | -13.0 | 17.1 | E131 Chamath opposes x3 (marked reversal; no prior support to flip) [w=0.90] |
| E131 2023-06-02 | oppose | -12.6 | 4.5 | E131 Jason opposes x2 [w=1.05] |
| E131 2023-06-02 | reinforce | +15.4 | 19.9 | E131 Friedberg support x2 [w=1.08] |
| E132 2023-06-10 | reinforce | +13.0 | 32.9 | E132 Chamath support x3 (flipped from reversal) [w=0.90] |
| E133 2023-06-16 | reinforce | +25.6 | 58.5 | E133 Brad Gerstner support x3 (new voice) [w=1.41] |
| E133 2023-06-16 | reinforce | +6.7 | 65.2 | E133 Friedberg support x2 [w=1.08] |
| E133 2023-06-16 | reinforce | +5.7 | 70.9 | E133 Chamath support x3 [w=0.90] |
| E134 2023-06-24 | decay | -2.8 | 68.0 | E134 silent |
| E135 2023-07-01 | reinforce | +3.7 | 71.7 | E135 Sacks support x2 [w=0.77] |
| E135 2023-07-01 | reinforce | +3.8 | 75.6 | E135 Chamath support x2 [w=0.90] |
| E136 2023-07-09 | decay | -3.0 | 72.5 | E136 silent |
| E137 2023-07-14 | decay | -2.9 | 69.6 | E137 silent |
| E139 2023-07-27 | decay | -2.8 | 66.9 | E139 silent |
| E140 2023-08-04 | decay | -2.7 | 64.2 | E140 silent |
| E141 2023-08-11 | decay | -2.6 | 61.6 | E141 silent |
| E142 2023-08-18 | decay | -2.5 | 59.1 | E142 silent |
| E143 2023-08-25 | decay | -2.4 | 56.8 | E143 silent |
| E144 2023-09-01 | decay | -2.3 | 54.5 | E144 silent |