Keval Desai retweeted
I’ve been thinking about @davemorin’s observation a lot this weekend. Since we launched @itsdazzleai, I’ve been making the case that your camera roll is a better basis for personal assistant work than email is. While getting access to both email and photos would be great, if I get one, I want photos. Part of it is that we can get a sense of your taste and part of it is that *you* decide what you take pictures of so you decide what’s in your camera roll. It’s *your* to-do list, not someone else’s for you. Dazzle puts you in charge and lets us anticipate what you need and what you like. Try it at dazzle.ai/app
There's an insidious new type of slop happening at work. Email used to just be other people's todo list for your life. Now the people you work with are driven by their AI agents, which often lack the context to know what matters for them, let alone for you. So they ask you for things as if they were priorities. It feels off because it is: Email is now other people's agent's todo list for your life. This is going to take some work to fix.
11
6
92
65,710
Keval Desai retweeted
The Paradoxical Commandments
98
222
1,247
67,562
Textbook example of when you are a bear fighting an alligator, the first thing to do is ensure the fight doesn't take place in the swamp = as soon it was about putting a ball in a hole, the little master had no chance :)
One cricket legend. One golf legend. 🏏 🆚 ⛳ One very unfair challenge 😂 @dpworld | #DPWIC
2
207
Keval Desai retweeted
One cricket legend. One golf legend. 🏏 🆚 ⛳ One very unfair challenge 😂 @dpworld | #DPWIC
8
7
91
26,451
Keval Desai retweeted
Thank you Prof Adil, Sunil Gavaskar and Bombay Gymkhana for celebrating the life and times of the later Sir Garfield Sobers last week.
4
56
1,996
30,973
Keval Desai retweeted
Every day as I travel across this state, Democrats are coming up to me telling me they’re voting for me. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. Everybody is ready for REAL CHANGE! Vote for change, California!
179
1,985
6,889
31,902
Keval Desai retweeted
Lung cancer rates are rising, particularly in people who are not smokers. When my sister Susan was diagnosed in 2023, we were shocked. When I read the news about Pope Leo XIV, I was again shocked. I hope this is a wake-up call for the world that anyone can get lung cancer, regardless of their history with smoking. More people die of lung cancer than of breast, prostate, and colon cancer combined, and we need a new approach to screening and treatment. lnkd.in/p/gNPH8wN8
6
10
70
8,382
Keval Desai retweeted
Great explanation of why California gas prices are higher than in other states, in the @sfchronicle of all places. 26¢/gallon goes to "cap-and-invest" which funds high-speed rail. sfchronicle.com/california/a…
45
148
776
145,956
Keval Desai retweeted
The Trillion-Dollar Question Nobody Really Has a Good Answer To - Where Is the ROI? We spend a lot of time debating how many GW of AI compute will come online. But the bigger question is: who ultimately pays for all of it, and can the economics justify trillions of dollars in investment? I find it helpful to think about AI economics as a chain: CapEx → Compute / Inference Revenue → Model / API Revenue → End Demand One important nuance: the market often uses model company revenue (@OpenAI , @AnthropicAI , etc.) as a proxy for AI demand. But outside direct consumer subscriptions, much of that isn't necessarily ultimate end demand. A company paying for Claude Code is still an intermediate customer in the economic chain. The real economic value comes when that company uses AI to generate incremental reve or reduce costs. --- Let's put some numbers around 2027. 1. CapEx: US$2.5-3.0T Assuming ~50GW of new global AI compute capacity, we're looking at roughly US$2.5-3.0T of total infrastructure investment. ~70% goes toward chips and related compute equipment, with the rest covering buildings, cooling, power and supporting infra. Importantly, this is much broader than the often-quoted ~US$1.2T of hyperscaler CapEx. Neoclouds, colocation providers, private developers and others are also funding the buildout. 2. Compute / Inference Layer: US$1T+ Revenue Potential If all 50GW were deployed and commercially utilized, the capacity could theoretically support over US$1T in annualized compute infrastructure revenue. For context, combined CSP cloud rev = sub US$600B on consensus est. 3. Model / API Layer: How Much Revenue Do We Actually Need? @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI are rumored to be approaching US$200B of combined ARR by YE26 (source: public data). My instinct is that we need to see something closer to US$400B+ by FYE27 to begin supporting the scale of investment we're talking about. Rough sanity checks: 1) US$2.5-3.0T of CapEx implies roughly US$400-480B in annual depreciation. 2) Total GW online grows +70% in FY27E, hence ARR needs to grow at least 70% (to $350B)? --- So, was the ROI ever a slam dunk? Never, really. And I think we should be intellectually honest about that. Don't get me wrong. I believe AI is one of the biggest technology supercycles we've ever seen. But when it comes to justifying trillions of $$$$ of CapEx, even the bull case rests on extrapolating the early success of AI rev. Some extrapolate linearly. Others exponentially or logarithmically. The resulting forecasts can be wildly different. And that's precisely why the market tends to overshoot in both directions. It is not really backed by a solid set of numbers, but rather, extrapolations. --- Which brings me to how I think about trading this cycle. The market isn't necessarily trading the absolute level of AI CapEx or revenue. It's trading the rate of change, particularly revisions to expectations. Think of it as two cars racing: 🏎️Car 1: AI Infrastructure Investment How quickly are CapEx expectations being revised upward? For example, since the beginning of 2026, CSP CapEx expectations have been revised upward by roughly 40-50%. 🏎️Car 2: AI Monetization How quickly are AI rev expectations being revised upward? How quickly is actual end demand catching up? The market wants to see 🏎️Car 2 outpacing 🏎️Car 1. If CapEx estimates keep moving higher while AI monetization fails to keep pace, investors will increasingly question incremental returns, even if absolute AI revenue is still growing rapidly. AI can be the biggest technology supercycle of our lifetime, and investors can still overpay for the infrastructure along the way. Both can be true imho.
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…
39
52
336
50,681
Keval Desai retweeted
Argon continues to be excellent at non-coding use-cases - very good at doc creation. - excellent at data analysis - brilliant at reasoning The model scores above all the openAI and Claude models
101
23
646
26,625
Keval Desai retweeted
Dazzle starting with the camera roll means you can get going with an AI assistant doing useful things in a matter of seconds. Most users are kicking off their first task in under a minute from install. dazzle.ai/app
Replying to @marissamayer
Pictures not prompts is the right framing for everyone outside the AI bubble. Most people will never write a good prompt, but everyone has a camera roll full of tasks. That's a creator-demo goldmine, the product explains itself in 15 seconds of video.
1
20
10,918
Keval Desai retweeted
30 years of @Bloomberg in India - and we're just getting started. Great to celebrate alongside colleagues and clients, and to bring leaders together at the #BloombergNewEconomy Forum. A few highlights from an unforgettable trip.
71
51
320
13,960
Keval Desai retweeted
I’ve traveled to some of the poorest countries in the world. California's streets are often worse! We pay the highest taxes in America. There’s NO REASON we should be living in Third World conditions! I’ll hold cities accountable by implementing a grading system: from “spotless” to “squalid.” Similar models have worked all over the globe. WHY NOT HERE?
109
1,263
3,932
24,389
Keval Desai retweeted
“I am Jewish police commissioner , working for a Muslim mayor, being honored by a Catholic organization. God bless America.” - @NYPDPC 🇺🇸🗽. Al Smith dinner.
5
14
179
9,060
Keval Desai retweeted
New post on @signalfulnews @shaneparrish interview with @BillAckman. Signalful summaries going forward will have more insights and more detail per insight. Check it out, and subscribe to the newsletter to get these delivered directly to your inbox.
Why Bill Ackman Expects a Venture Blowup Bill Ackman says AI raises the risk of disruption for every business, and that even companies that look dominant today may disappear. He expects venture capital to hit a high-profile blowup, and tells founders to raise money now but spend it as if it were their own. Pershing Square owns only highly predictable companies, keeps its team stable for years, and does not use AI to build models. Ackman is also copying Buffett's playbook at Howard Hughes, where an insurer, permanent capital and a 47% stake are meant to let him think in decades. These signals are from an interview that @shaneparrish did with Bill Ackman on @TKPPodcast (The Knowledge Project) 1. Rehab Has No Payer. Bill Ackman says brain injury care breaks down after the surgery, because nobody is paid to follow the patient's recovery. Neurosurgeons are highly compensated for operating, many hospital rehab programs are "embarrassingly inadequate," and an insurer might pay for only 6 weeks of care. The head of rehab at Mass General told him the typical surgical patient ends up in a nursing home and dies a few months later from pneumonia. Ackman thinks technology can fill the gap, starting with AI as a speech therapist where a human one can cost $500 an hour. The institute he is building focuses on brain rehab, recovery and longevity, and he wants everyone to get the benefit. He also plans real food for patients, since he calls hospital meals frightening. 2. Zero Turnover. Pershing Square's investment team has stayed the same for 9 years, apart from a few additions. Ackman says that in an industry where top people move for $100 million bonuses, a revolving door leaves you unsure whether anyone is telling you every risk. After 9 years of candor, he doesn't question anything the team tells him, and he now generates only a minority of the portfolio's ideas. That frees him to work on strategy. 3. FOMO Pricing. Ackman sees bubble-like behavior in venture. A company he met that wasn't raising was preempted two days later by an investor who put in $50 million at a $400 million valuation, and two weeks after that it raised $50 million more at $1 billion. He also saw a Series A at a $5 billion pre-money. He describes a bubble as more and more money chasing one trade out of fear of missing out, until valuations overshoot. Berkshire stock hit an all-time low in the internet bubble because Buffett sat out the boom, and Ackman says staying out depends on whether you think short-term or long-term. 4. Raise Now, Spend Carefully. Ackman calls this a great time to raise capital and tells founders not to spend it as if the money will be there forever. In the internet bubble, a weekend Barron's piece listed every public internet company's cash and its months left before zero, probably the week before the market blew up. He expects another high-profile blowup where people lose a lot of money and the market resets. Companies with years of runway will survive, and the ones that must raise in 3 months will be gone. His advice is to treat every dollar as your own. 5. Bet on the Person. In venture, Ackman weights the founder over the idea, because the original idea is often not the one that works. His best venture investment was Coupang. Bom Kim pitched the Groupon of South Korea in 2009, and Ackman thought Groupon was a bad model, but he liked Kim and his case for South Korea as a launch market. Kim built the Amazon of South Korea, which had little to do with the plan. In public markets a bad CEO can be replaced, and Ackman says the best private companies without their founder are close to a write-off. 6. Disruption Is the Risk. Ackman says an investor's most important job is assessing risk, and AI has massively increased the risk of disruption. Buffett could not see the internet coming for businesses like World Book, and Ackman says every investor is now guaranteed to look foolish on at least one business. His discipline is to predict what a company looks like 10, 20 and 30 years out, and to buy only what he'd happily own if the stock market closed for 10 years. 7. Updates in Days. The pace of AI improvement is the fastest Ackman has ever seen. Microsoft's old 1.0 to 2.0 updates took a couple of years or more, and now a consequential update arrives in days, like a Tesla updating its software overnight. He says "scare" is probably the wrong word, and he wants investors to be thoughtful about how wide a moat really is. Ackman calls predicting disruption the most complicated question an investor faces, and he expects some of the most dominant-looking businesses in the world to disappear. 8. The Library of Companies. Pershing Square holds a library of great businesses it has followed for years but couldn't buy. At 35 times earnings, for example, it is hard to reach the 20%-plus return the firm wants, so the team does the work and sets the name aside. It waits for a macro event to reprice the business. COVID gave it chances, and the "SaaS apocalypse" let it buy Microsoft at what Ackman calls a very attractive valuation, along with other high-quality businesses. 9. The Fresh-Eyes Panel. Two team members do each deep dive, starting with 10-Ks, 10-Qs and call transcripts and moving to expert networks of former employees, industry experts and competitors. They build a model of the return at today's price and present a deck. Ackman and CIO Ryan are usually not the two, but they run an independent assessment that gives them "enough information to be dangerous" to ask the right questions. The other five team members, who haven't done the work on that name, challenge the deck, and the meeting ends in a decision or a list of open issues to chase. 10. Do What Nobody Has Done. Pershing Square uses AI as a research tool and doesn't use it to build models. Ackman says that when everyone has the same access to AI it is hard to be differentiated, and what's left is outside-the-box thinking, because AI reviews everything that already happened. His best investments were things nobody had done: credit default swaps before the pandemic, the stock of a bankrupt company, and shorting AAA credit before the financial crisis. AI would not have told him to do any of them. The same logic made money going into COVID, when the firm was weeks ahead of the world on a global shutdown, and again when it bet that rates would rise on inflation. He says an asymmetric bet, a view different from everyone else's expressed through an instrument that pays far more than the capital at risk, is how you make a lot of money. 11. The Stone Tablet. After a very large loss around 2015 and 2016, Ackman had the firm's investment principles engraved on a stone tablet and put it on his desk. The checklist asks for simple, predictable, free-cash-flow-generative companies, large and liquid, run by a strong management team or one with a named replacement ready. It also lists an aversion to short selling and a requirement that asymmetric bets pay far more than the capital at work. Ackman says a checklist is a good way to avoid mistakes. 12. Asymmetry in Reverse. Ackman never liked short selling, because you can lose infinity and the most you can make is finite. Pershing Square still shorted a company it saw as a fraudulent pyramid scheme, planned to hand the FTC a detailed analysis, and felt the wind was at its back. It underestimated market dynamics when Carl Icahn bought the stock against it, and the trade turned into a hedge fund squeeze on Ackman. Shorting also costs friends: Pershing held the vast majority of the short interest, so everyone else sat on the other side, and the company had built infrastructure to attack its critics. 13. Sell When the Thesis Breaks. Pershing Square bought a meaningful Netflix stake after a subscriber miss and shared its deck with management, who agreed with the thesis and said they would never run ads. A few weeks later Netflix missed subscribers again and said it would launch an advertising model. Ackman's rule is that new information inconsistent with the thesis means you either buy a lot more because the news is immaterial or you exit because the thesis is broken. He exited, because a firm that owns only the highest-certainty companies couldn't accept a much wider range of outcomes, and moved the money into Alphabet. Netflix then executed well and its stock went back to a high multiple. When the stock was later cut in half, Pershing bought it back at a price it liked. 14. A Modern Berkshire. Ackman owns 47% of Howard Hughes and is turning it from a real estate company into an insurance holding company. Pershing Square bought the specialty insurer Vantage Holdings and recruited what Ackman calls the best management team in insurance. The model is Buffett's: hold the float in short-term treasuries to pay claims, put the rest in common stocks, and earn a profit on both underwriting and assets. With liabilities that carry a negative cost, Ackman says an insurer can generate a 20% or higher annual return. Howard Hughes is about 70% real estate and 30% insurance by capital today, and he expects 70% to 75% insurance within 5 years, funded by real estate that throws off close to $300 million of net operating income. Wall Street has wanted nothing to do with the business for 14 years, so the stock still trades at a discount to its assets. 15. Never Forced by Circumstances. Asked about Charlie Munger's remark that Berkshire was almost never forced to make decisions by circumstances, so it always had options, Ackman says Pershing Square designed its business around that. The firm holds anchor stakes in each public vehicle it runs, with employees owning 28% of Pershing Square Holdings and investing more than $500 million in Pershing Square USA. If the market panics and people want liquidity, they can sell the stock while the capital stays in the vehicle, which let the firm buy in the COVID crash and the financial crisis. Ackman says allocators pull money when a fund does well because it gets too big a share of their portfolio, and pull it when it does badly. He traces his biggest investment mistake to being distracted by raising capital for open-ended funds. If the firm compounds at anything close to its historic rate, he says it will manage a trillion dollars in 20 years.
5
6
30
9,382
Keval Desai retweeted
"You're the first Republican I've ever voted for.” These lifelong Democrats are sick of being gouged by their own party, and Becerra is too ARROGANT to offer anything but more of the same. You can join them in voting for change. JUST TRY IT.
170
3,308
12,831
59,278
Keval Desai retweeted
Can you feel the SuperIntelligence? - flying cars - insanely good LLMs - awesome robot demos - free classifiers - self improving agents It’s only getting started 🔥
58
17
344
12,923
Keval Desai retweeted
🚨 NEW: Becerra just dodged another debate. This one was on ZOOM! UCLA wanted us to debate agriculture policy. I said yes right away. He said he was “booked up for the remainder of the YEAR.” Doing what?! Farmers are getting crushed in this state and Becerra doesn’t think they’re worth his time. Pathetic!
219
2,569
7,467
50,705
The amazing thing about this quote is that it was written in the 60s (Dune was first published in 1965).
15
38
208
13,490