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Far From The Finishing Post
Far From The Finishing Post explores the ideas and practices of leading investors in an effort to continuously grow our collective knowledge. This podcast is intended for UK listeners only. The views and information contained within this podcast do not constitute investment advice and should not be used as the basis for investment decisions. Any reference to securities should not be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell these securities. Any opinions expressed are those of the relevant individuals and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy Asset Management and may be subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a guide to future performance and the value of an investment may fall as well as rise.
Far From The Finishing Post
Alastair Unwin (Polar Capital) - Investing in an AI-first World
Alastair Unwin is a fund manager on Polar Capital’s Technology team. We discuss Alastair’s career as a technology investor, AI’s exponential curve of improvement and potential as a general purpose technology, as well as the issues that investors should consider as ever more capital is spent to realise AI’s promise.
Show notes:
[01:33] Alastair discusses how he got into investing
[03:14] Lessons from Herald, Neptune and Polar
[05:05] Heuristics for technology investing
[07:29] AI scaling laws
[10:10] AI bottlenecks
[13:45] Capital formation and AI’s new infrastructure
[17:42] A hardware cycle
[19:37] Motivations for increasing capex
[25:08] Capex in the context of improving models and the global wage bill
[28:49] Increasing circularity of AI financing
[31:14] Is it winner takes all or will models be commoditised?
[33:34] Nvidia and the depreciable life of chips
[37:52] Hyperscalers’ ability to win in the new paradigm
[40:32] Alphabet’s prospects
[44:21] Adoption rates and use cases
[49:03] Sitting with ambiguity and not being dogmatically convicted