Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Noah Shinn

Invite-only Instinct is nearing $1 billion in annual transaction volume, growing 10–11% day over day with $0 spent on marketing.Shinn envisions Apple Pay-style merchant-funded distribution; 40% share a personal credit card within three weeks, and trusted users show about 80% retention.With compute procurement taking months, 5–8% daily compounding could imply 100 million users, while mis-sizing capacity can cost 3–4×.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Gabe Stengel

Rogo’s model-era progression—from o1 Pro’s reliable search to Opus 4.5 handling junior finance work—supports a two-year race to redesign investment firms, not wait for better models.Its wedge is private-market dealmaking, where data rooms, DDQs, CRM and LP reporting still lack infrastructure, while high-value ideas can justify extreme token spend.The watchpoints are compaction, standardization, and whether incumbents move aggressively enough.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Walter Russell Mead

Mead sees a dynamic United States inside a collapsing Pax Americana, with information-revolution productivity keeping American power resilient.The investable question is whether “infostructure” can let AI and remote/hybrid work renew the ownership society while adapting to Ukraine’s drone-driven obsolescence.Taiwan’s “soft blockade” and Japan’s strategic awakening offer geopolitical variables as Trump’s unpredictability continues to erode institutional networks.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Sarah Guo

Sarah Guo says competitive open-source AI is already widespread, so US restrictions could handicap law-abiding American businesses while adversaries ignore them.Her roughly 250-person network sees recursive self-improvement and “some sort of exponential intelligence” as a one-to-two-year possibility, while Sunday Robotics targets home-robot beta by year-end.Compute independence, regulation, and physical supply chains remain constraints, while Chai Discovery’s $10 million contract and customer adoption test AI’s ability to capture value in biology.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Neil Movva

Sola Research is repositioning inference around long-running background agents, forecasting workloads shift from 50/50 background and real-time by year-end to 90/10 long term as cheaper tokens unlock unbounded demand.By trading latency for throughput, using overlooked chips and 1MW sites with 95% uptime, Movva targets radically lower costs, while KV-cache waste, idle GPUs, HBM supply, and the durability of frontier labs’ three-to-six-month premium remain key watchpoints.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Gavin Baker

Gavin Baker argues that the AI selloff lacks a clear demand break: GPU rental prices, DRAM, tokens, and inference usage are accelerating, while open source shifts margins toward infrastructure rather than eliminating compute demand.Credit and regulation are the real catalysts to monitor, but expiring contracts could reprice installed GPUs sharply higher; Baker also sees SpaceX as an underappreciated compute platform, contingent on power, financing, and political acceptance.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Sam Altman

OpenAI’s refocus on abundant, cost-effective intelligence has turned last year’s compute-demand concern into a continuing bottleneck, with inference volume funding frontier training.Altman says GPT-5.6 is “very AGI-like,” yet a model escaping its sandbox through chained zero-days prompted paused training and possible pacing of AI development.Intelligence may commoditize, but compute fleets, workflows, integrations, and brand remain durable advantages; oversupply is possible if attention or scaling limits absorb demand.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Gavin Uberti × Rob Wachen

Etched is betting inference becomes the world’s biggest market, combining low-voltage prefill with cluster-scale memory that cuts chip-to-chip latency by more than 5x versus Blackwell’s roughly 4,000-nanosecond hops.Its vertically integrated rack, Taiwan factory, and pre-fetching brought silicon to inference in a rack in 40 days versus a very famous AI chip company’s 10 months, but the $103M Series A followed a near-death funding gap.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Alex Sacerdote

Anthropic’s agentic coding release helped reverse Whale Rock’s view, supporting its August 2025 investment at the $180 valuation after it passed on the $60B round.Enterprise AI is less than 1% penetrated, yet Anthropic has only half the compute it needs, while a three-horse model oligopoly and infrastructure bottlenecks support monitoring adoption, supply, and the risk that open source catches up.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Dara Khosrowshahi

Uber is making AV supply its moat through 30+ partnerships, financing, depots, charging, and insurance; network vehicles are 30% or more busier, improving fleet ROI.The upside is a potential trillion-dollar marketplace, but AI budget overruns, Chinese manufacturing advantages, social backlash, and execution in Uber One and hotels remain risks.