Gavin Baker
Gavin Baker is the Founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management, LP, a crossover investment fund with approximately $7 billion in assets under management focused on technology and consumer companies. Before founding Atreides in 2019, he spent nearly two decades at Fidelity Investments managing the Fidelity OTC Portfolio, where he was named Fund Manager of the Year by The Boston Globe in 2014. He is widely recognized for early conviction in companies such as Nvidia and SpaceX, and for influential public commentary on AI infrastructure, semiconductor capacity, and the competitive landscape among frontier AI model developers.
“Gavin Baker, who's obviously a very pronounced thought leader in the space and brilliant investor, did articulate that permitting and the regulatory challenges around it actually has almost helped because it throttled supply to allow it to grow in lockstep. In an asymmetric world where not every player views regulation and growth at that level, I don't think I would agree with him.”
Source→“In 30 days, we went from not being an AI hyperscaler to being number four. And we passed a lot of companies, including Oracle. CoreWeave is a huge business.”
Source→“It's hard to say that Anthropic's not up. After the revenue numbers they put up, after the Fable 5 release, and Mythos is evidently even better.”
Source→“That has been decisively wrong. Probably more than 90%. And it may continue to be decisively wrong. Frontier might be 90% of the economic value. Open source might be 80% of tokens.”
Source→“Cursor and Anthropic have more tokens of proprietary coding data than anyone else. And they each have more tokens of proprietary coding data than exist on the public internet.”
Source→“Their biggest one thing they emphasized is we thought the world would be consuming less NVIDIA than it is. And if anything, NVIDIA is accelerating and they just continue to out-execute their competitors.”
Source→“Harvey had a great blog post that they put out on X. They used their own proprietary legal data to do reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning with Fireworks on an open source model. And then they used a router... and they got better outcomes than Opus either 4.7 or 4.8 at a lower cost.”
Source→“I just think that Noam Brown post from yesterday, polynomial, is so profound... We do not know how smart these models are... Nobody has run Mythos for a year continuously. And we may never know how smart each generation of models actually is or was.”
Source→“He called it bitter lesson adjacent that coding may be the fastest path to AGI and ASI. Because if you're really good at coding, you can write code... to do anything.”
Source→“Secondaries are now competing with IPOs and acquisitions as the principal way that these guys are exiting... Today it's at 106. So a premium in the market as of Q1 25.”
Source→“It's a neobank that has a completely next generation stack... they're doing really well in Europe. They're coming to the United States. The founder seems to be just an absolute star. Tens of millions of customers. 14 lines of business. They're like a billion dollars in revenue.”
Source→“Gavin Baker said, I think quite intelligently, that permitting and regulation and the delayed build out of data centers has actually helped. Because if I enabled you to build 10x the data centers today, it would actually create the glut.”
Source→“"the right picture is not a Pentagon-sized building lifted into orbit but server racks in space, individual racks placed where sunlight is constant and cooling is effectively free, linked to one another & to the ground by laser."”
“I manage more than 100 positions at my firm. And I do that with a team. We're over 30 people now.”
Source→“The one thing I would just say... they said if they thought their CPU business was going to be $20 billion this year... That's extraordinary. It means overnight [they became] one of the world's largest CPU manufacturers.”
Source→“Crime is now a choice... A16Z had a great essay on flock. We can really, really solve crime. And it's just a choice.”
Source→“My firm, Atreides, is an investor in a company called Exite Labs. It's a matter of public record. It's going to be in essentially every Starlink. And the chips were not designed to go to space. They're not radiation hardened... they just happened to pass [rad testing].”
Source→“He's clearly a brilliant man. I think he's a Rhodes Scholar at like 19. And I think my understanding is he's putting up pretty extraordinary numbers... running a fund that went from zero to $5B.”
Source→“If OpenAI and Anthropic are at, call it $100 billion of ARR now, with 80%-ish gross margins on inference, like the returns are there. And then if we add in Gemini, we add in Cursor, we add in XAI, we add in open source, you know, it's not hard to see $200, $300, $400 billion of ARR at the end of this year at high margin.”
Source→“The fact that they are now, they were EBIT positive per the Wall Street Journal in the most recent quarter is a really important fact for kind of the whole AI narrative.”
Source→“Their first data center was 122 days. The second one, it took them 91 days. The third one was, I think, 66 days. They build data centers dramatically faster than anyone else at a lower cost.”
Source→“Cursor allegedly has more tokens of coding data than exist on the public internet. And that is a stat from, I think, more than a year ago. So I'd imagine it's grown significantly.”
Source→“CoreWeave's lowest financing—I can't forget if it's 6% or 7%. 6%. It's going to come down. And if you can get an asset-backed loan, an asset-backed financing for GPUs at a lower rate than other chips, that's a profound advantage.”
Source→“Broadcom is engaged in a different way. They're just everybody's favorite ASIC supplier. If you're a startup, it's considered like a level up if you get to work with Broadcom for your second gen chip.”
Source→“I do think Jensen is going to keep open source a certain time frame behind the frontier. I think that's going to be a very interesting thing to watch.”
Source→“George retires because he can't take the underperformance... He had like 40% of his fund in tobacco, 40% in home builders. And literally, he probably outperformed the NASDAQ by like 20 or 30x over the next three years.”
Source→“Carlotta Perez wrote this great book about this. Markets are efficient. They correctly understand that this is a foundational new technology... And then you get a bubble. That bubble funds the build-out of this new technology. But supply gets ahead of demand. And you get a crash.”
Source→“I do want to reframe orbital compute because I think when people hear data centers in space, they picture a pentagonized building in space... That's not what it is. A Blackwell rack weighs 3,000 pounds. It's eight feet high. It's four feet deep, three feet wide. It's racks in space.”
Source→“If I were to watch one thing to understand where there's a bubble, it's Taiwan Semi's capacity decisions.”
Source→“Are frontier tokens going to continue capturing the overwhelming majority of economic value created at the model layer?... AI is just shifting from all-you-can-eat to pay by the drink... I think the shift to usage-based pricing is probably why you will see OpenAI and Anthropic exceed well over $200 billion in ARR this year.”
Source→“At the application layer, forget value accruing, just value has been destroyed. AI has net destroyed, even if you count cursor cognition, the most successful AI natives. Trillions of dollars of value has been destroyed by AI at the application layer.”
Source→“I think because Elon had his foray into politics, that makes it hard for some people in America to see him clearly, which is sad because I do think he's probably doing more for America than any other American. He's single-handedly bringing manufacturing back to America. He's revived defense tech... He's creating all these blue-collar manufacturing jobs... He's done more than any living human to decarbonize the world.”
Source→“Grok 4.3 is on the Pareto frontier. It's clearly the best, lowest cost, 500 billion parameter model.”
Source→“I think capitalism is going to solve the Watts shortage absent big regulatory or political blowback... I think the Watts shortage will probably begin to alleviate 27, 28. And then I think orbital compute will really solve that.”
Source→“Anthropic at $900 billion for $50 billion in ARR. Growing at ridiculous rates. And I think maybe a true statement is that if Anthropic could just wave a magic wand and get all the compute they wanted, they'd probably be doing well north of $100 billion today. Maybe $150.”
Source→“By DeepSeek Monday, it was super clear that this was going to be the most positive thing that had ever happened to compute demand. Prices of the AWS availability zones in Asia had already doubled.”
Source→“What Cerebrus has done is something hard and fundamentally different. Way for scale computing. It comes with a set of trade-offs, but that architectural decision they made was hard and lets them do something that no one else can do.”
Source→“Definitionally, if you're a switch company or an accelerator company, you cannot be a copper loser because you're going to be on the other side of that connection.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.