Alastair Unwin (Polar Capital) - Investing in an AI-first World
Description
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
United States
