AI Copium follows investor Gavin Baker's conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy about why many people close to frontier AI have become more bullish. Baker says he looked for quantitative evidence that the boom was slowing, but instead found faster capability progress, severe compute scarcity and very limited adoption of existing agentic systems.
The bull case depends on more than larger models. Continual learning and better sample efficiency could create another capability discontinuity, while successive adoption waves could spread AI through software, physical infrastructure and labor markets. Baker expects data-center demand to remain strong because useful inference is still constrained by available compute.
The largest uncertainty is whether regulation and public consent can keep pace with the ambitions of frontier companies. The discussion highlights a growing gap between insiders who expect rapid transformation and a broader public that has not accepted its economic or social consequences, leaving open whether the current confidence reflects genuine insight or a technology bubble.
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