Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:21)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
Joe, we like to talk a lot about physical constraints on this show, right? And this is one reason why AI is a really fascinating area for us right now, because there are a lot of physical constraints on what is ultimately the sort of ephemeral technology. And I think that the tension between those two things is really interesting, right? Like you type a prompt into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and it's the sort of like disembodied digital platform. You don't necessarily think about the power usage, the real resources, the transformers that have to go into data centers to get compute.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:58)
The thing that I've been on my mind lately and I've written about it, and I plan to write more is this idea that the canonical AI thought experiment is, what happens if you tell an AI to make a lot of paper clips, and then it destroys the world because in the pursuit of marshaling all of the world's resources, it just turns everything into paper clips because it doesn't know.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:20)
I have to ask, is this canonical example, is this based on your traumatic fear of Clippy from Microsoft Word?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:26)
No, but that is, it all comes back full circle. But what we're seeing in real life is that everything from access to electrical grids, GPU is being the big example, energy turbines, talent, and now even including residential real estate are being re-proposed to make more and more advanced AI. And in the original paperclip thought experiment, they envision, or at least in one version, the philosopher Nicholas Bostrom envisions the AI having exhausted all of the world's resources, then sending a probe into outer space to consume star energy to build more paperclips.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:01)
Just eat the universe.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:02)
And to this point, we're even talking about going into outer space for data centers to build more AI. So every version of the thought experiment is being replicated, except it's just more and more resources to build the AI by humans rather than paperclips by AI.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:18)
There's this other connected theme here. So we've talked before about how one of the reasons valuations seem to be getting insane in the market is because all of this activity is being driven by this existential need to become number one in frontier models and this new technology. And so if you say you absolutely have to be the first to invent AGI, then you can justify any amount of spending on earth, right? And so what we tend to see is like the biggest companies just keep getting bigger. They're the ones that can get resources for all this stuff.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:51)
And I think one of the most fascinating things right now is that at least as of right now, June 4th, 2026, the frontier models are really close to each other, right? So and the 4.8 GPT, 5.5, like they're not that different. And one of the things I'm curious about is, is there something inherent in market dynamics in this space that will always keep, whether it's being able to distill results from another model and cause I steal them, whether it's information sharing among employees, is there some inherent reason why we've seen the stability? Or could it be that at some point one lab just like breaks out and establishes permanent?

**Tracy Alloway** (3:33)
Still a possibility, but like I am personally on the side of commodification and everything just becomes kind of basic or basically available. I know. Okay. Well, all right.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:43)
Thank you, Joe.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:44)
All right. That's a polite prompt to get to the guest. We do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Anjney Midha. He is of course a former general partner at Anderson Horowitz, a Stanford University visiting scientist who teaches the viral AI lecture called Frontier Systems. Also, one of the first guys to write a check for Anthropic.

**Anjney Midha** (4:07)
Amazing.

**Tracy Alloway** (4:07)
He is now the founder of a new company called AMP Pbc. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots, Anj.

**Anjney Midha** (4:13)
Thanks for having me. One correction, it's pronounced AMP Pbc, but everything else you got perfect on the intro.

**Tracy Alloway** (4:19)
AMP would make sense, wouldn't it?

**Anjney Midha** (4:21)
As an energy. Yeah.

**Tracy Alloway** (4:22)
Just remind us, the Pbc is Public Benefit Corporation.

**Anjney Midha** (4:26)