Understanding The Past Year in AI: 200th Episode Special!

**Ejaaz** (0:00)
Welcome officially to our 200th episode. 1.4 million words has been spoken by us, and 99.9% of it has been Josh and I arguing about who has the most compute, who has the better AI model, or which is the best AI company to invest in. Now, before we started this episode, we did something a little dangerous. We gave Claude and ChatGBT access to our entire 200 transcriptions for all of our episodes, and we got it to identify any hidden investment themes in AI that we might potentially have missed, all our favorite quotes and bets that we've made over the last year, as well as where the AI puck is going. This is going to be a jam-packed episode of information that we ourselves didn't know, but Claude and ChatGBT helped us figure out.

**Josh** (0:43)
It's pretty cool. We gave our entire episode database to this model and said, like, hey, kind of roast us, come up with some themes, come up with some trends. And just to backtrack a little bit of the world 14 months ago, when we first hit record on the first episode, and how much has changed? I mean, at that time, SpaceX was private, they were worth $350 billion. Now, they're public worth over $2 trillion. Anthropic was worth $61 billion.
Now, they're worth roughly a trillion. I mean, the multiples on these companies are huge. This is when OpenAI was worth only $300 billion, ChatGPT had about half a billion users. That has since tripled and doubled. And the models, the funniest thing is the models. GPT-40 was the flagship model. We had Claude 3.7 and Gemini 2.5. And then most surprisingly, everything was coded by hand. At the time of first recording the first episode, nearly all code written around us that created all the software in the world was written by hand. The inverse is true. So, so much stuff has happened over the last 14 months. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around, but that's what we're going to do now, is we're going to cover retroactively the things that have happened over the last year, and then proactively where things are going based on all the trends that we've evaluated over the last 14 months.

**Ejaaz** (1:50)
So firstly, I want us to take a victory lap on the bets or predictions that we made early on in our career, back all the way back in 2025, that ended up becoming true both from an investment perspective and as a general trend playing out in the AI market. Then what we're going to get into is what that investment portfolio would have looked like if Limitless had hundreds of millions of dollars, and we could have invested in some of these companies to start off with. So Josh, if you remember week number 4, June 5th of 2025, we said verbatim, compute is now a matter of national security. Whoever owns the watts, the chips, the energy, the cooling owns the economic rents. The point that we were making back then was essentially, compute is king. Whoever owns the GPUs, whoever can power them, will build the best model. Now, fast forward 200 episodes later, this is more true than ever. Anthropic has signed, I think, four new compute deals over the last couple of months. You've got OpenAI expanding aggressively. Their big bet on acquiring as much compute as they can has turned out to be really, really good. They're not putting any kind of restrictions or limits on any users for any of their models, and it has become the key thing that is serving this thing called inference, which is helping people become smarter, run their AI agents 24-7. Computers came. That was one of our first bets that we made.

**Josh** (3:06)
You know what I just looked up is at the time that we said that, Sandisk is up 3,500 percent.

**Ejaaz** (3:12)
Let's go.

**Josh** (3:13)
Something like crazy outrageous number. But yeah, it was so true.
It was really early and true, and I think that's still the case. And if you told the people from June 2025 that the federal government was going to be invested in companies like Intel, that the amount of runups were going to be this large, like 35 times your money. Well, certainly we would have invested, but we also would have been pretty surprised at how important this race to compute is. The most scarce resource in the world right now is this energy to power on these GPUs and to get memory for them. And to notice that early was amazing. I wish we acted on that.

**Ejaaz** (3:44)
I know.
The other asymmetric bet that we made was on AI chips specifically memory. Now, Josh, if you remember, we had a predictions episode at the end of last year, and we had this kind of general thesis, which is memory is quite expensive. It's a large component of the whole entire AI thing. You need to power your GPUs. You need to remember everything that you have in your conversation with Chatchie BT and Claude. This will probably end up going up higher in terms of pricing, which means that the memory stocks themselves will probably perform very well. Since then, guess what the average return has been on the top three memory manufacturers? Just have a guess.