Inference Will Be $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Software Investors are F***ed | Naveen Rao
Harry Stebbings talks with Naveen Rao, founder of Unconventional AI and former Mosaic ML founder, about why energy is AI's bottleneck, why hardware beats software for investors, and why inference could become a $10 trillion market.
The gist
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Rao says building one gigawatt costs about $50 billion, the US is using up spare grid capacity, and building 10 gigawatts a year would be amazing.
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Rao argues chips no longer gain much efficiency physically, so the big wins now come from designing the model, architecture and hardware together, energy first.
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Rao says AI has moved the bottleneck from producing work to verifying it, and agents should not yet be trusted like trained human experts.
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Rao predicts the inference market will reach $10 trillion within 10 years, says hardware is the place to be, and that pure software investors are in trouble.
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Rao expects 80% of tokens to run on open models in three years, but sees agentic coding tools as overrated and robotics as far bigger.
Also mentioned
8:07
Bloom Energy
· "Companies are building new sort of technologies like Bloom Energy. There's a Bloom Energy deal for..."
10:40
Mosaic
· "Then the next level, which is not really exploited that well, and we started this a little bit at Mosaic,..."
18:45
Nvidia
· "I mean, look, I think Nvidia obviously executed extremely well on the path to getting us here."
45:52
Legora
· "Do you think SaaS becomes Legora? And what I mean by that is like, is Legora SaaS? Well, I mean, kind of,..."
48:34
Harvey
· "If Harvey said like, 'Hey, I have a solution that does all your NDAs, it reviews your contracts,' and I can..."
48:58
Fireworks AI
· "Lin at Fireworks AI, where I'm an investor, has spoken very openly about owning your own intelligence and..."
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