Ben Buchanan
10.4K posts
Ben Buchanan
@01Core_Ben
Trying to get rich and live forever. Tweets mostly about big-tech, semiconductors and exponential progress. Pathological optimist. Don’t Die.
Bradenton, FL Katılım Ocak 2022
573 Takip Edilen4.4K Takipçiler
what problem do you most hope AI will solve in the future?
maybe we can help!
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Before AI I paid an accountant to do my taxes. After ChatGPT came out I realized I could do them myself on turbo tax. I now have 7 turbo tax accounts instead of one because of AI (for family I help out).
I also use quickbooks all day every day.
I also received payment links generated by QuickBooks all day from our vendors.
Long intuit in my software basket and buying more, obviously…
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Ben Buchanan retweetledi
CSU supercut done! I could only cut it from 4 hours down to 36 minutes.
I moved a couple segments on the timeline for clarity, it focuses heavily on mark miller opening, AI and panels and condensed a bunch of Q&A. fixed some audio synch issues as well.
Uploading to youtube now.
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My newest index for people who don't think software is going to die. Here's what I did.
Started with the $QQQ.
Cut weighting of any company that has had a historically abnormal run.
Eliminated nosebleed valuations, companies where revenue didn't keep up with inflation, or who face structural headwinds.
Overweighted companies trading at historically low valuations.
Added a basket that includes "AI Losers" and compounders who for whatever categorization issue are not included in the index - who are trading at historically low valuations.
My guess is this thing underperforms as long as the AI trade remains on, but downside should be far less, beta lower than existing QQQ.
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The $CSU.to AGM was 4 hours and 17 minutes. If you want me to make a super cut just like this tweet and I'll see if I can chop it down to something like 30 or 40 minutes and I'll DM you the link.
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@WillBiddy_ x.com/01core_ben/sta… I concur and have added a lot as well
Ben Buchanan@01Core_Ben
Every year I help various family members with taxes, and also manage taxes for a trust and two businesses. Pre Chat-GPT ALL of this was done by a CPA. Today, only one of the business and my parent's personal tax return are done by CPA - I handle the rest, even the trust if nothing tricky happened during the year. I am only able to figure everything out thanks to AI - where I usually have Claude and ChatGPT open to help. I now have 2 TaxAct licenses and 7 TurboTax licenses. I used to have zero. AI driving business to TurboTax. I'm also about to set up a new QuickBooks account for a new business - one that exists in part b/c AI is making it easier and cheaper for us to experiment with ads. I also just started Google ads a month ago - which wouldn't have happened without the help of AI. I also signed up for Shopify plugins that I never would have except for AI. AI is expanding the TAM for software, it is also stealing business from service providers. Interestingly though - I'm also beginning to spend more on service providers - just different ones. Just some narrative violations around my own circle of observation.
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$INTU is one of if not the most insulated software company from artificial intelligence fears in my personal opinion.
-SMB book-keeping and accounting monopoly
-Taxes are very specialized, important, and sensitive
-Their 3 sided network is reinforcing itself with every additional user
These are conservative estimates for Intuit looking forward and we still see incredible returns.
I'm loading up before the Market changes sentiment!
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It's hard to "grind my gears". But people being able to piss away their life savings on whether or not Jerome Powell opens a press conference by saying "Good Afternoon" or betting on the results of a sports game - or buying lottery tickets - while not being permitted to invest in the world's best companies b/c "private investing should only be done by sophisticated investors" - is one of them.
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The IPO system is broken. You don’t go public to raise growth capital anymore. You do it to dump equity on retail.
NVIDIA went public at ~$600mn in 1999. Microsoft at 780mn. Oracle at ~270mn. Intel at 58mn!
Today you won’t IPO even at $60 billion.
At a $600 million valuation if you hit the jackpot and become a $60 billion company in public markets that’s a 100x return.
Investing $10k as retail makes you a millionaire. This is wealth creation.
At $60 billion there’s very little chance you get to $600 billion let alone 100x from there. You will certainly lose money as retail.
Mathematically if you only allow $100 billion IPOs you’re basically capping upside at maybe 10-20x. There’s no more 100x or 1000x potential. And even 10x is extremely unlikely.
Airbnb, Uber DoorDash are maybe 10x outcomes at best for retail investors. These are supposed be success stories of last decade.
Apple Microsoft Tesla Google were all 100x opportunities for retail.
So you’ve basically cut the average middle class investor out of the upside while private markets and insiders keep most of it for themselves.
Ronak Jain@r7onak
No Equality champion will ask for this, simpleton brains just want a flat Billionaire tax, and Billionaires always have a place to move and save money. The only chance for equality in an unequal world is access and a chance to throw the dice in the game.
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I'm going long deep OTM leaps on $SNAP Monday. If Evan ever decides to make money it would be trivially easy. I also think there are more potential acquirers than in the past (e.g. OpenAI). If Snap were to get acquired it would be based on some reasonable multiple of normalized earnings, or based on the size of his user base. In either case the takeout price would be at least 3X what it's at right now. Wish me luck.
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Every year I help various family members with taxes, and also manage taxes for a trust and two businesses. Pre Chat-GPT ALL of this was done by a CPA. Today, only one of the business and my parent's personal tax return are done by CPA - I handle the rest, even the trust if nothing tricky happened during the year. I am only able to figure everything out thanks to AI - where I usually have Claude and ChatGPT open to help.
I now have 2 TaxAct licenses and 7 TurboTax licenses. I used to have zero. AI driving business to TurboTax.
I'm also about to set up a new QuickBooks account for a new business - one that exists in part b/c AI is making it easier and cheaper for us to experiment with ads.
I also just started Google ads a month ago - which wouldn't have happened without the help of AI.
I also signed up for Shopify plugins that I never would have except for AI.
AI is expanding the TAM for software, it is also stealing business from service providers. Interestingly though - I'm also beginning to spend more on service providers - just different ones.
Just some narrative violations around my own circle of observation.
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I don't disagree. Had a fairly sizeable semi position until recently. That said, my current base case is that incumbents are in a good spot. A company who is in the business of making IT management software for humans will have a head start in making IT management software for Agents. A company in the business of processing payments will have a headstart at processing payments made by AI. I'd prefer to play the theme with hardware but given the run I'm not comfortable doing that from here. And I am very comfortable longing software given how much valuations have come in.
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@01Core_Ben Software is the abstraction layer that sits on top of hardware.
Right now that abstraction layer has always been designed for humans from the ground up.
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The bull case for everything including software is that autonomous agents become analogous to adding people to the workforce. Imagine what happens to demand if the pool of potential users starts expanding by 1 billion per year.
Agents using photoshop. Agents processing transactions on Visa/Mastercard rails. Agents doing tickets on ServiceNow.
Agents doing customer service for other Agents...
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To me there are three obvious truths about big software companies today:
#1
The bearish narratives are so pervasive primarily because these companies are in a massive drawdown.
#2
Software companies never deserved the valuations they previously commanded. Hence the drawdown.
#3
The most dangerous threats to Big Software today are the same as they were before LLMs.
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What would the “story” be for ServiceNow if their stock was at $75 and price momentum was inflecting upward?
$75 is almost 20% lower than $91. But I’d be willing to wager a princely sum that if the stock were at all time highs and rocketing - the narrative would be far different than the ones we’re being bombarded with today - even if the actual price of the stock was lower. Instead of discussing how AI has threatened their “terminal value” we would be discussing how AI gave them “optionality”.
Same stock. Lower price. Different chart. Different story…Price drives narrative - as they say.
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This is a chart of ServiceNow $NOW.
Today ServiceNow is priced at $91 per share, down from a high of around $210 per share - a drawdown of more than 50%. But what if instead of being in a 50% drawdown, ServiceNow was at an all time high, and its share price was $75?
(see chart in next tweet)
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So where’s the semi money gonna go? I wanna skate to where the puck is gonna be à la Gretzky.
Martin Shkreli@MartinShkreli
semis peak cycle right about now
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“I’m writing this post because the IPO is coming up and valuation must go brrrrrrrrrrr”
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@SBorsadia A token is about 1.5 words. Baseball is one word but two tokens. Tokens can also be things like phonetic sounds (e.g. Sch sounding like Sk)
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@01Core_Ben Is there a unit of measure a non-techie can correlate with a token? If so, what is it?
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Riddle me this. WTF are we using tokens for?
Token generation per month:
Google: 1.3 quadrillion
OpenAI: 650 trillion
Anthropic: 650 trillion
Other (e.g. Meta, OpenAI on Azure, etc) is also something material.
Call it 3 quadrillion per month total or 100 trillion per day.
Approximately half of these are used by programmers - so call it 50 trillion per day.
There are ~50 million programmers on Earth and maybe half of them (generously) are responsible for generating all these tokens.
This gives us 50 trillion / 25 million = 2 million tokens being generated per day by these people. 60 million per month.
For reference, Microsoft Excel's core functionality is built with about 2 million lines of code (and around 40million if you include libraries, UI, integrations, etc).
We're using around 10X more tokens today than a year ago, and on the order of 50X since 2024.
If the world suddenly started using 50X the amount of underwear it was using two years ago - everyone would notice. You would probably be spending half your day in the bathroom doomscrolling updates from the CDC on the latest possible explanations for why the entire world simultaneously came down with a violent case of diarrhea.
Yet token consumption is up 50X, and daily life has changed for at most 1% of the world's population?
Just strange to think about...
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