Dylan Patel on Why AI's Biggest Infrastructure Gains Come From Co-Design
- Jobs, GDP, And Economic Growth
- AI Engineering, Software, And Developer Tooling
- Open Models
- Capital, Markets, And Business Models
- AI Infrastructure, Compute, Chips, And Energy
- Frontier Models And Capabilities
The real breakthrough innovation is when you leapfrog a few layers, you co-optimize and co-design them, and now all of a sudden you've taken what could have been a 2x here, 2x here, 2x here, and instead of being multiplicative to 8x, it's actually 100x because you've optimized across all three layers.
In the conversation, Dylan told the story of living in a tent on the back of his truck and in cheap motels while blogging, researching, and listening to semiconductor textbooks. Later, he would travel to more than 40 conferences a year. What does this have to do with co-design?
It gave Dylan a deep appreciation for the interconnected nature of the chip stack: tools, chemicals, fabs, software, and ultimately the systems view that led to the success of SemiAnalysis.
He formed one of the earliest and most robust theses on AI co-design: the idea that you cannot cleanly split progress into model, software, and hardware buckets. The big jumps come when labs co-optimize all three.
Section 1
Section 01- In the conversation, Dylan told the story of living in a tent on the back of his truck and in cheap motels while blogging, researching, and listening to semiconductor textbooks. Later, he would travel to more than 40 conferences a year. What does this have to do with co-design?
Section 2
Section 02- It gave Dylan a deep appreciation for the interconnected nature of the chip stack: tools, chemicals, fabs, software, and ultimately the systems view that led to the success of SemiAnalysis.
Section 3
Section 03- He formed one of the earliest and most robust theses on AI co-design: the idea that you cannot cleanly split progress into model, software, and hardware buckets. The big jumps come when labs co-optimize all three.
Tags
- AI Infrastructure
- Developer Tooling
- AI Economics
- Open Source AI
- Data Centers And Energy
- Cloud Runtime
- Frontier Models
- AI Infrastructure Efficiency
- AI Chips
- AI Capital Allocation
- Benchmarks And Evaluation
- Compute Supply Chain
- Cloud Economics
- Startup Infrastructure
- Inference Infrastructure
- Open Weights
- Private Markets