Some people wonder whether AI companies can make enough money selling chatbot subscriptions to justify their planned $100+ billion spending on datacenters.

Current trends suggest that there’s enough competition between AI companies to drive chatbot prices down to somewhere near the cost of compute.

I expect they won’t rely on these subscriptions as a primary revenue source, and that they have some awareness of other business models to which they may shift in a few years. This post will outline one possible model.

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This post is a response to Tyler Cowen’s A household expenditure approach to measuring AI progress, discussing how AI will affect productivity over the next 5 years (i.e. until the summer of 2030) via the effects on typical household expenses.

I mostly predict that the effects will be larger than Tyler expects, but the 5 year time period that he chose is short enough that the effects won’t be obvious until near then end of that period.

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Book review: The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There, by Vincent T. DeVita, and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn.

In my last review of a medical book, I was disappointed about the lack of explanation as to why medical advances get deployed much too slowly, particularly cancer treatments.

By some strange coincidence, the next medical book I read, published a decade earlier, provides some valuable insights into those problems.

This is a memoir of both luck and skill. DeVita is uniquely qualified to describe the origins of the war on cancer, due to a career that included diagnosing patients, running clinical trials, and serving as director of the National Cancer Institute.

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I’ve been shifting my investments to more AI-focused bets.

Here’s an overview of my larger positions, in descending order of how eager I am to recommend further purchases now:

  • MU – AI is memory hungry, and MU is in a good position for almost NVDA-like growth
  • CSIQ – solar, for AI-related power demand
  • ASML – semiconductor equipment
  • SCIA – semiconductor equipment
  • GOOGL – for TPUs, DeepMind, and Waymo
  • SMCI – datacenter
  • NVDA
  • AMPX (and AMPX.WS) – batteries suitable for drones
  • TSSI – datacenter
  • CLS – close to half of its business involves datacenters
  • PDEX – a fairly safe way to diversify my portfolio
  • MTG – a fairly safe way to diversify my portfolio
  • ASTS – expanding cell phone coverage; I’ll likely sell when I can get long-term gains

Short positions:

  • SP500 futures – hedging against risks such as tariffs
  • SOFR futures dated 2029 through 2032 – betting that interest rates will rise due to AI
  • WMT – it’s got a high PE ratio, and little sign of growth

[This is not at all a complete list, as I have smaller positions in something like 150 other companies.]

AI stocks are likely to form a bubble someday, but I’m guessing the peak of that bubble is more than a year away.

I still have some concerns about tariff-related damage causing some declines sometime this year. I’m optimistic that the courts will strike down the per-country tariffs this fall. It shouldn’t take long for the country to recover from the tariff damage once the tariffs have been removed.

Beware that even in a strong bull market, there will be periodic scares, such as January’s DeepSeek-trigger panic, that cause sharp drops in leading stocks. AI-related stocks had a big rally in June, and are likely to consolidate for a while before the next such rally.

Mainland China seems committed to reasserting control over Taiwan within a few years, regardless of how much force is needed. Here’s my attempt at planning a non-disastrous scenario.

I have less expertise here than in my average blog post, so I encourage readers to question my guesses.

Blockade

In April of 2028, China launches a blockade of Taiwan. It surrounds the island with their navy, threatening to seize or sink any ship leaving Taiwan that doesn’t submit to Chinese inspections.

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My recent post Are Intelligent Agents More Ethical? criticized some brief remarks by Scott Sumner.

Sumner made a more sophisticated version of those claims in the second half of this Doom Debate.

His position sounds a lot like the moral realism that has caused many people to be complacent about AI taking over the world. But he’s actually using an analysis that follows Richard Rorty’s rejection of standard moral realism. Which seems to mean there’s a weak sense in which morality can be true, but in a socially and historically contingent fashion. If I understand that correctly, I approve.

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Super Agers

Book review: Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, by Eric Topol.

I was somewhat disappointed, partly because the title misled me.

The book is broad and shallow, as if he’s trying to show off how many topics he’s familiar with. Too much of the book consists of long lists of research that Topol finds interesting, but for which I see little connection with aging. He usually doesn’t say enough about the research for me to figure out why I should consider it promising.

He mostly seems to be saying that the number of new research ideas ought to impress us. I care more about the quality of the most promising research than about the quantity of research.

The book is mostly correct and up-to-date, but I’m unclear what kind of reader would get much out of it.

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This post is a response to a claim by Scott Sumner in his conversation at LessOnline with Nate Soares, about how ethical we should expect AI’s to be.

Sumner sees a pattern of increasing intelligence causing agents to be increasingly ethical, and sounds cautiously optimistic that such a trend will continue when AIs become smarter than humans. I’m guessing that he’s mainly extrapolating from human trends, but extrapolating from trends in the animal kingdom should produce similar results (e.g. the cooperation between single-celled organisms that gave the world multicellular organisms).

I doubt that my response is very novel, but I haven’t seen clear enough articulation of the ideas in this post.

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