Investors are working overtime to digest the implications of Dario’s Pacing the Frontier essay.
Funda will make the argument in a forthcoming note that AI development should not be slowed uniformly because release pace, training pace, and sector readiness differ across industries.
I believe Funda is already read by KOLs like Gavin and Elon, but if you agree with the views in the note, please do your part to amplify it by (can’t believe I’m saying this) liking and subscribing and reposting the content.
In the marketplace of ideas, you can do your part to “vote” for views you agree with.
The Funda platform has summarised the various “camps” that have formed over the weekend. This is free for everyone to read and repost.
Some responses from investors and folks working in AI in the chat this week:
Join our chat - we think its one of the higher signal Substack chats around. We have regular contributions from professional investors and engineers, who have weighed in on names such as Kokusai Electric, Nanya Plastics, Kingboard, Victory Giant, Komico and Yageo.
Separately, our work this week reinforced the value of getting close to the supply chain in Asia.
I think the strength of a company’s partners (relative to a competitor’s) does explain recent surprising market share gains, such as Semtech in TIAs.
We also had comments from Marvell attributing their success to the strength and history of relationships in the supply chain:
If you just popped out of nowhere and you said, hey, I got a data center part now, and I think I need like billions of dollars of revenue like next year, I think people are going to look at you like, where were you 5 years ago? I mean you can’t get some of the substrate capacity until the end of the decade if you haven’t started. How are you going to get it if you didn’t start 5 years ago?
[O]nce we acquired Avera and then Inphi and Innovium, we got these very complex reticle-sized products that required deep relationships in the supply chain in terms of substrates and back-end capacity that wasn’t that fungible.
[Our COO] and I basically went off and struck a bunch of deals, long-term deals with all of our supply chain, not just TSMC, our sole-source vendor on the fab side, but also on the substrate side, back-end capacity, et cetera. And that worked really well. I mean that's basically what's gotten us from, call it, $4.3 billion run rate when we bought Inphi.
…I just got back from an entire week in Asia visiting my supply chain. New vendors, existing suppliers and just kind of reaffirming where we're going. And so that has really helped that combination of credibility, trust, compelling road map and then capital you put in…
…suppliers are a lot like you guys, okay? At the end of the day, they want to figure out who's the management, where is this company actually going? What end markets are they in? Are they credible? Do they have a good plan?
We celebrated our one year anniversary this week. There will be a longer reflection on how we got here, but to put things in perspective, this newsletter went from a post in September 2025 about a Singaporean diesel generator company that was an analogue of Power Solutions (a big retail favourite on X) to a position where we have some exciting things lined up for the next 12 months:
As Matt Murphy says, the supply chain have views on where the likes of Marvell are going, and I think we’re making progress on getting closer to them so we can get really differentiated content for you.
We’re going to push a little harder on opportunities in Singapore - there are definitely doors we can try to open here in relation to names like Soitec and our favourite Singapore pick. I’m excited about what we can achieve here - stay tuned.
I think the discussion on multiplayer and multimodal AI, and how the consumer experience should change, was lost in the noise of conference roundups about the usual semi names and the Muse launch: