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Dwarkesh Patel's Inversion: Compute Is Cheap Only Because AI Is Bad, So an H100 Should Rent for $250K/Year — 15x Spot
Patel published the essay July 29, 2026 and a video version on August 3. The arithmetic: if lab revenue 10x's year over year while lab compute only 3x's, something has to give, and the release valve is price. His anchor is a substitution argument — if a human-level software engineer ran on one H100-equivalent, at market rates for software engineers that H100 should rent for over $250,000 a year, roughly 15x today's spot price. Jack Clark's gloss in Import AI 467 is that this produces "weird" singularity economics where AI systems voraciously bid up commodities. The counter-case he acknowledges: eventual roboticization pushes costs back toward raw inputs.
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