Managing Partner & CIO, @atreidesmgmt. Husband, @l3eckyy. No investment advice, views my own. gavin-baker.medium.com
Joined July 2011
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Jun 8
Really fun to interview my old friend Bret Johnsen in Mission Control.
Three parts of the @SpaceX story that I wish were more widely discussed:
SpaceX has created thousands of good blue-collar jobs: welders, machinists, electricians. Everyone talks about the need to bring high-paying, blue-collar jobs back to America. SpaceX and Tesla are making that happen. To the best of my knowledge, they have created more manufacturing jobs in the US than just about any other American company over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine our nascent industrial renaissance succeeding without these companies.
SpaceX was started with the goal of putting humans on Mars. And along the way, they have massively improved life for many humans on Earth. Mars may be a starter planet, but Earth is our planet, and the technologies developed at SpaceX are already in use today connecting and safeguarding the people of Earth. Starlink is a really efficient way to bring internet to low-income countries. In Kenya’s remote Murang’a County, Starlink has made it possible for patients in rural villages to consult with medical specialists via telemedicine. In the rainforests of Brazil, Starlink has connected schools to reliable high-speed internet that will provide more educational opportunities to students. Here in America, Starlink has proven vital to emergency teams responding to natural disasters. During Hurricane Helene, the Starlink hubs dropped into North Carolina and East Tennessee were often the only contact point between cut-off towns and the outside world. Literally life-saving.
This IPO will be a big milestone for the company. It’s important to celebrate this, while also remembering that making humanity multi-planetary is the ultimate goal. Going to Mars is really hard. There have been many setbacks thus far, ranging from fiery explosions to failed landings. There will be many more. Ad Astra Per Aspera. But SpaceX is at its best *after* a setback imo. Their first 3 launches were “failures”. Had the 4th not succeeded, there might not be a SpaceX today. The company’s success in the face of such daunting odds is a testament to the resilience of the culture and absolute commitment to the mission shared by every employee I’ve ever spoken with. Some of the world’s most talented engineers have chosen to live in Airstreams at Starbase away from their families for weeks on end in service of this goal. I will never forget the welders who told me they signed every weld because they wanted to be accountable if they were responsible for a failure. True missionaries, all of them.
I am grateful to every single person at SpaceX for helping to make the future as inspirational as possible. And I will be even more grateful if I get to see a blue sunset on Mars!
More info on spacexipo.com
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Such a fun day with so many old friends.
Always a little sad to leave Starbase.
Per aspera much of the time so important to celebrate sometimes.
So grateful to everyone at SpaceX for helping to make the future awesome.
Excited for the next Starship launch. Ad Astra!
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Jun 12
Fun interview on a super exciting day
Jun 12
GAVIN BAKER: “A month ago, @SpaceX did not have a cloud computing business. Now by some measures, it is the fourth largest cloud ahead of Oracle — and they did that in 1 month. Let's see what they do in a year.
“A really important variable for SpaceX is how many gigawatts can they bring on over the next few years because they are monetizing these gigawatts of terrestrial compute at a very high rate.
“Then, when are we reusing Starship such that we could put Starlink V3 satellites up into space, enable direct to cell, and then orbital compute soon after?
“There is a path here as a as a public company, with a series of events and milestones that investors can use to track the company's progress.”
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Jun 12
Let’s see whether @MorganStanley or @GoldmanSachs is the first to post a photo of their traders or bankers wearing green shoes which was a @SpaceX mandate. Gotta keep it fun.
There might be a prize!
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Jun 12
Winner winner chicken dinner
Prize tbd
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Jun 11
Super fun chopping it up with Brad, Clark and my colleague Foxy.
BG2 w/ Gavin Baker. The SpaceX IPO, Fable 5 / Mythos, AI Capex Update & Market Check. 🚀💰 @BG2Pod @altcap @GavinSBaker @_clarktang
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Jun 9
Evidently prices will go up in about two weeks.
Also I preferred Mythos to Fable.
Fable makes me think of fabulist, which is not the best association.
Excited to try it!
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Jun 9
Super important post from @polynoamial and the investor TLDR is: all current estimates for compute demand might be low.
“We likely don't know what the capability ceiling is for modern LLMs because it's too expensive to measure.
Frequently when I discuss this, people ask why we don't just evaluate with a harness that pushes test-time compute until performance plateaus. The problem is that, empirically, the plateau is very far out. Sometimes we may not observe a plateau at all within practical budgets
Notice that for the stronger models the performance improvement over time is stronger. It seems likely that as models become stronger they become more effective at operating over longer horizons. The point of plateau is pushed out, and may even disappear.”
If test-time compute performance improvement over time *effectively* scales at some ratio with training…
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Jun 9
Original post:
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Jun 8
Really fun to interview my old friend Bret Johnsen in Mission Control.
Three parts of the @SpaceX story that I wish were more widely discussed:
SpaceX has created thousands of good blue-collar jobs: welders, machinists, electricians. Everyone talks about the need to bring high-paying, blue-collar jobs back to America. SpaceX and Tesla are making that happen. To the best of my knowledge, they have created more manufacturing jobs in the US than just about any other American company over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine our nascent industrial renaissance succeeding without these companies.
SpaceX was started with the goal of putting humans on Mars. And along the way, they have massively improved life for many humans on Earth. Mars may be a starter planet, but Earth is our planet, and the technologies developed at SpaceX are already in use today connecting and safeguarding the people of Earth. Starlink is a really efficient way to bring internet to low-income countries. In Kenya’s remote Murang’a County, Starlink has made it possible for patients in rural villages to consult with medical specialists via telemedicine. In the rainforests of Brazil, Starlink has connected schools to reliable high-speed internet that will provide more educational opportunities to students. Here in America, Starlink has proven vital to emergency teams responding to natural disasters. During Hurricane Helene, the Starlink hubs dropped into North Carolina and East Tennessee were often the only contact point between cut-off towns and the outside world. Literally life-saving.
This IPO will be a big milestone for the company. It’s important to celebrate this, while also remembering that making humanity multi-planetary is the ultimate goal. Going to Mars is really hard. There have been many setbacks thus far, ranging from fiery explosions to failed landings. There will be many more. Ad Astra Per Aspera. But SpaceX is at its best *after* a setback imo. Their first 3 launches were “failures”. Had the 4th not succeeded, there might not be a SpaceX today. The company’s success in the face of such daunting odds is a testament to the resilience of the culture and absolute commitment to the mission shared by every employee I’ve ever spoken with. Some of the world’s most talented engineers have chosen to live in Airstreams at Starbase away from their families for weeks on end in service of this goal. I will never forget the welders who told me they signed every weld because they wanted to be accountable if they were responsible for a failure. True missionaries, all of them.
I am grateful to every single person at SpaceX for helping to make the future as inspirational as possible. And I will be even more grateful if I get to see a blue sunset on Mars!
More info on spacexipo.com
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Jun 6
Quite a week for open-source AI. Especially American open-source. Nemotron 3 Ultra is the most important release in quite some time. And some really cool RL and fine-tuning work from Harvey.
Jun 5
Before the week ends, let's acknowledge one of the most INSANE week ever for open AI, with 25 notable open-weight drops across every modality:
🧠 LLMs
→ NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: 550B hybrid Mamba-MoE, only 55B active, 1M context, MMLU 89.1. NVFP4 variant claims ~5x throughput on Blackwell. First openly-weighted 550B hybrid Mamba-Transformer, closing the gap with frontier closed models.
→ Google Gemma 4 12B: fully open dense any-to-any (text/image/audio/video), 256k context, encoder-free, 140 languages, AIME 2026 at 77.5. Shipped with a 23-checkpoint QAT wave (mobile ONNX MLX). Most deployable model of the week.
→ StepFun Step-3.7-Flash: 198B sparse MoE VLM, ~11B active, SWE-Bench PRO 56.3. Apache 2.0.
→ Liquid AI LFM2.5-8B-A1B: edge MoE, just 1.5B active, 128k ctx, MATH500 88.8, MLX-ready. Best on-device option this week.
→ JetBrains Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Thinking: their first open MoE, near-Qwen3-14B coding at 2.5B active. Apache 2.0.
🎨 Image gen (the surprise of the week)
→ Ideogram 4: their FIRST-EVER open weights. 9.3B flow-matching DiT trained from scratch. #2 overall behind GPT Image 2, top open-weight model on Design Arena LMArena. Strongest open checkpoint for text-rich images, full stop. It has taste. Still can't believe this is open weights.
🔊 Audio & Speech (a breakout week for open TTS, 4 labs shipped)
→ Boson Higgs Audio v3 4B: 102 languages, 21 emotions, singing/whispering/shouting, sub-second TTFA.
→ RedNote dots.tts: the only fully continuous (no codec) open TTS pipeline, Apache 2.0.
→ Google Magenta RealTime 2: real-time music gen, <200ms latency, text audio MIDI. multimodalart ported it to PyTorch within hours with live ZeroGPU demos.
→ NVIDIA Nemotron-3.5 ASR: 600M streaming, 17x more concurrent streams vs Parakeet RNNT 1.1B.
👁️ Vision & VLMs
→ PaddleOCR-VL-1.6: SOTA document parsing at 1B params, Apache 2.0.
→ Baidu NAVA: 6.3B joint audio-video gen, best-in-class A/V sync, Apache 2.0.
🎬 Video, 3D & World Models
→ NVIDIA Cosmos3-Super: 64B omnimodal world model coupling action trajectories with video audio gen, for Physical AI.
→ JD JoyAI-Echo: up to 5-min multi-shot text-to-video on LTX-2.3.
→ ByteDance Bernini-R VAST TripoSplat (single-image-to-3D Gaussian splats, MIT).
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Jun 4
I believe I said “tough, flinty, disciplined” rather than stubborn.
I deeply admire TSM management and believe their capacity discipline, whether organic or self-imposed, is good for everyone.
We want a smoother for longer cycle. An overbuild and/or a bubble would be terrible.
We need to get C.C. on X!
Jun 4
$TSM CEO Pushes Back on @GavinSBaker, Clarifying That TSMC's Bottlenecks Are Organic, Not Self-Imposed
"When asked by a reporter, Gavin Baker, a technology investor who previously managed over $17 billion in assets at Fidelity and is now the chief investment officer at Atreides Management, described TSMC as being managed by a group of very stubborn and experienced people in their 70s who had personally witnessed Taiwan's semiconductor industry go from lagging behind Intel to gradually establishing itself as a global leader. Therefore, they were very clear about the cost of tech bubbles and crashes.
In response to the above statement, TSMC's CEO stated that Baker originally meant that TSMC was applying the brakes because AI would not become a bubble. A group of experienced seniors were applying the brakes. But to be honest, TSMC did not deliberately control it, nor did TSMC intend to apply the brakes. They may be a bit stubborn and old, but they really did not deliberately apply the brakes.
TSMC's CEO said that his company tried its best to increase production capacity for its customers, but who knew that the customers' businesses would grow so fast? The development since the launch of GPT in 2023 has far exceeded expectations. C.C. Wei also revealed that he asked NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang why he was so smart and hadn't told him earlier, but Huang replied that he didn't know either. No one, including TSMC, can predict this now, and all these demands are going to TSMC, which can't see it coming either.
C.C. Wei also stated frankly that TSMC has been increasing production, with more than a dozen construction sites underway in Taiwan."
It's actually interesting that Wei chose to discuss this narrative, and he specifically quoted Gavin's comments.
$NVDA
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Jun 2
Investing is a difficult, humbling job. Thank you for remembering.
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May 29
We need to change our policies on China and GPUs.
huaweicentral.com/we-are-tha…
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May 27
Tells you a lot about the reality of Chinese silicon IMO.
May 27
Fast, faster, Qwen. 🚀
Thrilled to see Qwen3.5 reaching a record-breaking 580 tps for agentic workloads on the TokenSpeed engine! This milestone wouldn't be possible without our incredible partners.
Huge thanks to @lightseekorg, @NVIDIAAI, the Mooncake team, and @tri_dao for the pioneering FA4 optimization. Together, we are pushing the boundaries of open-source LLM inference. 🤝✨
Dive into the full @PyTorch blog post below! 👇
pytorch.org/blog/up-to-580tp…
#Qwen #Qwen3_5 #TokenSpeed #LLM #Inference #AI #PyTorch #OpenSource #AgenticAI #HighPerformance
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May 27
Composer 2.5 being Pareto dominant in coding per CursorBench is important.
This is after only a few weeks of supplemental training and/or RL in the Colossus 2 cluster.
The 1.5 trillion parameter version of Grok will likely be a much better base model than Kimi. We shall see.
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May 23
Thoroughly enjoyed this discussion, especially the parts around SpaceX and Nvidia.
Anthropic being EBIT positive in the first quarter seems underappreciated re: the debate on “ROI on AI.”
Also curious to see what comes of Trump’s trip to China over time per @chamath commentary.
May 22
ALL-IN POD IS LIVE! 🚨
Massive show
Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) subs in for Sacks to talk:
-- Andrej Karpathy Joining Anthropic: Impact on the AI Race?
-- SpaceX S-1 Breakdown: The $2T Case, Elon Web Services, Datacenters in Space
-- Nvidia’s Big Beat and Shock Selloff
-- Why America Has Turned on AI
-- Trump Pulls AI Order
-- Market Update: Inflation, Bond Crisis?
-- Did the US-China Summit Flop?
(0:00) Gavin Baker joins the show!
(0:30) Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic; hypergrowth and profitability
(12:42) Why Americans have turned on AI, anti-human perception
(27:22) Trump pulls AI EO, US-China AI relationship, dystopian AI layoffs
(45:19) SpaceX S-1 tear down! Three major businesses and the case for $2T
(1:11:22) Nvidia smashes earnings but stock falls, why people are shorting chips
(1:22:25) Market update: Flashing red signals, oil, inflation, yields up
(1:32:45) China trip flops, or was progress made behind the scenes?
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