Hello everyone. Welcome back to SemiAnalysis Weekly. We've got our second guest ever on the program today. That's John from Asianometry. Top one YouTuber in the world. Uh, at least my favorite. Doug said it's top two, but we won't hold him to it. This week we're planning to talk about some big news and everybody leaving Google, uh, leaving Gemini hanging out to dry maybe, or just going to work on some of their passion projects now that they've spent their first 35 years in one job and had enough. Uh, the Chinese ban on transceivers, Elon pulling in his, uh, 1 trillion revenue forecast from 2031 to 2030, and maybe some DVDs. Uh, guys, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is, uh, it's weird. You're so professional compared to Transistor Radio.
We've grown up. It's so grown up, John.
Okay. I have a burning question for you, John. So, uh, one of the times when many people may have seen you talk is on the DoorDash podcast where a few years ago there was this like famous clip where you're sitting beside Dylan and you say, "Wait, wait, wait. We're assuming GPT-5 is going to be good. We've just assumed that." Do you remember this clip?
Okay. That was like a year and a half or two years ago. So now we're sitting in August 2026. Do you feel like GPT-5 was good? Did it surpass your expectations?
I mean, I think GPT-5 was, I think the concept of GPT-5 was, uh, was probably, was probably right in the sense that, like, was it good? Five itself probably wasn't that great as compared to others, but, you know, it kept going. And then I think, uh, when the really, when the agentic code stuff really hit, then everything hit the, you know, everything hit the pedal to the metal. So I was very impressed by that. So, um, you know, but what they said, you know, when I went on the, when I went on the pod, when I sat down on the pod, the first thing I thought to myself, I chugged like five cups of coffee, and I thought to myself, you know, it doesn't really matter if I'm accurate. As long as I'm entertaining, that's what matters.
Hopefully we can aim for that, uh, today as well. Entertaining and, uh, questionable accuracy. Doug, what do you think? So, this was October 2nd, 2024. I just looked it up when, uh, Dylan and John went on Torash's podcast and they talked about this stuff. Like, I kind of agree GPT-5 was a bit of a dud, but 5.2 and certainly now 5.6 is like mind-blowing two years later.
5.2 was ass too. I'll be honest. I think 5.2 was not very good.
Um, I think 5.6 is good.
The new, the new base, the new base model is good. 5.6 good. And also soon, soon six, six this week.
Yeah, the second six apparently is, is good.
Yeah, Doug is coming, as they say. Doug and, is John, I don't know if you know this, but Doug is the largest spud in the world.
Yeah, that's the name. That's how they named it. So it's like the Spud, the Spud model is the largest spud.
It's very... So the, the Doug pre-train is done. There's also rumors that it's going to be really good at writing, and I think that's pretty poetic that, uh, one of the models that finally really knows how to write some incisive commentary is going to be named Doug.
That's blazing. It's going to, it's going to, it's going to teach us a master class in, uh, in, in writing history. I'm looking forward to it.
Yeah. Hopefully it knows. It's not this, but it's that.
That's where Doug gets his, his edge. The, uh, references to like 1940s Taiwanese. Uh.
Well, you say that, but there's only the, only person who's probably better at it than me is John. And John's here. So John's like, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, 1955 semiconductors like, well, that doesn't, that doesn't exist. Semiconductors run around then." But then John's like, "Yeah, here's what a DVD player is." I was like, "What the hell?" So the only person in the world who goes deeper and more random, I think, is John.
I've always, I, I like, like Doug for like, you know, I've, I read this really weird book on Japanese history from the 1700s on the Mitsui family and I'm talking about it and then Doug's like, I read that first half, first half was great, second half was okay. Like this. I guess when it got into the modern like, eh, I don't really care, but yeah, the first half was pretty good, but yeah, well, no, you got that from Jordan though. We all got it from the same source though.
I had like, I picked it up from my, uh, when Japan ate their rich video, but I, I didn't, I skimmed through it. It wasn't like... It's a good, it's a narrative or it's too... No, it wasn't even narrative. It was really, really boring.
Yeah. So, this is Jordan Schneider of China Talk you're talking about. I think it's unlikely that anybody subscribed to somebody else's weekly doesn't know, um, Asian or China Talk, but in case they don't, clarifying that. Uh, interesting to get the take without Jordan on here, but John, what's your, what's your take on the Trump administration prepping to ban a bunch of Chinese data center components, including like transceivers, and then possibly banning humanoid robots as well, like the Unitree stuff we were talking about a few weeks ago on here?
You know, on one hand, you know, I'm generally of a, I'm, I'm generally more hawkish. I think we should be banning this stuff. You want to drive, you want to make sure that you don't have, you're not drive, you're not, uh, uh, driving revenue for people, for, for, for the Chinese. But on the other hand, I mean, they have the expertise and it's not exactly like the stuff is, um, I mean, I mean, you're very good, they're very quite good at like, once they read the, the letter of the law, it's pretty good to evade the letter of the law so you can to meet the letter of the law, so you evade the spirit of the law. And I think like, yeah, they're real followers.
Vietnam. Yeah, they're, they're real followers.
Yeah, Thailand. Thailand is actually a big, uh, big area. The other thing too, um, is unlike past bans, I think this is an example where Inolite, um, is actually better than the West. This is like, this is like us banning, like it's like inverse EVs, right? EVs they didn't have. I don't think they will have EUVs for some time, but, uh, when it comes to 1.6T, 16T transceivers. Um, yeah, maybe there's some components in the West, but the entire supply chain is primarily in China. So, this ironically is probably more painful for the Western companies to bear because the supply chain's already there. So, yeah.
And there's one thing that I, I feel like the Chinese are really, really good at, it's optics. It's, I have maybe it's the rare earth thing. Made the fact that a whole bunch of people study it. I don't know. [snorts]
Yeah, they're also good. They also made the optics in the iPhones like Sunny Lan or whatever, right? Those are the two, um, companies that make the lenses.
Yeah. I mean, they're also pretty a Chinese company, isn't it?
Ah, whoops. Sorry, it's Logans. It's the Chinese company. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I mean, they're also pretty good at humanoid robots, drones, solar panels. Now EVs, like I think there's a, a growing list of real technology where banning the best product in the world is what it takes to ban China from competing in the American market. Whereas in the past it was like you're banning cheap knockoff competitors who are trying to bleed their competitors dry. Now you're just like kind of losing the domestic manufacturing base because the manu... I guess that's, that's what I would guess.
The idea would just be kind of like, you know, you'd ban one side, you ban the, the import and then you, you raise up a domestic competitor. So I would imagine that the Americans have a good number of domestic competitors. Or if you really want to go 197, 1960 Japan, you kind of force the Chinese to enter a joint venture with the Americans if they want to enter that market. A 49, 45% joint venture and then IP transfer, baby.
You, you're, you're foreseeing Trump in a light industry coming soon.
I don't have to do a 50, a 51% to the Trump family. Yeah, it's actually really easy. Analy, if anyone is listening, you know, tip us for the idea.
Yeah, for us. But demand is not slowing down. So, uh, maybe biggest news story from this week was like everybody leaving Google. Um, Jeff Dean, Sanjay, Oriol, like a lot of, uh, there's news about Demis stepping down to become the chairman. Well, no, no, he's stepping up in theory because that's up the org structure, but, um, I mean Demis has been really focused on Isomorphic Labs, but some say that's, that's this is, that was, um, allegedly according to the investor bros, um, relatively well, uh, you know, kind of forecasted or like, you know, communicated beforehand. I think there is a real chance that Demis would be, could be the next CEO of Google. And so like I think Demis is, you know, failing upward as fast as possible. You know, that's in the spirit of, uh, Google.
Does he actually want to be CEO of a company? Like he, he doesn't seem to like the admin stuff, right? He looks like a scientist, scientist.
He's chief, he's chief scientist now that Jeff Dean's gone.
And he's, and he's currently CEO of Isomorphic Labs. As if chief scientist wasn't enough. Um, I mean the guy reportedly works insane hours. Like he'll just work a normal day, go home, have dinner, and then come back and just like read papers by himself in the office until 2:00 a.m. every night. This is like, isn't that how I work?
Why is this acceptable? Why are you saying this is unusual behavior?
It's Taiwanese behavior, bro. It's a Taiwanese. So he's got, he's got, he's got, he's works until he's got to work 18 hours a day.
He's got that fire in him.
Even if this is just like some, you know, story to gas him up, you do not hear the same story about Jensen or Zuckerberg or like anybody who fancies themselves a scientist who is also the CEO of a leading company. So I, I do think it would be a change from the current day-to-day to become CEO of Alphabet, I guess, and take over for Sundar. But maybe the, okay, the, the more important thing here is like, you know, Jeff Dean left, like the legend, employee number 30, MapReduce, Spanner, BigTable, TensorFlow, TPUs, like what, you know, he's an infrastructure guy, you know, he's just been focused so much on infrastructure that's... decided that, sorry, I'm not gonna go into that. No, um, I do think it's a big deal. Uh, I definitely think there is a lot of rumors that I don't like. I guess the thing is Jeff Dean's also at every conference, you know? He's like at every conference, man. He's like always on the speaking circuit. He's always talking about something. I feel like Jeff Dean is, uh, as you know, like the Chuck Norris of Google, like that's, that's his like rep, his reputation. And I think even if he was or was not working there day-to-day, I feel like you have to be a little sad for Google cuz that's like they just lost Chuck Norris, bro. Chuck Norris just died.
Yeah. This is right after losing John Jumper, right after losing Noam Shazeer, right after leaving Dave Silver. The prototype seems to be that these guys leave and then they raise money from a bunch of investors including Google Ventures and Google Ventures. Yeah. And then go buy a bunch of GPUs and do whatever they want. Maybe because they couldn't get compute allocation to pursue the ideas that they wanted to. I mean, you, you may be able to say Jeff Dean like was in this senior role and quite a public figure, but I don't think you can say the same for Koray or, um, Oriol [clears throat] or Sanjay. Like these were ostensibly the leads of Gemini. Like that's, I think that's pretty crazy that they all left. Um [laughter] like.
Well, can I say something though? Is this vibe, is like from a vibe, from a SF vibes perspective, is it surprising? Cuz, uh, you know, the, the joke is Gemini hasn't been a frontier model for a long time and now they definitely won't be. Um, you know, there's, uh, I guess I don't know, I guess you just like lose all the legends and you think how are they going to come back, but they do have a lot of compute, but I just, um, I don't know, everyone at GDM is not AI pilled, right? All the people who want to do the best AI don't work at Google. Uh, and I think that that's like an important mindset. I think it's part of it too is Google's not a startup, right? Google's maybe the largest bureaucratic organization in the world and OpenAI and Anthropic who are the best in the best are definitely kind of startups. I'm sure they're going to speedrun being a bureaucracy really quickly, but, you know, they have one job and one job only. It's like a be the best at AI versus Google is like we do ads and search and YouTube and billion surfaces every day. And then they're like, "Okay, well, how do we shove AI into all these different places?" But I don't know. I feel, I feel like it's poetically, poetically it makes a lot of sense to me.
Um, my hottest take, or not even hottest take, it's actually pretty mild. Google has an L culture and has never actually made anything inside, internally. They've only ever acquired all their innovation. Number one, and their execution is very, is very poor and they were also terrible at go-to-market until TK got GCP. But like, just seriously, let's do some accounting. Everything other than core search has been purchased. YouTube, uh, uh, what we call it, AdMob, DoubleClick, AdSense.
I'll help you make it by saying Android.
Yeah, but Android. Yeah, all these guys.
Not true. This is not true, man. They didn't, they didn't acquire Maps. They didn't, they didn't acquire Maps.
They acquired Maps. They map about it. They, they bought the team that... Dude, there's a whole book about this, man.
They did not acquire Maps. They add, they added positions after they started.
They effectively acquired Maps. There's a whole book about this.
Okay. [gasps] Didn't you just say that Doug is the guy who has the book? They also did not acquire GCP which was like the crux of your argument that they have.
They acquired TK who then made GCP good. They also, to be clear, they invented half of the concepts of GCP and then they were last place despite being pretty close to the front, you know, showing up at the beginning of the, uh, of the line and then out, you know, underexecuting to be last place. So, I just think like Google has... acquire TPUs. Did they acquire Kubernetes?
No. T... Okay, so I'll give him TPU. I'll give him TPU. How's that sound? I'll give him TPU. Um, how generous of... Yeah, you're welcome. How, how nice of me. Um, no, but, uh, I think the thing is like there are these companies that are like known for their research and they never execute on the... Bell Labs that comes up and like Bell Labs they make a bunch of science. No, but they literally make a bunch of science stuff and they literally get it, they get, uh, massively disrupted by it in the end.
Bro, uh, the first, uh, digital camera was made by Kodak.
Okay, dude. Who invented the transistor and gave it to everyone?
Exactly, dude. It makes so much sense that Google is going to invent the transformer and then get like giga, giga screwed as it proceeds to like just lose and become a TPU. I mean like... proceeds to lose and be the third most valuable in a company, company in the world with a market cap of $4.3 trillion. Lose to who? Lose to Nvidia.
There's, there's a short was the biggest company in the world in 1982. It's so, from a, from a technology perspective, I think to me there's these moments, these important branches in a, to be clear, this is not saying it's a bad stock or bad company. They're going to make a crap ton of money, but there's these important branches in a, in like an innovative technologies company where they start to become, you know, financialized and they say, "Hey, let's do the, let's do the way we make money and like stop doing the, like pursuing technology." You can argue this is like Intel giving up at mobile. You can argue when IBM effectively, IBM had systemic problems, but honestly IBM's vibes are very similar to Google when they were, you know, they're like, "Yeah, no, no. We're not going to do all this new stuff. We're not going to do PC. We're going to focus on mainframe, right?" They're going to do what they did and then they will proceed to lose. And to be clear, IBM had like effectively 90% market share in 1950. Like there are these points in a company's history and if I, I feel like today more than any other point I think Google has that opportunity where the, they're like, okay, we're going to all in on TPUs. We're going to become an infrastructure company. We're going to do good enough. We're going to have a good enough product on the transformer, but they're probably not going to stay for the next and the next and the next and then they'll quietly bow out. And then when we look back in 5, 10, 20 years and, and, and look like, oh, what was the moment that they like, where things like, where things started to, to change, it's like right now. But to be clear, I think that it's really good for the stock in the short run and medium run, honestly.
