Who will profit from AI remains unclear, as Weisenthal and hosts debate bottlenecks and productivity

The participants questioned who will ultimately capture the profits from the AI boom: labs, chipmakers, or companies in other industries. Joe Weisenthal said there was no obvious consensus. He also responded positively to the hosts’ speculative idea that some in tech might support restrictions on data-center construction and computing capacity to create a supply bottleneck and push prices higher. This was presented as a theory, not an established fact.

One host argued that the AI investment thesis requires a major capabilities jump soon. He said agents had helped renew market optimism, but that, in his assessment, Anthropic’s growth had decelerated in the third quarter while remaining very rapid. He also relayed Elon Musk’s argument for focusing on a massive increase in computing supply without worrying too much about demand; the host said that strategy could prove successful, but did not present that outcome as certain.

The discussion included a retelling of an assessment by Torsten Slok of Apollo: the “Magnificent Seven” companies are seeing positive returns from AI, while many S&P 500 companies outside tech have a harder time increasing revenue or replacing jobs with AI. The participants also discussed the lack of consensus on AI’s potential productivity impact. Weisenthal said it is difficult to isolate the effects of the internet and mobile phones in productivity charts. He suggested that some of the recent U.S. productivity advantage might reflect layoffs and a stronger economy than Europe’s, rather than AI; he also acknowledged that he had not examined the Financial Times chart that had been mentioned.