About this episode

Leslie D'Monte speaks with Neil Thompson about the economics driving the AI revolution and the challenges ahead.

PARTNERED Artificial Intelligence is advancing faster than ever—but can this pace continue? In this episode of Techcetra partnered with  @salesforce  , Leslie D'Monte speaks with Neil Thompson, Director of the FutureTech Research Project at MIT, to explore the economics driving today's AI revolution. While recent breakthroughs have transformed what AI can do, Neil explains that much of this progress has come from scaling compute—using more GPUs, more power and larger investments. But is that model sustainable? What happens when compute demand outpaces supply? The conversation dives into the economics of AI, chip shortages, NVIDIA's dominance, large language models, small language models, Agentic AI, AI in scientific research, digital labour, and the future of AI infrastructure. Neil also shares his perspective on India's AI ambitions, semiconductor manufacturing, local language models and why continuously improving smaller models may be a smarter long-term strategy. In this episode: Why we're living through AI's "golden age" The economics behind AI scaling Why chip shortages could continue for years Compute vs algorithmic innovation LLMs vs SLMs The rise of Agentic AI…

People in this episode

Host: Leslie D'Monte

Guest: Neil Thompson

Topics covered

• economics of AI
• AI scaling
• chip shortages
• NVIDIA dominance
• AI in scientific research
• India's AI ambitions
• semiconductor manufacturing

Keywords

• AI
• chips
• compute demand
• large language models
• Agentic AI
• digital labour
• semiconductors
• NVIDIA
• AI infrastructure

Sponsors

Salesforce

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MIT, NVIDIA

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