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The King of Chicago Trading Wants to Build a GPU Market Bigger Than Oil

34m 25s

The King of Chicago Trading Wants to Build a GPU Market Bigger Than Oil

The transcription includes segments from different sources, highlighting Palantir's approach to AI that enhances workers' abilities rather than replacing them. Michelle Hussein's show is promoted as a platform for essential conversations with influential personalities. Don Wilson discusses the growing significance of GPUs in AI and trading, emphasizing the potential for GPUs to become a major commodity. The conversation delves into market standardization, the development of GPU futures, and challenges related to cloud computing and trading platforms. The exchange also touches upon the importance of deterministic matching engines in trading, potential market participants, and the role of neoclouds in the evolving landscape of GPU trading.

Transcription

6141 Words, 34420 Characters

You're being sold an AI future where you're obsolete or irrelevant. That vision is wrong. At Palantir, they're building AI that helps workers and unlocks their full potential. American workers are our nation's greatest strength. AI shouldn't eliminate them. It should elevate them. Palantir is here to tell their stories. From factories to hospitals, AI is freeing people from drudgery, letting them do what humans do best. Create, solve, build. Palantir, making Americans irreplaceable. Hello and welcome. This is the Michelle Hussein show. I'm Michelle Hussein. I speak with people like Elon Musk. I think I've done enough. And Shonda Rhimes. That's so cute. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me. Listen and subscribe to the Michelle Hussein show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcasts. You certainly ask interesting questions. Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News Hey there, OddLots listeners. You are about to get a conversation with Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW, sometimes called the smartest man in trading. This was recorded live on stage at Chicago's Untitled Supper Club. We had a blast and we hope you'll enjoy the show. All right, Don. Well, thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. Great to be here. Truly the perfect guest to talk about what's next in trading. But just to begin with, why GPUs? Well, obviously, AI is becoming more and more useful. And as it becomes more useful, people use more of it, which means they need to use more GPUs to run in France or train new models. And I actually have this theory that within the next 10 years, the world will spend more per year on GPUs than it does on crude oil. And that would, of course, make GPUs compute the largest commodity in the world. So it seems like you would kind of need a market for that. A very modest call. Just the largest market in the world. Yeah, it's funny because, you know, I associate oil often coming out of, you know, sandy deserts. But now they're literally turning the sand via chips into the commodity itself or like breathing life into the sand. Just to back up, I have a million questions about this. For those who don't know, why don't you give us the sort of, you know, the 30-second or the 45-second description of what you do or what DRW is? Yeah. So I started off standing in the trading pit in Chicago in the Eurodollar Option pit, yelling and screaming. And then I would go home and write code on my Macintosh computer and build models. And essentially, you know, I don't stand in the pit and yell and scream anymore. Most of the pits are gone. But we kind of do the same thing now with computers. I heard a story that you were once on vacation with your family and you were in Italy, I think in Florence. And instead of, I don't know, eating gelato or something like that, you decided to invent a new Greek letter for derivatives trading. So this is cool. Yeah. So here, I mean, you're confusing two stories. So actually what happened was there was a new exchange that had launched an interest rate swap futures contract. It was called IDCG. And I looked at the contract and I figured out that actually they had not designed the contracts properly. And so although they were telling everybody that it was economically equivalent to a regular interest rate swap, it wasn't because it had this additional convexity bias in it, which is we could talk about convexity bias. It goes even more in the weeds than a lot of your podcasts go into. But so when I was in Florence, I had this idea of how you could create an interest rate swap futures contract without this convexity bias problem. And that is what I focused my time on there. What was the letter? So back to the letter, the letter was about after a really unpleasant period in the Eurodollar option pit where all the market makers lost tons of money because the shape of the skew shifted dramatically as the Fed started hiking in a very predictable manner. And nobody had really developed a measure for linear skew. And so during the week, I said, well, this isn't that much fun. We're losing a lot of money every day. But the good news is that that means we have something to learn. And so I spent the weekend working with the Quants and we came up with kind of a measure of the linear skew between the calls and puts and decided to use the Greek letter psi to describe it. And so by Monday morning, we had put it into the risk and onto the sheets. And before the open, I explained to the traders how to talk about it, how to use language around it. And before you know it, we had made the money back because we were able to trade, manage this risk better than anybody else because we had a whole language around it. Amazing. So we've established your street cred when it comes to solving problems in contracts for financial instruments. If I think about a GPU future or something like that, the first problem that comes to my mind is standardization because of course, all different types of chips, different types of memory, different latency, I guess. How do you go about addressing that? So that's a great question. And right now, so what we've done is we set up two companies. One is called Compute Exchange, not very creatively named. We have a tendency to do that. DRW is your initials, right? That was my trading badge. And yes, also my initials. Yeah. I mean, we did better later on with Cumberland, our crypto trading arm. That was actually a reference to the Grateful Dead song about the Cumberland mines. Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that either. Yeah. One of my partners who does the more creative naming came up with that one. He's a dead fan. Anyway, the other company is called Silicon Data. And Silicon Data's job is to create indices that will become tradable, will be viable to have futures contracts listed on them. And right now, they've created an number of different ones, but one is the H100 index, another one is the A100 index. And believe it or not, those indices are both available on Bloomberg. Oh, amazing. That's a love hearing that. If we were in the studio, I would already be looking up the chart as you were talking about it. Who are the natural participants? Because when I think about AI or training, you know, imagine someone goes to one of the big cloud vendors and they sign a long-term contract or whatever. Who are the participants who would be better off in an environment where there was a liquid market for compute? So what we found, and DRW actually uses compute exchange source compute. And we find that because there are something like 70 different cloud providers that participate, you can often get better pricing. And one of the things that you can do is you can specify, let's say that you're an AI company and you know roughly what kind of cluster you want. You can specify that. You can even say, you know what, I'm indifferent between locations or, you know, if it's in the Middle East, I'm still okay with it, but I want to pay 20 cents per GPU or less. Whatever it is, you can kind of express your preference curve. Compute exchange can conduct an auction and then, you know, find the kind of best price compute that matches your needs. So that's kind of the idea of how it works. And, you know, it probably doesn't work if you want a 10,000 cluster monster for doing a huge training run. But for inference, it works great. Or for smaller training runs, it works really well. Is the broader impact the idea that once you establish a liquid market where people can, you know, presumably hedge their exposure, that that would bring down the cost of capital? So that's right. So once you have a liquid market, then you have much more confidence in the indices. And you can then list futures contracts. And so what does that do? It enables the neoclouds that are going out, raising capital, buying a bunch of GPUs, putting them in data centers and kind of hoping that they can rent them out and not really knowing what they're going to be able to rent them out for six months from now, let alone two years from now. So a neocloud could buy the GPUs, sell a strip of futures contracts. And I envision that these will be traded kind of like electricity futures, where there's one for every month. And if you want to hedge the next three years, you sell 36 of them. And now you've locked in your pricing. Obviously, their cost of capital is going to go down, which in turn should make GPUs more readily available. And then on the flip side, if you're running an AI company and you raise a finite amount of dollars, and you kind of know how much training you're going to do, but you don't know exactly what configuration you can go ahead, buy the compute in the derivatives market. And then once you have a clear view on exactly what configuration you want, then you can swap those derivatives for actual compute. Talk to us a little bit more about this sell side. So we have these big clouds, the ones that everybody knows, and then you mentioned the neoclouds. Do you see that changing? What do you see as the future mix of cloud vendors in the future? So that is a great question. I think that the whole space is going to grow, but that the AWS, GCPs of the world will make up a smaller percentage of the whole. Okay. That's my guess. But how come? Because there is such proliferation of other companies buying GPUs and deploying them. Okay. That's a good answer. You know, Joe asked you who would be the natural market participants for this. I'm going to ask you the opposite question. Who wouldn't want this? Because I think of some of the hyperscalers, they seem to like controlling the GPU supply and maybe squeezing some of their competitors. Would you expect resistance from them? Yeah. I mean, I think the hyperscalers benefit from opaque pricing and kind of bundled pricing. And of course, they would prefer to have all the GPUs. But NVIDIA wants… I would also prefer to have all the GPUs. Yeah. Yeah. That's always a good thing. But I think NVIDIA wants the GPUs to be widely distributed. And they're really the ones that make the call. This isn't the first time that there's been an attempt to create futures markets out of technology. I think there's been multiple efforts decades ago to like DRAM futures. Yeah. It doesn't seem that fundamentally different. Although maybe it is, why did those fail? Like when you think about like what's going to be different at this time, what was the failure that caused like why didn't DRAM futures take off? So the thing about DRAM was that the price just kept on going down. So in a very predictable way. And so why would you want to buy a futures contract if you know the price and the future is going to be lower? Whereas GPUs, we've certainly gone through periods where GPU demand was super high. And then we've gone through a period where there was kind of some excess supply. So there's not a consistent trajectory of pricing? I think that there will be a consistent trajectory lower in terms of, I don't know, however you want to measure it, dollars per flop or dollars per token. I think that that's going to continue to decline. But you know, and each 100 is going to be a useful GPU for a very long time. And over its life, I think there will be periods where there's more demand, less demand, and you know, a little bit more cyclicality and less predictability. So I know that the Trump administration has said that they want this market to happen, right? So you seem to have some regulatory, I guess, tailwind behind you. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that this is a controversial thing. I think that it's pretty clear that once we figure out the right index construction and have kind of sufficient data that I don't think the CFTC would complain about the product. Silicon Valley is selling you a future where you're obsolete or worse, identical. At Palantir, they're witnessing something different and revolutionary, from reindustrializing the nation's defense base to shipyard workers building faster and frontline workers boosting productivity. AI is transforming work across the nation. AI is not replacing American workers or flattening them into conformity. It's unleashing what makes each one irreplaceable, their judgment, their craft, their creativity. When American workers become more powerfully themselves, they own the future. Palantir, making Americans irreplaceable. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mall, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are, like, totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. This is a little bit of a sideways question from your attempt to build this market. But speaking of the cloud, in your main business at DRW, I assume you're sort of major customers or users of the CME. Are you excited about the CME's migration of its back end to Google Cloud? Because they tout it. They talk about their partnership with Google, et cetera. As a client or customer, are you enthusiastic about this move? We interviewed Terry earlier today, and he was excited for sure. Yeah, so it depends on what you put into the cloud. And it's totally fine to put a lot of things into the cloud. But the thing that you don't want to put into the cloud is a matching engine. And the reason for that is you want the matching engine to be as deterministic as possible. So that means that if you send two orders into the matching engine, one, let's say, a couple of microseconds behind the other one, you want the one that gets there first to be filled every time. And if you put stuff into the cloud, it's very hard to make that happen. You wind up getting a wide distribution around which order will be filled first. And even as you stretch those times out, you could have an order that comes in maybe a couple milliseconds later be filled first. That is super disruptive for liquidity providers. And it means that the liquidity in the market is going to suffer. But you say it's not ideal for them to have a matching engine in the cloud, but this is the direction it's going in. Yeah. And it's unclear exactly which part of the matching engine will be in the cloud. Is it some kind of a dual structure? I don't know. But that's what matters is a deterministic matching engine. I mean, if Google can figure out how to make a matching engine in the cloud deterministic, go for it. I'm very skeptical that that's even possible. Can you just describe the sort of theoretical problem? What is it about cloud computing that makes this particular problem the deterministic aspect difficult as opposed to traditional infrastructure? Well, when you have on-prem computers, it's all right there. You can control where the wires go. And so when it's in the cloud, it's a little bit more, well, nebulous, I guess. It's just harder to do. That's a good pun. I admire it. So you mentioned that you have this long and storied career in the trading industry starting from old school trading. And now we're here talking about GPU trading and what's in the cloud and what works and what doesn't. Tell us what your company, what DRW is actually doing when it comes to practical application of AI. This is a question we're asking everyone. We ask all companies to spill all their proprietary secrets about AI. Exploding the engineers. We know that they're generating code. We know people are coding. Yes, we know that they're using cloud code or whatever. So besides the engineer. That's kind of the boring answer. And then the other thing is then when we ask this question, people cite a bunch of machine learning things. Which has been here for a while. So let's talk about actual AI. So I think that the way that we make trading decisions is going to change dramatically. And it already is. You can use AI to interact with your proprietary data, your proprietary models, and suggest trades. That's pretty cool. Are you doing that right now? Yeah. So we're starting to do that. But we have some tools that kind of do that now. And the other thing that's really interesting is to fiddle around with agents and have different agents interact. And so you could kind of think about maybe you have a couple different analysts, AI analysts, that both work on some stock. And then you have kind of a risk-taking agent or maybe a couple different risk-taking agents that interact with those analysts and then come up with trades based on that. So I mean, that's a little bit of a theoretical concept. But I don't think we're that far away from things like that. Just on the cloud trading a little bit more, I am really interested in this topic. What is the current state today, just so that we understand where you're at? What is today's snapshot of usage of the platforms? I mean, as far as where the matching engines are? No, no, no, no, no, sorry. On the GPU trading, how are we going to visit right now? Where is the state of the business? I think last month, we conducted five or six auctions. So it's early, but it's happening. So when I think about how futures contracts are born, it's usually bespoke options and then you get the index, I guess, and then you get a forward and then a future. That's kind of how I think about it in my head. Is that the process that you imagined for this? Not necessarily. I think that the simplest, I mean, yeah, I suppose you could do some privately negotiated compute swap or something, and maybe that will happen first. But I think the first thing is a futures contract that settles to an index. If the spot market becomes really liquid and you have very standardized auctions, and one of the things that you asked about was, well, how do you deal with the lack of standardized, and so one thing is you go to a certain type of GPU, H100, for instance. But even within that, you can configure them in different ways. You could use InfiniBand, you could use some other way of connecting them. And so what's important is you need to decide on some benchmark. And one of the things that Silicon Data has done is they've actually built some measurement tools that measure how fast a GPU cluster is. And so you can then say, okay, well, in order for this GPU to be kind of eligible to be in the index, it needs to meet a certain standard. And there are a couple of different vectors you can measure by. So I think that that's kind of how you would do it. And then if you got very liquid auctions, you could actually have a futures contract that cash settles to the auction price. And then people could have the option of either essentially just cash settling their derivative and walking away, or cash selling their derivative and participating in the auction. And they would know that price would transfer from one thing to another. That might be a future state of the world. And the initial state is probably just a generic index and the futures cash settle to the index. What would a market failure look like in GPU trading? Because your analogy is the oil market, and weird stuff happens in the oil market. Could we get negative GPU prices? Or if everyone wakes up one day and decides they want to use chat GPT as their psychotherapist or whatever, some people are doing, could you have a GPU shortage where maybe people can't deliver into the contract? There are lots of ways that markets can break and go wrong. And I remember to this day that when oil futures went negative, it was during COVID, I was sitting at home, I was trading oil futures, and I bought oil futures for negative prices. You were one of the ones who actually got it, still amazing. What was that, 2021? So yeah, my then 14-year-old said to me, "Please, please, please, I want to buy negative priced futures contracts." And I said, "Well, you have no way of taking delivery of the oil." And he said, "I will go to Cushing, Oklahoma and figure out how to do it." You've really raised a son, daughter, son. He's been learning. We have an episode about taking physical possession of oil. I do not recommend it. Turns out if you keep it on your desk for long enough, it evaporates into the atmosphere and poisons your colleagues. Yeah. Anyway, a little bit of a tangent. So I think on the upward trajectory, if there's tons of demand, that's something that commodity markets are really good at dealing with. The price will go up and more supply will come in, and I think that's all good. On the downward side, you can always just turn the GPUs off. So I don't think they trade negative. How much of the volatility, when you anticipate market volatility and the price of GPUs, how much is that embedded electricity cost? So when you buy compute, you're buying the chip, but also the power. How much of that volatility will be the power? So the industry lingo that's used is total cost of ownership, and what percentage of the total cost of ownership is the power price. And for an H100, it's less than 15%. Less than 15. Okay. So GPU trading, obviously one of the things you're working on, but you're a busy guy and you've got other stuff up your sleeve. What are you doing in the realms of tokenized trading? So that is an area that we're super excited about. And we've been thinking about this for a very long time. So in 2012, when we started talking about Bitcoin at DRW, and there were a number of traders at DRW that were very excited about Bitcoin. You were very early into it. 2012 was still pretty early. Very early. Yeah. So we were having these discussions of why is this interesting? Is it interesting? What about it is interesting? And we came away with the following thesis. There's some small chance that Bitcoin could be digital gold. I don't know. Call it 1%. It's kind of an interesting product. So we should probably make markets in it. So we set up Cumberland as the... And we didn't call it DRW because at the time, everybody knew that anybody trading crypto was obviously a crook. So we wanted to kind of separate the brand a little bit. But the other thing was this idea that you could move value instantaneously in a trustless ecosystem was super interesting to me. And I said, wow, if you could do that in traditional financial markets, that would make the market so much better, so much more resilient. And so we should really figure out how to do that. So we started a company called, again, not very creatively named, Digital Asset Holdings, which created the Canton blockchain. Initially, the Canton blockchain was a private permissioned chain, but last summer it actually became a public chain. And that chain was designed specifically with tokenization of traditional financial instruments in mind. So it has a couple of characteristics. One is it has configurable privacy. And believe it or not, for people who are in the finance business, they don't want to broadcast to the entire world when they are buying or selling something. I mean, obviously, if it's above the reporting thresholds, you do. So that was kind of a fundamental characteristic of this chain. It's different than Ethereum or Solana or any of these other things where if you tokenize something and put it on top, and you move it around, everybody sees it move around. So that's kind of something we've been working on for quite a while. How big could this get? Like, could it swallow everything? Could you imagine a world in which given any financial instrument, a stock, a bond, etc., that it all sort of ends up on chain? Yeah, I think that everything will be on chain. Wow. By when? Give us a year. No, I'm always way too early on this stuff. But I think in the next five years, really, all of these instruments will be on chain. Okay, that's good. Primarily on chain. We will have a live episode in 2013. We'll come back to Chicago. We'll revisit that question. [Music] The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day, in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mall, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are, like, totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Is the idea with tokenized assets also that you could use that for collateral management and use it as a way to move collateral? 100%. And so, everybody's talking about moving to 24/5 or 24/7 markets. And if you want to do that, it's really important to be able to move collateral 24/5 or 24/7. And move variation margin 25/5 or 24/7. And so, yes, that is a very important use case. So speaking of very exciting, sexy topics in trading, right after you, we're going to be speaking with Tarik Mansour of Kalshi. And so prediction markets are super hot. Where are you at with them? Is DRW making markets in any of these, in any of the spaces right now? So a million years ago, we actually made markets in prediction markets. I think it was, I don't know, in trade or something. And it never went anywhere. Nobody cared. And I always thought prediction markets should be a thing. Everybody should care. But nobody did. And then Auger came out and I was like, oh, this is really cool. This is going to take off and nobody cared. And so it's taken a long time. So at this point, we use it as a reference price, obviously during the election. It was super helpful to use that as a gauge of-- Oh, so you were actually using that? Because we hear stories about institutional investors maybe finding prediction markets useful, perhaps. But you were looking at it. We were definitely looking at it. We were not using it as a hedge. And it was funny, Shane messaged me and said, hey, it's up on Bloomberg now. And I was like, oh, that's awesome, Shane. The Shane Copeland from Polymark. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But currently, do you foresee, are you going to enter? Not either in making markets on some of these exchanges, and would you get into the sports contracts? I mean, so we're not here. I think it's highly likely that we'll start trading some of the prediction markets. Some of our competitors already trade in the sports markets pretty actively. We don't. So it's not necessarily a natural fit, but I don't have a religious opposition to it. Would there be different considerations for trading in a prediction market versus a traditional financial asset? Are there different things you have to think about, either in terms of pricing the trade or maybe risk management? Well, I think it depends on what the prediction market is. I mean, if you're trading a prediction market on, I don't know, whether somebody will throw a rubber object onto a WNBA court, then I mean, that's something that people in the audience can control. And so it seems like providing liquidity in that you would be at a disadvantage. That was a very particular example, by the way. I was going to go with Taylor Swift getting married, but you went with that one. Well, these are markets that people can directly intervene on. Directly impact. This is true. As opposed to, for instance, anti-social behavior. That's right. And as opposed to, will the Fed cut 25 or 50 or stay on hold? I mean, you can trade that in SOFR. You can trade that in the Fed funds futures. There are some binaries you can trade. And so the prediction market version of that is totally fits in with the risk that we already trade. So we mentioned in the intro, there's going to be this big meeting in DC next week. And we just happened to sort of catch a bunch of the participants. When you look at the landscape for these new futures platforms, because that's what they are, right? The CME, has regulation been part of their dominance? Has regulation made it harder for other entrants to cut into CME margins or volumes? So I'm trying to ask questions that are going to create some tension around the table next week. Yeah. So here, I mean. Oh yeah, you should hear what Terry said about Howard Lutnick. It'll be on the clock. I'm sure I can probably repeat it without having heard it. So once you have a liquid market in something, it becomes a natural monopoly. It's very hard to move that to a different venue. It's happened before. I was living in London in the mid-90s. And the Bund Futures were on the floor of the life. It was this huge trading pit with a bunch of guys pushing and shoving. And over the course of 12 months, the DTB, now called the Urex, was able to move the entire Bund Futures complex onto the computer on a different exchange. Now, I mean, they gave hefty incentives to people. I think they went to all the German banks and they said, "Don't you dare trade on life anymore?" So it's possible. But I think that these things are generally, I don't think that it's really a regulatory issue that causes them to be sticky. I think it's more just kind of a natural state of affairs. Network effect, I guess. So our theme for this evening is obviously the future of trading. And one of the things that seems to be happening is the sort of intermingling of professional and retail trading. And we, again, talked about that with Terri. I'm sure we're about to talk about it with the Kalshi CEO. But from your perspective, and again, you started this career back when, I don't think there were any retail traders doing day trading, really. How has that changed the way you think about trading? And can you envision a future where, I don't know, AI fires all of us and we're all going to be just day trading from home as an insurance policy? Robinhood is really a full employment program. Maybe, for US workers. Yeah, so I mean, that is a thesis that I have heard is that what's happening is a bunch of relatively successful people are losing their jobs and they're retiring. But in their retirement, they decide to just manage their portfolios on Robinhood. And so there's this surge in trading activity that wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. And it's only going to grow from here. And I don't know, maybe that's right. It feels to me like culturally. Because you're talking about why have prediction markets taken off when they've been around for over 20 years. I think I first heard about them in like 2002 or 2003. They've suddenly taken off. There was never a bright line between what's gambling and what's sort of hedging or what's trading. But that's clearly whatever line that is just feels like it's completely collapsing. Is this good? Do you have an opinion? And I don't know if any of our opinions matter on the question because it feels like culturally we're entering this world where everything will be tradable on any app. And you're going to see a price for Gold Futures right next to one day, the line on a football match, et cetera. Is it, do we want this world? So I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. But I am a little bit confused about whether prediction markets and sports are actually consistent with what the commodity exchange act says is permissible. And so I know that your next guess is benefits from his ability to list these contracts. And I don't know if the CFTC is just kind of asleep. And I know they're kind of understaffed now. Or maybe they've decided that actually these are economically important transactions that are consistent with the CEA. It's unclear to me. All right. Well, we're going to have to leave it there. But Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. That was our conversation with DRW founder and CEO, Don Wilson, recorded live on stage in Chicago. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stull Work. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armand Daschelbenet, at Dashbot, at Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks. For more OddLots content, go to bloomberg.com/oddlots with the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our discord, discord.gg/oddlots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we do these live shows, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Are you looking for a new podcast about stuff related to money? Well, today's your lucky day. I'm Matt Levine. And I'm Katie Greifeld. And we are the hosts of Money Stuff, the podcast. Every Friday, we dive into the top stories about Wall Street, finance, and other stuff. We have fun, we get weird, and we want you to join us. You can listen to Money Stuff, the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. you

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Palantir focuses on AI that elevates workers and unlocks their potential, not making them obsolete.
  2. Michelle Hussein hosts a show featuring conversations with prominent figures like Elon Musk and Shonda Rhimes.
  3. Don Wilson, CEO of DRW, discusses the increasing importance of GPUs for AI applications and trading.
  4. The discussion covers topics such as market standardization, GPU futures, and the impact on cloud computing.

Summary:

The transcription includes segments from different sources, highlighting Palantir's approach to AI that enhances workers' abilities rather than replacing them. Michelle Hussein's show is promoted as a platform for essential conversations with influential personalities. Don Wilson discusses the growing significance of GPUs in AI and trading, emphasizing the potential for GPUs to become a major commodity.

The conversation delves into market standardization, the development of GPU futures, and challenges related to cloud computing and trading platforms. The exchange also touches upon the importance of deterministic matching engines in trading, potential market participants, and the role of neoclouds in the evolving landscape of GPU trading.

FAQs

Palantir uses AI to help workers unlock their full potential and elevate them in various industries.

The Michelle Hussein show features essential conversations to make sense of the world, with guests like Elon Musk and Shonda Rhimes.

GPUs are crucial for AI as their usage is increasing due to the growing utility of AI, leading to higher demand for GPUs.

Compute Exchange allows users to specify their computing needs and conduct auctions to find the best-priced compute resources.

A liquid market for compute can bring down the cost of capital, making GPUs more accessible and enabling effective risk hedging.

Hyperscalers may resist the idea as they benefit from opaque pricing and control over GPU supply.

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