How Does Claude 4 Think? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken

Bullish:

• $AIAGENTS - The future of AI development will focus on efficiently deploying and launching multiple agents rather than individual agent capabilities.

  • “One prediction I have is that we're gonna move away from can an agent do x y z and more towards can I efficiently deploy launch a hundred agents”

    Trenton·1:33:29
• $AICOMPUTE - AI is expected to achieve superhuman performance in scientific areas with clear feedback loops, driving demand for AI compute capabilities.

  • “I expect scientific areas where you are able to put it in a feedback loop to have eventually superhuman performance.”

    Sholto·1:33:22
• $SOFTENG - AI-powered software engineering agents are expected to match the productivity of junior engineers within a year.

  • “I really do think end of this year, sort of like this or this time next year, we have software engineering agents that can do close to a day's worth of work, for, like, a junior engineer”

    Sholto·2:35
• $SEMIS - Significant growth in semiconductor demand is expected due to increasing AI compute capabilities, with projections suggesting AI chips could match human brain processing power.

  • “By 2028, there's gonna be a hundred million. But if you there's been estimates that an h 100 has the same amount of flops as the human brain.”

    Sholto·1:19:21
• $ENERGY - As AI becomes a crucial input for economies, energy demand is expected to increase significantly to support AI infrastructure.

  • “If intelligence becomes this, like, incredibly valuable input, like, intelligence becomes almost a raw input into the economies and quality of life of future, the thing directly underneath that is energy.”

    Sholto·2:02:28
• $COMPUTE - Strategic investments in compute infrastructure, including data centers, are expected to become increasingly important for countries to support AI development.

  • “So having some, guaranteed amount of compute, I think, will actually be quite important. So, like, pre getting ahead of investments in, like, data centers and this kind of stuff on the condition that it's, like, companies in your country Yeah. Have to be allowed to to use that compute.”

    Sholto·1:58:46
• $SOLAR - Solar energy is expected to play a crucial role in meeting the increased energy demands of AI-driven economies, with potential for significant expansion of solar panel installations.

  • “If intelligence becomes this, like, incredibly valuable input, like, intelligence becomes almost a raw input into the economies and quality of life of future, the thing directly underneath that is energy. And so making sure you have, like, you know, incredible amounts of solar, like, tile the desert solar panels on, you know, some parts of the desert in solar panels, would be would be helpful towards making sure that you have more access to intelligence on top.”

    Sholto·2:02:28

Bearish:

• $JRDEV - Junior developer roles are expected to be significantly impacted by AI automation within the next five years, potentially reducing demand for entry-level software engineering positions.

  • “Even if AI progress totally stalls, you think that the models are really spiky and they don't have general intelligence. It's so economically valuable and sufficiently easy to collect data on all of these different jobs, these white collar job tasks, such that to Sholto's point, we will we should expect to see them automated within the next five years.”

    Trenton·2:03:19