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Doug O'Laughlin is the President of SemiAnalysis, the Substack-native semiconductor research firm whose analysts hit dozens of technical conferences a year to map every layer of the AI buildout.
The Oracle sat down with O’Laughlin to break down Polymarket’s biggest AI market and discuss why the leading labs may be sitting on their best models.
This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.
How does it make you feel when you see Twitter meme coin accounts suddenly rebranding as AI bottleneck guys? And how is SemiAnalysis different?
Let’s put it this way: they’re semiconductor bottleneck guys, but they couldn’t tell you what a semiconductor was two years ago. They don’t understand the difference between a CW and DW laser.
Me and Dylan were obsessed with this space when no one gave a shit about semiconductors, before the chip shortage. We came to the conclusion that it’s the most important technology ever invented, and that after the end of Moore’s law it would only become more important, because making it would become harder. That’s truly the entire bet of my career. In 2018, no one gave a shit about chips, and everyone was talking about software. Now the world’s totally opposite. What’s our edge?