Warning, this is a long comment! (I’m trying to stick to sourced facts here and not overstate what they mean)

I went down a rabbit hole after watching Dylan Patel on Dwarkesh today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV26V1UvkJw

I was initially just surprised by how bullish Dylan is on OpenAI/Anthropic and how bearish he is on China, despite Chinese labs getting closer to US SOTA while offering inference at dramatically lower prices.

So, I started digging while waiting for various day-job inference calls to return, ha.

Dylan says he spent years obsessively posting on hardware forums, moderating hardware subreddits, and running anonymous hardware blogs/videos before SemiAnalysis. But he also says most of that history is now gone, including from the Internet Archive, because he asked for it to be removed.[1]

In a 2024 interview he described his post-college job as “data science” around hurricane/earthquake/wildfire simulations for a financial company.[1] In a 2026 Sequoia interview he described himself as having been a “quant at a small quant risk firm” who generated $10M+ of “risk-free revenue.”[2] The Information reports that he declined to identify the employer and doesn’t list it on LinkedIn.[3]

Even harmless/silly stuff seems to drift. In February he said he kept bees for ~1.5 years. Today it was “few months, few months.”[4][5] I know, sort of silly and doesn't matter.

The Information reports that Patel owns stakes in ~20 startups in the same ecosystem SemiAnalysis covers, organized a $50M Fluidstack SPV, and is now targeting a $400M venture fund.[3][6]

And, in a 2022 HN discussion about SemiAnalysis disclosures, after saying his reports had moved smaller stocks by 20% in a day, Patel wrote: “If I thought I could move the stock, I'd make the position in the morning alongside my clients, and publish shortly after.”[7]

I don’t know that any of this is false or that anything improper happened (I’m definitely not claiming that). More that 1-2 of these things would just be odd. Taken together, though, they made me question how much trust I was putting in the broader story.

The dynamic of reminds me of crypto, WeWork, Theranos, Citron, etc. Once enough important people validate someone, things that would normally invite basic diligence somehow stop getting questioned.

[1] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dylan-jon

[2] https://sequoiacap.com/podcast/dylan-patel-of-semianalysis-w...

[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dylan-patel-semianal...

[4] https://www.latent.space/p/dylanpatel-cooking

[5] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dylan-patel-3

[6] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-semianaly...

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31065646

OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell