# General Models Must Still Justify Their Compute Costs by Dave Blundin > "Both things can be true: a generalized model can drive a car or inhabit and build a robot, while a specialized model may still perform the task more efficiently. The missing question is how much compute the general model used. Compute will remain starved; chip prices have risen, and high-bandwidth memory has increased fivefold in price. AI is so valuable that people want the compute, so using more compute for the same task is a serious failure." > **— Dave Blundin**, *MOONSHOTS Live, September 25, 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Recording or publication:** [MOONSHOTS Live at 42:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk7hdOwJj4&t=2576s) — The poster preserves the complete source object used in the research dossier; square brackets or ellipses, when present, are visible editorial repairs inherited from the reconciled source record. - **Reconciled source dossier:** [[research/Jensen Pushes Back on Doomers Moonshots Live|Jensen Pushes Back on Doomers Moonshots Live]] — preserves transcript order, speaker attribution, editorial conventions, and the surrounding argument from which this Reminder was promoted. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Gigawatt Is the New Measure of War|The Gigawatt Is the New Measure of War]] - **Article:** [[articles/Vertically Integrating an AI Superpower from AI Factory to Citizen|Vertically Integrating an AI Superpower]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Dave Blundin|Dave Blundin]] - [[wiki/Compute Scarcity|Compute Scarcity]] - [[wiki/Generalist Robotics|Generalist Robotics]] ## Share on Social Media ``` "Both things can be true: a generalized model can drive a car or inhabit and build a robot, while a specialized model may still perform the task more efficiently. The missing question is how much compute the general model used. Compute will remain starved; chip prices have risen, and high-bandwidth memory has increased fivefold in price. AI is so valuable that people want the compute, so using more compute for the same task is a serious failure." — Dave Blundin, MOONSHOTS Live, September 25, 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-dave-blundin-general-models-must-still-justify-their ```