Alex Wissner-Gross

pivoting back from consumer to enterprise, which Anthropic, due to its own compute limitations, was betting on enterprise almost the entire time, at least from far earlier on than OpenAI was, that cost them.

That may have, in fact, ultimately delayed their revenue targets for what would have been their IPO.

Now they're, as Brian mentioned, GPT-5.5 is out, Codex is looking stronger than Cloud Code at the moment, I expect leapfrogging to continue.

But that did probably set back OpenAI's internal revenue projections somewhat.

At the same time, they're backing out of Stargate as it was originally construed, and now it's just a leasing operation.

It's no longer a data center build operation, so that should free them up quite a bit.

It's a bizarre situation, though, if Sarah is leaking these expectations.

It almost smells to me like an expectation re-anchoring game.

Why, if you're about to go public, do you have your CFO leaking these stories to the Wall Street Journal and other major publications that, oh, things might not be as rosy as they otherwise seem and we might have to delay our IPO?

That's the sort of exercise in PR that a company goes through constantly.

if maybe it's trying to re-anchor expectations lower than they actually are so that it can exceed and beat them on a shorter time scale.

where the p e returns are just staggeringly high and it's all because yeah because of ai ai automation can i make a hot take here okay alex and then we'll go back to hugh salim go ahead alex so a hot take uh the elephant in the room how is this money going to be spent 10 billion dollars open ai 1.5 billion dollars anthropic a skeptic which i'm not but a skeptic might argue

In this instance, I'm not, but a skeptic might argue that there's a very real risk that these monies are going to be used to basically pay the respective frontier labs for their own sales.

That it's sort of open AI spending $10 billion, or I guess they've contributed part of the $10 billion, but that's ultimately a bit circular.

So, the same folks who were arguing that all of these deals in the past year or so that NVIDIA was striking with other folks in their supply chain were just

constituted NVIDIA doing circular sales, that OpenAI and Anthropic are basically launching these ventures or co-branded ventures as a way to drive their own sales through circular sales mechanisms and wash sales.

That's what a skeptic would say.

Another take would be that PE firms, I guess there's a second elephant in this particular room, which is that the PE firms have got to be staring down future discounted cash flows and being quite scared by it.

If AI is just eating away all of these otherwise relatively.

Yes, relatively predictable future cash flows of all of their operating portfolio companies and AI marches into the room and suddenly they only have, as we've talked about on the pod in the past, about maybe they only have two to three years of runway left in these cash flows before AI just obsoletes the cash flows and you're a PE company and OpenAI or Anthropic come into your office and say, we'd like to set up JV with you, billions of dollars, and you can spend the billions of dollars