Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're covering a bunch of different news stories. OpenAI is reshuffling their leadership. They're trying to get back a bunch of lost ground on enterprise, which it feels like Anthropic has kind of been beating them at for a while now.
Chapter 2: What leadership changes is OpenAI implementing to regain market share?
There is a key OpenAI infrastructure partner that has just hit unicorn status. And of course, there's a whole wave of inference startups that are showing basically where I think a lot of the AI money is actually going to be flowing in 2026. Plus, I want to break down a new benchmark that shows why white-collar jobs are actually not disappearing nearly as much as they were predicted in the past.
And again, a former Sequoia partner is betting that AI agents can finally fix calendar scheduling if you want to get into some interesting AI use cases. This is the AI Chat podcast, which is a daily podcast covering the most important news and conversations in AI. So let's get into the episode.
I think according to reporting from the information they have, basically, by the way, if you don't have the information, it's I think one of the best insider tech news. So, you know, free plug to them. But OpenAI, they have a whole report on which says that OpenAI has appointed Brett Zoff to lead their enterprise sales efforts. Zoff is pretty familiar inside of the company.
He previously was the vice president of post-training inference before he left in 2024 to go co-found OpenAI.
Chapter 3: Which AI infrastructure partners have reached unicorn status?
Thinking Machine Labs with former OpenAI CEO or CTO Miriam Ratti. So this, I mean, just in and of itself, this got a lot of headlines, the fact that he left OpenAI to go found this company. And then, you know, they raised like a billion dollars and less than a year later, before any products were shipped, he came back to OpenAI.
And what you know, it's like has this new role inside, which is kind of funny. He came back last week, and I think there's not like a lot of new like circumstances that we know about why he left Thinking Machine Labs. So that's pretty unclear. The timing is pretty notable. Opening Eye right now has a ton of pressure in the enterprise market.
And I think this role is going to put him kind of at the center of their 2026 growth strategy. I think despite launching ChatGPT Enterprise earlier than a lot of the other competitors, OpenAI's market share has actually steadily declined.
I think not a lot of people know this, but there's some data that came out of Memlo Ventures that says that OpenAI's enterprise LLM usage has fallen roughly 50% in 2023. to about 27% by the end of 25, which means that you can look at some of their other competitors to see, you know, what else is happening in the industry. Anthropic, for example, now leads has around 40%.
Chapter 4: How is AI impacting white-collar jobs and the workforce?
And Google's Gemini has, it's been making a bunch of gains, it's a lot slower, but it is making some it's gaining some ground there. So I think this isn't, you know, lost on OpenAI's leadership. Sam Altman has apparently kind of flagged the fact that OpenAI is growing as a big concern inside of the company. There was kind of the famous, you know, red flag moment.
And the CFO, Sarah Fryer, also said that enterprise growth is a top priority this year for them. They've also expanded their partnership with ServiceNow. I think that kind of shows OpenAI is planning to fight a
Chapter 5: What evidence suggests that white-collar jobs are not disappearing?
So this is going to be interesting. The next thing I want to talk about is a company called LiveKit. It's one of OpenAI's really key infrastructure partners, and they have officially reached unicorn status. So they are a real-time voice and video infrastructure company. They power ChatGPT's voice mode. They just raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
The round was led by Index Ventures, Tier 1 VC. They also had Alameter and Redpoint and some other pre-existing investors that all jumped in on that. But LiveKit essentially started as an open source project during the pandemic. The founder, Russ Dessa and David Zhao, they're focused on building interruption free audio and video tools. And then the business just sort of took off from there.
I think it's interesting. It took off, especially when a lot of companies started asking for them to basically do it, but manage it. So they built a cloud based solution for the voice AI. So today, LiveKit's customers, they have OpenAI, XAI, Salesforce, Tesla, a bunch of emergency services, some mental health providers.
But I think the thing that's really interesting for me is that as AI voice is becoming a lot more mainstream, the infrastructure layer is turning into a really valuable part of this stack. And so I think the fact they were able to raise $100 million, and of course, they're fueling like OpenAI's voice mode and a lot of other players shows just how valuable this company and others like it will be.
Okay, so in that same theme, I want to talk about another company, which is called Infraac. This is a company that is commercializing a lot of popular open source projects, but one in particular is called VLLM, and they have just raised $150 million in seed funding. They have an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by A16Z and Lightspeed.
VLLM and a bunch of similar projects are focusing on inference, or essentially the process of running models really efficiently in production. I think right now as we're seeing kind of a shift in AI from these sort of big training breakthroughs to a lot more real-world deployment, investors are putting a lot of money into the tools that make models faster and cheaper and more scalable.
So, Infrax Story, I think, is very close to another recent spin-out, which is called Radiax Arc, which also commercialized SG Lang.
Both of those projects originated from UC Berkeley's AI research ecosystem, and I think they show, like, a pretty big trend in the industry, which is that training is going to definitely grab headlines, but inference is where a lot of the real business value is actually being created. I mean, the fact that they were able to raise $800 million, I think, goes to prove this. So, Infrax Story,
Now for one of the most important research stories in AI right now. And I think this is one that cuts through a lot of the hype that we see. There's a new benchmark from Merkur. It's called the Apex Agents. And this is essentially they tested leading AI models on real white collar work. And they have a whole bunch of tasks that are drawn from, you know, like consulting law, investment banking.
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