OpenAI's $121B Funding Round Explained
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
What is the significance of OpenAI's $121 billion funding round?
Today on the podcast, we're talking about OpenAI that just closed the largest private funding round in tech history, $121 billion at an $852 billion valuation. We also need to talk about what that means, who's writing the checks, where all this money is actually going. And then something else I thought was pretty terrifying. was Anthropic's rough week and a month they have been having. On the one hand, they're having a generational run. I am using Claude and Anthropic more than ever before for basically everything with ClaudeCowork and ClaudeCode. But at the same time, they've had a bunch of bad PR perhaps.
And the most recent is that their ClaudeCode source code just got exposed to a public NPM registry. They accidentally shipped about 500,000 lines of this. In addition, I want to talk about where hardware is at. Huawei's new 950 PR chip is picking up real orders from ByteDance and Alibaba. I think this means a lot in the context of US-China chip wars. So let's get into all of it. Before we do, if you are someone who uses AI tools regularly, which I'm guessing is most of you if you're listening to this, you should absolutely check out AIbox at AIbox.ai. It is my own startup and it gives you access to over 80 AI models in one place. So instead of paying for separate subscriptions to ChatGPT, Cloud, and Gemini and everything else,
you have one platform. The thing that I think is actually the most useful is that you can build automations just by describing what you want in plain language. So no coding is required. I'm not a developer. I built it for people like myself. It's $8.99 a month as the starting price, which is way less than stacking three or four different subscriptions on top of each other. The link is in the description. I think this is something that will be super worth trying out because it will save you money and it will also keep all of your files and logins in one place. So if you want to go try it out, AIbox.ai, link in the description. Let's talk about Huawei first. Their 950 PR chip is getting a lot of traction and it is a serious competitor to Nvidia's AI chips.
They've been working on this for a while. We know China obviously has been working on this because they don't want to get left behind and the United States has a whole bunch of chip export controls. Routers reported last week that both ByteDance and Alibaba are planning to place orders and customer testing has apparently gone really well. Huawei right now, they previously had kind of their flagship Ascend 910C. It was struggling to get any adoption from some of the big private sector tech companies. NVIDIA was still basically dominating everywhere there. So I think the main complaint that it got was software compatibility. If your whole stack is built around NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, then switching is super, super painful.
The 950 PR apparently is going straight after that. And I guess they're sort of addressing it. It's a lot more compatible with CUDA workflows and the response time is a lot better. But by basically integrating with the software that NVIDIA uses, they're able to get into that same ecosystem without people having to completely rebuild everything from scratch. The pricing on it is really interesting too. The standard version with DDR memory, it comes in around $6,900 per card and The premium HBM version is about $9,600. For comparison, NVIDIA's high-end AI chip sells for significantly more than that. So I think that there's a big cost advantage if performance is competitive enough. Huawei is planning to ship around 750,000 units in this year.
They have mass production starting next month and full shipments in the second half of the year. I think given all of that, NVIDIA's chips are, you know, banned from sale in China. And so I think that this is basically the market stepping in to fill the gap. I think the real question is whether this is going to accelerate China's AI development in the way that, you know, maybe the export controls were significantly trying to prevent by dense and Alibaba are placing real orders.
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