{"id":377385,"date":"2025-11-14T03:15:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T03:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/377385\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T03:15:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T03:15:21","slug":"what-insiders-anonymously-think-about-the-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/377385\/","title":{"rendered":"What insiders anonymously think about the AI race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">This is an excerpt of <a href=\"https:\/\/sources.news\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer\u2019s Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, which is now in its third year. I\u2019ve attended this event for three years <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2024\/11\/22\/24303470\/ai-model-llm-progress-hitting-scaling-wall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in a row<\/a> because Eric does a great job curating the speakers and the audience, and the conversations are more substantive than a typical industry event.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">This year was no exception; however, I found the most interesting part of the day to be when the results of an anonymous audience survey were shared onstage. The more than 300 attendees who participated in the survey primarily consisted of AI company founders, followed by investors, other industry professionals (including product leaders and engineers), and members of the media.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Here are the results of the survey in order of how they were shared onstage:<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>1. What will be OpenAI\u2019s annualized revenue be at the end of 2026? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Median answer: $30 billion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>2. What will Nvidia be worth at the end of 2026?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Median answer: $6 trillion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>3. What year will an independent committee of experts, as dictated by the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, declare that we have reached AGI?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>4. Which venture capital firm\u2019s AI portfolio are you the most jealous of?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">The top three most voted for, from first to last: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>5. If you could put money in any private technology companies today, what would they be?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Top five companies in order from first to last: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenEvidence.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>6.<\/strong> <strong>What global company\u2019s model will top the LMArena web development leaderboard at the end of 2026?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">In order from first to last: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Qwen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>7. If you could short a $1 billion-plus valuation startup, which would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">First place was Perplexity. Second place went to OpenAI. Other names shown onstage: Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral, and Thinking Machines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">What stood out to me from these results (Newcomer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newcomer.co\/p\/cerebral-valley-ai-summit-audience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">has published the slides<\/a> for his paying subscribers):<\/p>\n<ul class=\"duet--article--unordered-list _1ymtmqpi _11h7yix0 _1xwtict1\">\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\"><strong>A softening on OpenAI:<\/strong> Given that Sam Altman has said OpenAI plans to end this year with $20 billion of annualized revenue, this group of AI insiders doesn\u2019t expect next year to be as exponential for the business as the leap from 2024 to 2025. The prediction that AGI won\u2019t be declared until 2030 suggests a lack of faith in model progress meaningfully improving in the near term, although that answer could also be clouded by the complexity of how OpenAI and Microsoft must settle on how it\u2019s decided. (I\u2019m still waiting for either company to share information on who its \u201cindependent committee of experts\u201d will be and how they\u2019ll decide.) It was also notable that more attendees wanted to buy Anthropic stock than OpenAI\u2019s, despite the consensus being that OpenAI would lead LMArena next year. <\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\"><strong>Meta wasn\u2019t in the conversation.<\/strong> It wasn\u2019t named on the list of models likely to lead LMArena next year. The presence of a Chinese model (Alibaba\u2019s Qwen) in the top five signals a shift that\u2019s already underway, as many companies fine-tune open-source Chinese models rather than Llama. Meta has a lot to prove if it wants to re-enter the model race. <\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\"><strong>Perplexity is controversial.<\/strong> But everyone working in AI already knows that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>Other takeaways from Cerebral Valley:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>What\u2019s driving <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2024\/7\/1\/24190060\/amazon-adept-ai-acquisition-playbook-microsoft-inflection\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>reverse acquihires<\/strong><\/a><strong>? <\/strong>I attended a breakout session about AI acquihires, such as Meta\u2019s deal with ScaleAI to hire Alexandr Wang and Google\u2019s deals with Character and Windsurf. I\u2019ve closely covered many of these deals over the past couple of years, but it was interesting to hear the group\u2019s perspective on what drives them. Antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech certainly plays a factor, but some who have been involved in these kinds of transactions also made the point that bigger companies are racing each other to shore up talent and move faster than their competition. They have seemingly \u201cinfinite money,\u201d as one member of the group put it, and see it as a game of placing bets on a very finite pool of talent. One AI founder in the group, who fielded multiple offers of this kind, recalled a member of a Big Tech company\u2019s corporate development team asking him how much he wanted his startup to be valued for a deal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>No one cares about AGI anymore. <\/strong>At the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2023\/3\/30\/23746922\/command-line-a-visit-to-cerebral-valley\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">first Cerebral Valley conference<\/a>, the topic of AGI was a major throughline. A startup founder onstage said that \u201cwe\u2019re going to be dead\u201d by the time OpenAI releases GPT-10. This year, multiple onstage conversations noted how AGI barely registered as a discussion topic. Instead, most of the interviews focused on the business applications of AI. Multiple companies represented onstage at the first Cerebral Valley event didn\u2019t exist and are now worth billions of dollars. There was a strain of AI bubble fear throughout the day, but mostly, everyone seemed dialed in on how they could win market share and provide products that people want to pay for.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\"><strong>Standout quotes from onstage interviews:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul class=\"duet--article--unordered-list _1ymtmqpi _11h7yix0 _1xwtict1\">\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\">Replit CEO Amjad Masad: \u201cIf you are competing on price, then maybe you don\u2019t have a business.\u201d<\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\">Elad Gill: \u201cMost companies should sell at some point. There\u2019s often a market-maximizing moment where you\u2019re going to get the best deal you can. A very small number of companies should never ever sell.\u201d<\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\">San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: \u201cPeople are starting to complain about traffic. Thank goodness. I want those complaints. We still have a lot of empty office space.\u201d <\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\">Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: \u201cTime spent is, I can tell you, not on any of the dashboards that I look at. It\u2019s just not a main consideration.\u201d <\/li>\n<li class=\"_11h7yix1\">xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba: \u201cKnowledge is just crystalized computation from the past.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Follow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"tly2fw3\">\n<li id=\"follow-author-article_footer-dmcyOmF1dGhvclByb2ZpbGU6NDU3\">Alex HeathClose<img alt=\"Alex Heath\" data-chromatic=\"ignore\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"fill\" class=\"_1bw37385 x271pn0\" style=\"position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url(&quot;data:image\/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'\/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'\/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'\/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'\/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'\/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'\/%3E%3C\/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='\/%3E%3C\/svg%3E&quot;)\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/alex_heath_blurple_headshot_720.0.png\"\/>Alex Heath\n<p>Sources author, Verge contributor<\/p>\n<p class=\"fv263x1\">Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n<p>FollowFollow<\/p>\n<p class=\"fv263x4\"><a class=\"fv263x5\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/authors\/alex-heath\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">See All by Alex Heath<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>ColumnCloseColumn\n<p class=\"fv263x1\">Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n<p>FollowFollow<\/p>\n<p class=\"fv263x4\"><a class=\"fv263x5\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/column\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">See All Column<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>SourcesCloseSources\n<p class=\"fv263x1\">Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n<p>FollowFollow<\/p>\n<p class=\"fv263x4\"><a class=\"fv263x5\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/sources-newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">See All Sources<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":377386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,21228,51060,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-377385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-column","11":"tag-sources","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115545881639163157","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}