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Anthropic's $30B Ramp, Mythos Doomsday, OpenClaw Ankled, Iran War Ceasefire, Israel's Influence

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Source ↗ ← All highlights
  • OpenClaw Put AI Coding Antitrust On The Table
    • The OpenClaw fight exposed a coming antitrust question in AI coding around bundling, pricing, and dominant token share.
    • Jason Calacanis said Anthropic ended flat-rate subscription access for heavy OpenClaw users, forcing API pricing, then announced its own managed agent product days later. Transcript: David Sacks Docket today. J. Cal, you may once again be tarred with your affiliation with us. Poor you. Jason Calacanis I mean, I don’t care. Literally, I’ve got friends on both sides of the aisle. I have friends everywhere. Of course you do. Even J. David Sacks Cal. Even J. Jason Calacanis Cal has friends everywhere. David Sacks Let me ask Brad a question here, just while we’re on the topic of Anthropic. There was a really interesting story or tweet, I guess you could say, by the founder of OpenClaw. Peter. Peter, yeah. What’s his name? Peter Steinberger. Steinberger. Steinberger. Yeah. Renowned coder who created OpenClaw, which is kind of the thing that launched the sole agent era now, I guess you could say. Any event, he said that Anthropic was cutting off his access to, was it to Claw? Is that the next topic? This is on the docket. Jason Calacanis It’s a little bit nuanced. Everybody using OpenClaw would take their $200 a month subscription to Anthropic, which was essentially like people were using more tokens and it’s an average. The people from OpenClaw, it is very verbose. And those people are 100x the usage of the average subscriber. So he said, you can’t use your 200, you have to use the API. You move from the $200 plan to the API, add a zero to your token use or more. And so they essentially ankled OpenClaw. And then 10 days later or less, they released or announced their new agent technology, which is, according to them, a safer, better version of OpenClaw. So hey, all’s fair in love and war. And they have basically shot a huge cannon across the bow of open claw. David Sacks Can you just explain that exactly? So I think you’re right that they systematically copied feature by feature of open claw, incorporated that into clawed. And then the coup de grace was basically cutting off open claw. Can you just explain exactly what they did? Jason Calacanis Okay, very simply. When you buy a subscription to these services, they have blended your usage across many users. So there’s, you know, nine out of 10 users use less than the tokens they’re paying for and the top 10% use much more. When OpenClaw became a phenomenon, the number one open source project in history on GitHub, with all of this usage, people went crazy. And you heard me talking about how crazy I went for it. Those people with the $200 subscriptions were using $2,000, $20,000 worth of tokens. So they said, you can no longer use your subscription to either your professional or enterprise subscription at $200 and plug that into your open clock. You now have to go to the API and pay per usage. So no more like unlimited essentially. David Sacks But if you use Anthropics own agent harness, are you part of the bundled flat rate? Jason Calacanis You can assume that that’s what they’ll do, which if you were thinking on an antitrust level might be token dumping or price dumping. I’m not saying like I’m ratting them out. David Sacks No, it’s like bundling, isn’t it? Jason Calacanis Well, price dumping or bundling. When you price something under the market price in antitrust, that would be price dumping, right? And if you were to bundle, it would be like the bundling issue. Brad Gerstner Critically important, you can use OpenClaw via Clawed API. And every company has a right to set the price for its products. It’s just saying that you were under their current regime. They were selling dollars for 10 cents via OpenClaw because these were such power users. And now they’re just saying, we have to price this rationally, but we’re happy to have you guys use the API. Okay. Okay. But Brad, when you use the OpenClaw competitor that Anthropic now offers, are they subsidizing that? David Sacks Are you paying? Jason Calacanis We don’t know yet because it’s in closed ban. David Sacks So in other words, what I’m saying is if they charge for API usage, their own first-party agent harness or system, then that would be apples to apples. But if they end up charging the bundled flat rate, let’s say, for their stuff, but then charge the metered rate for third-party stuff, you could make a bundling argument. Sure, sure. Brad Gerstner And you could say it’s anti-competitive, assuming that Anthropic has dominant market share in coding, which I think most people would say they do at this point. And assuming that it’s the same product. I mean, the reason most enterprises will probably use the Anthropic version of this agentic product is because it meets all of your security parameters, right? So Altimeter runs, you know, a lot of stuff on Anthropic. They’re already integrated within our data warehouse, our data lake, things of that nature. So just letting OpenClaw loose on the Altimeter, you know, data set would not be wise. And so it’s a different fundamental product. David Sacks No, I get that. And I think that Anthropic has a huge advantage, let’s say cloning OpenClaw and just building it into Claude. I’m not denying that. To me, that would be the reason why they don’t need to do price discrimination is because there’s already a very good reason to use the, let’s call it the bundled offering on a featured Basis. But the question I’m specifically asking is whether they’re giving themselves a price advantage. Jason Calacanis I think Brad is giving the most generous interpretation. You’re taking a more cynical one. I’m with you, Sax. I’m 100% on the cynical side. OpenClaw is so powerful. It’s got so much momentum that not only is Anthropic trying to ankle it, I believe when Sam Altman bought it, it was, and he didn’t buy OpenClaw itself, he hired, Aqua hired Peter. I believe it was to subvert the open source project to get Peter’s next set of genius ideas inside of OpenAI, as opposed to letting them go there. People are going to say I’m a conspiracy theorist, but this is the number one focus, and let me just give you a list of who is trying to kill OpenClaw slash compete with them. (Time 0:23:50)
  • AI Coding Still Struggles With Enterprise Tech Debt
    • AI coding may look dominant in tokens today, but Chamath Palihapitiya said it still serves a small slice of real enterprise software work.
    • He described customers dragging retired COBOL and Fortran experts back in because long-horizon rewrites and decades of tech debt still do not just work. Transcript: David Sacks Actually, I want to ask all three. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Yes, thank you for that TED Talk. I have a yes, no question for each of you. Do you believe that Anthropic has dominant market share in coding right now? Brad Gerstner Yes, no. In coding? Jason Calacanis Yes, just coding. They had the lead, but not dominant. Brad Gerstner I think it’s a trillion-dollar market, and these guys have less than 10% of it today, so it’s hard to make a case. David Sacks What percent of coding tokens do you think that Anthropic is providing the market right now? Greater than 50%. Yeah, that’s true. Okay, that’s called dominant market share. I don’t know about that. More than 50% of the market? You’ve got to look at what the TAM is. You’ve got to look at what the TAM is, David. Brad Gerstner Right? There are a lot of people who provide, you know that are in the business of helping people right software the tiebreaker before we move on to the next i’m not saying it’s a permanent condition David Sacks But if you’re telling me that today anthropic is delivering over half of the coding tokens that’s clearly a dominant position in the market for coding it’s an early market it could change Brad Gerstner But if i were representing them david I would say nine months ago, everybody called us out of the game. We were being destroyed by OpenAI. In three months, now people are saying we have dominant market position. This is the fastest changing, most competitive market in the world. I think it’d be very hard pressed to walk into some district court and make the case that these guys have somehow already formed a monopoly against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Etc. David Sacks Well, I’m not saying it’s a it’s already a permanent monopoly, but I am just asking about market share. And I do think you guys all agree. Let’s get Shemov. Chamath Palihapitiya Go ahead. They probably have 50 to 60 percent market share because I think Codex is actually quite broadly used as But that belies the more important point, which is AI-enabled coding, I think, Is still 5% of the broad market. So it’s kind of a nothing burger. Yes, they’re leading, but they’re leading in something that isn’t that big yet. Now, you would say, how could it not be big? And what I would say is, because most of the stuff that’s being written is still white sheet de novo code. And I think the ugly truth is I don’t care what model you have, but the long horizon ability for any of these models to actually build enterprise-grade software is still s-h s-h And that’s The actual lived experience. Not for me, but when I call on our customers, half a trillion dollar banks, a hundred billion dollar insurance companies, none of these guys are like, wow, it just works out of the box. It doesn’t work. So most of it is still hand-tuned. So until I can honestly tell you that we can point a model at this with the right guardrails, which I can’t today. What I would say is it’s a small market that will become large as these models become better. But we are in the world where we have 50 years of accumulated tech debt as a world. And I suspect when you enumerate the number of lines that that represents, it’s hundreds of trillions of lines of just pretty marginal, mediocre code to bad code. On top of that, we have all these legacy languages. I’ll tell you one of our customers, they have to go and get 60-year pensioners to come into the office to interpret… No, I’m not joking. This is a… Homewall, Fortran. This is a $100 dollar a year revenue company. And that’s how they solve these problems. It’s not Opus just solves it. So I would just keep in mind that most of the tech debt in the world that exists, 99% of it is still poorly addressed by these models. We are untying this Gordian knot. It’s going to take decades to do it right. So all the breathlessness about all this other stuff, I really think it’s not where the money is. It’s not the big time stuff. And you can tell me, oh, yeah, it’s going to be the future. And I would say, tell this business that’s $100 billion a year of revenue and 50 million billing relationships that all of a sudden you’re going to open claw your way to a solution. It’s bullshit. Not to say that you can’t have a great chief of staff and not to say you can’t do some useful stuff and trickery and, you know, have a good knowledge base. I’d like that too. But the core things that your lived experience sits on today is a mess of tech debt that will get very slowly replaced. And that’s just the reality of life. Jason Calacanis And there are competitors that are extremely disruptive. I’ll tell you about one. We talked about BitTensor, Tau, on this program a couple of weeks ago when we had the Jensen interview. You brought it up, actually, Chamath. There’s a project that’s Subnet 62. It’s called Ridges AI. And what they’re doing is a competitor that is not only open source, but anybody can contribute to it. They spent about a million dollars in TAO like rewards. And in 45 days, they hit 80% of what Claude 4 is. And they did that in under 45 days. The way that works is they give rewards for people who, and they can do this anonymously, make that coding product, which is like Codex or Claude Code better. That flywheel is racing right now with participation in the same way Bitcoin is. So you’re going to see a lot of open source and these crypto open source combinations. Chamath Palihapitiya And anybody who’s not investigated this, I highly recommend you investigate this. I do think you’re right about one specific thing. I would put zero, literally the probability zero, of any important company worth anything more than a dollar having and outsourcing their production code to an open source project. That’ll never happen. However, what will happen, though, is when you look at the cost of training this 10 trillion parameter model on Blackwell, and when you look in the future, let’s just say in six or nine Months, that a 15 or 20 trillion param model is going to get trained on Vera Rubin. I think, Jason, where you are right, I have zero, and just to be clear, I have no investments in this at all. I do, to be super clear. I’m just observing because another project other than BitTensor that someone brought up to me is Venice. The concept of open source training and orchestration is a hugely disruptive idea, which is the complete orthogonal attack vector to this idea that you have to raise tens and tens of Billions of dollars to train your models. Because if the capital markets run out of 10 and $20 billion checks to give people, the only solution is to be totally distributed. So I tend to agree with you, Jason, that there is going to be, at some point, a very successful open source project for pre-training. Absolutely, will there never, ever be an open source way where a real company that has any skin in the game says, here, guys, re-engineer my code base as an open source project. Never going to happen. Jason Calacanis Yeah, I think the coding tools will. And if you look at the history of open source, Brad, you actually, (Time 0:31:58)
  • Anthropic Revenue Ramp Repriced The TAM For Intelligence
    • Anthropic’s revenue ramp suggests the market for machine intelligence is much larger than standard software TAM assumptions.
    • Brad Gerstner said Anthropic added Databricks-plus-Palantir combined annualized revenue in one month and could have grown faster if compute were not the bottleneck. Transcript: David Sacks Third, Anthropix revenue run rate is based on what I can tell and what’s been publicly released is the fastest growing revenue run rate at scale that I think we’ve ever seen. Perfect segue. Jason Calacanis It’s the next story. David Sacks Okay. Maybe pull up the tweets, but this thing is ramping at a rate we’ve never seen before. Yeah. We can get into that in a second, but just one last final point is I think it’s pretty clear that where we go from here is agents and coding gives you a huge step up on agents because, you know, One of the main things that agents need to do is write code to be able to enable them to complete tasks. And so if it is the case that coding is this huge market that’s going to be dominated by one or two companies, and then that leads to another huge market, which is agents, My point is just, I think all these companies need to behave in a very clean way and not engage in tactics that later the government might say, you know what, that was anti-competitive. Everyone should just, I think, play fair, do not engage in discrimination against other people’s products, engage in fair pricing. I’m not accusing anyone of breaking any of the rules. But what I’m saying is that eventually, the government is going to look at this market with the benefit of 2020 hindsight. And I think everyone should just basically, you know, keep your nose clean, keep it tight, keep it tight. Jason Calacanis Tight is right. I think it’s an excellent point. Let’s talk about the revenue ramp of Anthropic. This is just unprecedented. Anthropic’s revenue run rate has topped $30 billion with a B. Early 2023, they turned on revenue. They started charging for API access. End of 2024, they’re at a billion-dollar run rate. February 25, they launched Clog Code. That was the starter’s pistol. Mid 2025, $4 billion run rate. End of 2025, $9 billion run rate. Just a couple of months later in April, $30 billion run rate. Yes, that’s right, triple. And the way they did this is enterprise customers are a major part of the spend. Dario announced a couple of months ago that there’s over 1,000 enterprises paying over 1 million annually. This is truly mind-boggling when you think about it because those are the most coveted customers in the world. These are the big fish that you just, when people are running enterprise software, they dream, Slack dreamed of getting these million-dollar customers. Salesforce dreams of getting these million-dollar customers. Brad, you’re an investor. I guess Sam famously on BG2 asked you to sell your OpenAI stock back to him. You didn’t. You demurred. But you’re an investor in both. How shocking is it to you to place both of those bets and then see one of them come from so far behind. You know, ChatGPT has 900 million users. I don’t know if they’ve passed a billion officially yet, but they are the verb, right? They’re the Uber. They’re the Xerox. They’re the Polaroid of AI, but they didn’t go after the enterprise. Dario made that, and Dario worked. He was the co-founder of OpenAI. He left, and according to the New Yorker story that came out from Ronan Farrow this week, he was basically left because of his disgust in working with sam altman your thoughts well you Brad Gerstner Know before we go down the open ai rabbit hole let’s just really contextualize like what’s going on here you know i i have this additional chart you showed one you know they added four Billion of revenue in January, $7 billion in February, $11 billion of annualized run rates, or $10 or $11 billion in March. Just to put it in perspective, that’s Databricks plus Palantir combined that they added in a single month. So we started with everybody at the start of the year wringing their hands, including, you know, Gurley and others saying we’re in a big bubble, asking whether the AI revenues would Show up to justify all of this investment. And bam, you have the largest revenue explosion in the history of technology. So the company’s plans were to end the year at about a 30 billion dollar exit run rate. They got there by the end of March, right? And I suspect that it’s continuing in April. So you have to ask what’s going on and what’s the big so what? The first thing for me is that model and product capability just hit this threshold we talked about earlier, near AGI, whatever the hell you want to call it. And everybody like Altimeter said, damn, this is so good. I have to have it. This is no longer about my IT budget. This is about labor augmentation and labor replacement. And by the way, co-work is growing even faster than Claude Goad at the same stage of development. So what it showed is we have a near infinite TAM. It turns out that the TAM for intelligence is radically different than anything that we’ve seen before. And I think the best example of this, right, this is millions of self-interested parties, consumers, enterprises, a thousand now over a million dollars, right? It’s not that there was some great go-to in Anthropic that all of a sudden, you know, they snuck up and blew everybody away. No, it was companies demanding the product. They’re getting throttled on the product. Why? Because it’s so good. It makes them better at their business. We are all self-interested actors. And when millions of those people are all making the same decision, there’s a huge tell. And the tell here is that the TAM is as big as Dario and Sam and others have been saying. We knew intelligence was going to scale on the exponential. The question was whether revenue will scale on the exponential. And that’s what we’re seeing. And remember, they’re doing this with only one and a half to two gigawatts of compute, right? These guys are massively compute constrained. They’re each going to be adding three gigawatts of compute this year. And so that will unlock, they would be growing even faster, but for that. And then Jason, to your point about the open source models that we all want to be a part of this solution. I’ve talked to a lot of big companies, 65 to 70% of their token consumption is open source model, right? Are these cheap Chinese and other tokens? So these revenue ramps are happening while the world is already using open source. This is not frontier only. This is frontier plus open source. We’re going to see massive token optimization over the course of the year. But what happens on this Jevons paradox is the unit cost of intelligence is plummeting, not the cost of tokens. The unit cost of intelligence is plummeting because the capabilities of these models is so much better. I look at what it does for Altimeter day in and day out. I talked to a major company yesterday. They’re on a run rate to do 100 million of token consumption this year on about $5 billion in OPEX. They think that we’re now nearing peak employment in their company, but that their token, their intelligence consumption, okay? Let’s not call it token consumption, right? Because tokens (Time 0:40:52)
  • AI Economics Moved From Demand Doubt To Margin Debate
    • The profitability debate has shifted from whether AI demand exists to how quickly gross margins improve as compute gets utilized.
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said the market is still stuck between gross and net revenue talk, while Brad Gerstner argued inference costs are down 90% year over year. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Okay. Chamath, question one has been answered. The question of, hey, this stuff actually have utility? That went from a question mark to an explanation point. Of course, it’s got utility. People are getting value from it. And it might be variable. Some people get more value than others. Number two, the revenue ramp was a big question. Now that’s turned into an explanation point. The final piece of the puzzle that you’ve brought up many times is, can this be profitable? And these companies are burning through a large amount of cash. So what is your take on when these companies can get out of the J curve? We talked about this, I think, three episodes ago. I estimated like we’re going to be looking at four or five hundred billion dollars in investment into these data centers at a minimum and then they have to climb out of that to get to profitability. So what are your thoughts on these becoming profitable companies? Chamath Palihapitiya Do you remember that investor that published this list, Jason, where he put all of the terms you talk about when one of the terms you can’t talk about is profit? It’s a list where it’s like, if you can’t talk about free cash flow, you talk about EBITDA. When you can’t talk about EBITDA, you talk about margin. When you can’t talk about that, you talk about revenue. And then when you can’t talk about revenue, you talk about gross revenue. So you can kind of figure out, I think, where we are in any part of any cycle by just indexing into what does everybody talk about. I think where we are is we are between gross revenue and net revenue. That’s where the discussion is. Okay. There was another article I think today in, I think maybe it was the information that tried to categorize and distinguish that Anthropic presents gross, OpenAI presents net. They’re different. We don’t know what the various take rates are. So they’re saying that there’s a difference. If it’s not true, there’s been no clarity provided by these companies. So at a minimum, you have this confusion where there’s the breathless talk. Then there’s people that don’t even know the difference between actual recognized revenue and run rate revenue and how to multiple i mean so we’re definitely there okay we can quibble About the details but we are not at the place where people are like oh here’s your steady state you know free cash flow margin and here’s what your ebitda does we’re never we’re we’re years From that they’re gonna have token maxing ebda like a cumulative ebda at the we work the thing that we need to understand is how gross margin negative is this revenue growth. We don’t know that. And at least we don’t as outsiders. Brad might know. Brad may know. Brad Gerstner I would tell you, think about this. What are their big cost inputs? The number one cost input is the cost to compute. Cost to compute, right? I just told you they only have a gigawatt and a half of compute. And they they had that gigawatt and a half of compute whether they have a billion in revenue or whether they have 80 billion in revenue so you might actually expect to see these companies Their gross margins are exploding higher like the fastest increase in gross margins i’ve probably seen out of any technology company so this is not gross margin negative you’re saying No definitely not gross margin negative and what i would tell you is- So then they must be hugely profitable then. Well, you may see accidental, what I call it, accidental profitability. They may not be able to spend this revenue fast enough, Chamath, on compute. And remember, it’s only 2,500 people. Google crossed this revenue threshold when they had 120,000 people. These guys have 2,500 people. So the only thing you can really spend money on, right, is compute, and they can’t stand up the compute fast enough. I’m not saying it’s there i’m not saying it’s 90 plus i’m just saying it’s gone from meaningfully negative 18 months ago to you know very very positive i’ve seen rumored out there so the Chamath Palihapitiya Trend is going well is what you’re saying right trend is there let me just say this i think if you’re an incumbent you want the cost of compute to go down i think if you’re not an incumbent, So specifically, who do I mean? Meta, Google, and SpaceX. I think those three people who have all three of them, well, sorry, Meta and Google have a fortress balance sheet. I think by the end of June, SpaceX will also have a fortress balance sheet. What they will want to do is they will want to make this a compute problem because they will control the conditions on the field. You already see this today. Meta’s models today, what people’s general reviews are, it’s okay, but the one thing that people say is it’s incredibly performant. The model quality is okay, but the performance is great, which speaks to Meta’s huge advantage. They have a massive compute infrastructure. So if you’re not open AI and Anthropic, they’ll want to make this a capital problem because then they can win it. If you’re Anthropic and open AI, you want this thing to be as efficient as possible. I think where we are is very much in the early innings. And we’re bumbling around talking about gross margins and revenues. We are not at profitability. And what is true for Facebook, and what was true for Google, was irrespective of where they got to a billion, who cares? They were profitable by year three. And they never looked back. I was there, I remember, it was glorious. Brad Gerstner The cost, the cost of building, you know, AI stipulate is radically higher than the cost of building retrieval at Google. It’s just a fundamentally more expensive problem. But I will tell you that there’s a lot of thought out there about negative gross margins. I mean, Jason, you started this segment by saying they’re burning through large amounts of cash. I think people are going to be shocked at how low the burn levels are at these companies. Yes. And I would say at OpenAI as well, like if they’re on, you know, if they do $50 billion this year, again, just look at the number of people they have revenue per people. It’s pretty low. And the inference cost is plummeting. Inference cost is down by 90% year over year. And so just finally, I want to make it respond to this point about gross versus net, this, this tweet that Chamath was referencing. Okay. So there’s a certain percentage, a smallish percentage of Anthropics revenue, right? That they distribute through the hyperscalers. And like a lot of arrangements, whether it’s Snowflake or Databricks or others, you pay a commission, right? On, on that. I will just tell you that you’re talking single digit percentage of total revenue of these companies. So the gross versus net thing isn’t what’s being reported. Like the apples for apples is pretty easy. And if you want to be conservative on it, take down anthropics revenue by, you know, five to 10%, which, you know, again, I don’t I think it’s better to gross up opening eyes revenue, but Any way you do it, I just think it’s a distraction from what’s really going on here. (Time 0:48:38)
  • Anthropic Became Early Proof That AI Capex Can Pay Off
    • David Sacks said the Anthropic numbers are early proof that massive AI capex is not just a bubble but a bet with real payoff.
    • He argued Silicon Valley makes conviction bets before spreadsheets can justify them, and coding is only the first major revenue vertical. Transcript: David Sacks Yeah. I mean, I want to go back to a point that Brad made, because I think it was just really important and I want to just underline it. Consider where we were at the beginning of the year and what everybody was saying is that AI was a big bubble. The evidence they would point to was the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars was going into CapEx that needed to be spent on these data centers. And there was no evidence of significant revenue to justify that spend. Where was the ROI? By the way, as an aside, the same doomers who were saying that AI was in a bubble were also the ones who were saying that AI was so powerful, it’s going to put us all out of work. And it’s going to take over from humanity. I mean, in other words, they couldn’t decide if AI was too powerful or not powerful enough. But putting aside that contradiction, they clearly were making this case that AI was this big bubble and that be no payoff or justification for this massive capex that’s being spent. And I think we’re starting to see here there is justification for it. We’re seeing it just in this one vertical of AI, which is coding. We’re, again, seeing the fastest revenue growth in history. It’s utterly unprecedented. And this is just one category or vertical of AI. We know that agents are coming next and the enterprise adoption of that is going to be absolutely massive. So I guess what I’m saying is that this is early proof for, I think, the thing that makes Silicon Valley special, which is we’re willing to basically bet on things that just intuitively, On a gut level, we know are the next big thing. We’re not that spreadsheet driven, actually. Silicon Valley believes that if you build it, they will come and is willing to finance that build out. And that’s basically what’s been happening. Again, just the top four hyperscalers, $350 billion of expected CapEx this year. On its way, I think Jensen said $1 trillion by 2030. So Silicon Valley, whether it’s big companies, whether it’s founders, they’re always willing to bet on this next big thing. They’re not like Wall Street. They don’t need, you know, to tell them where to go. They know where the technology is going and they make their bets based on that. And I think that there is going to be a big payoff for this. And I think it’s the thing that’s going to make our economy and the United States in general remain extremely dynamic and in the lead on this thing, is that we are willing to make those Kinds of bets. And I think it’s going to pay off big time. (Time 0:55:31)
  • Anthropic Won The Round By Staying Focused
    • Brad Gerstner said Anthropic won the last 90 days by narrowing its focus while OpenAI spread itself across too many fronts.
    • He credited Anthropic for skipping video, hardware, chips, and data centers to focus on coding and cowork, but warned it is foolish to count OpenAI out. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Hey, Brad, you didn’t answer my question about the vibes over at OpenAI versus Quad. OpenAI is, I wouldn’t say reeling, but there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on, a lot of employees leaving, a lot of people who are wondering, is our strategy the winning strategy of Consumer first? They shut down Sora, unwinding the Disney deal and really trying to get the company focused. And it’s kind of like, I mean, listen, the New Yorker story was a bit of a rehash. I don’t think we have to go into the blow by blow because we covered here three years ago. But the truth is, a lot of the great founders, co-founders of OpenAI and a lot of the great contributors are now at Anthropic other large language models. And in the secondary market, OpenAI is trading lower than the last valuation, and Anthropic is trading significantly above the $380 billion. So maybe talk a little bit about this competition, this Microsoft versus Apple, this Google versus Facebook. Brad Gerstner Well, let’s start with immense credit where credit is due. Anthropic was literally counted out of the game last year. And here they come over the last 12 months, and they’ve kicked open AI’s ass over the last 90 days. And what did Anthropic do? Anthropic made choices. No multimodal, no video, no hardware, no chips, no building data centers. They said, we’re just going to focus on coding and co-work. We think that is the path to AGI and ASI. They executed their butts off. They took the lead, 2,500 people tight, pulling on the ore in the same direction. But I think you would be seriously foolish to count out OpenAI, right? And I think we’re at peak open AI FUD. And I’ll tell you, it starts with great researchers and great models. And I think when you see the SPUD model, they’re about ready to release. I think it’s going to be an excellent model. Shows that they’re firmly on the wave. If you look at what’s going on with Codex, incredible ramp on Codex. Fastest ramping model with 5.4, I think 5.5 or Spud, whatever we’re going to call it. It’s going to be an even faster ramp. Jason Calacanis Have you seen Spud? Have you used it? Have you gotten a preview? People are using Spud, right? So it is being previewed. So you’re talking to people who’ve used it and what are they telling you? Brad Gerstner They’re telling us that it’s an incredible model on par with Mythos, right? And that it’s a very usable model in terms of how it’s packaged. I will say that, back to David’s point, now this is the most important point I think anybody can take away here. This is not zero sum. The TAM of intelligence is dramatically larger than any TAM we’ve ever seen in our investing careers over the last two decades, right? And if you’re on the wave, which OpenAI is, you are going to be selling into the world’s biggest TAM. They are going to build a very big company. I’m a buyer of the shares today, notwithstanding all of the vibes that you describe. I think these companies are firmly on the wave. They are jarred. They are sitting there saying, what did we do wrong and how do we get our mojo back? They want to compete. It is embarrassing to people on the research team and the product team over there. So I’m not saying there’s not a real awakening occurring there, but I think that’s what the case is. And by the way, to Ch point do not count out meta right i think meta is absolutely in this game google is absolutely in this game elon is absolutely in this game and if you’re on got some stuff Dropping shortly that’s going to be very impressive if you’re on team america the fact that we have five frontier models competing against each other and david made sure they weren’t Throttled by excessive government regulation. We have mythos come out. It’s a self-imposed safe harbor, you know, to harden our system. It wasn’t a call for moratoriums or getting the government involved. We have the type of competition that’s causing us to accelerate our lead against the rest of the world. We can’t take our eye off the prize. We got to stop adversarial distillation. And we need to make sure that we’re distributing our products around the world. But I view this as really good for Team America. (Time 0:58:00)
  • The Ceasefire Mattered Because Escalation Becomes Self Driving
    • The panel viewed the Iran ceasefire as valuable mainly because wars become hard to stop once they climb the escalation ladder.
    • David Sacks praised Trump for pulling toward talks, while Brad Gerstner said markets treated the conflict as a temporary shock and quickly bounced back. Transcript: Jason Calacanis We got to catch up on the Iran war. Here’s the latest. Two weeks into a ceasefire. I’ve started just two days ago at the taping of this. VP, JD Vance, friend of the pod, and some special consultants, Wyckoff and friend of the pod, Jared Kushner, are headed to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, for talks this very weekend. So while you’re listening to this event, they are going to be working on the peace deal. Easter Sunday, Trump posted a truth stating, open the f***ing straight and crazy bastards or you’re going to be living in hell. Just watch. Be to Allah on Tuesday morning Trump posted uh another threat on social media a whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again I don’t want that to happen but it probably Will tweets were obviously discussed uh a lot over the last week he gave him an 8 p.m deadline at 6 30 p.m POTUS announced on Truth Social that he had agreed. President Trump had agreed to a two-week ceasefire if Iran opens the straight. He also said, hey, listen, we got the straight. Maybe there’ll be a toll booth, but we’ll take the majority of the toll and we’ll split it with Iran. Here’s the quote. We received a 10-point proposal from Iran, and we believe it’s a workable basis on which to negotiate. And apparently Netanyahu took the ceasefire to mean level Lebanon, dropping 160 bombs in 10 minutes yesterday. Sachs, you were out last week. Everybody wants to know your position on the war. I’ll hand it off to you. What are your thoughts on how on the two-week ceasefire and everything that’s occurred up until this point? David Sacks Well, look, I have to preface what I’m about to say, which is I’m not part of the foreign policy team at the White House. And the last time I commented on the war on the show, it somehow made international headlines that Trump advisor says X, Y, Z. And I’m not a Trump advisor on this issue. I think that’d be a fair headline to write if it was a technology issue, but this is not. So whatever I say is just my personal opinion, but then the media is going to somehow portray it or attribute it to the White House or try and create an issue out of it. So I feel like I’m limited in what I can say, except that to say that I think it’s terrific that we have the ceasefire. I think it’s great that there’s going to be this meeting in Islamabad to hammer it out. And I think what the president’s accomplished so far with the ceasefire is, it’s a great thing because what happens with these wars is they take on a life of their own, meaning they tend To go up the escalation ladder, right? And there’s a lot of podcasts that are discussing the so-called escalation trap. And supposedly, there are stages of this based on historical patterns. And so I think it’s actually very hard to pull out of these things. And I give the president tremendous credit for negotiating the ceasefire that we’ve achieved so far and then sending the team to hopefully work this out. Jason Calacanis Brad, actually, my first trip to the Middle East was when you and I, maybe four years ago, Len, thank you for taking me. What is your take on where we’re at here? I think we just wrapped up week six of this and we’re going into week seven. Brad Gerstner First, on March 4th, I tweeted, the Trump doctrine in Iran, massively destroy all military capabilities, the people building lethal weapons to use against us, and get out. Reserve the right to do it again if needed. Zero efforts to build Madisonian democracy. Iran’s going to have to build what comes next. And I think what the market has said, right, if you look back at last year on tariffs, Jason, the top to bottom drawdown was about 15%. On the NASDAQ intraday, it was down 22%. Okay. The drawdown in this period over Iran was only down about five to 7% on S&P and NASDAQ, right? So the market has said, listen, trust Trump at his words. He said he’s not going to get into an entangled war here. I think he terrifies the hell out of people with his tweets about, you know, destroying civilization and all this other stuff. But I think people, even though they don’t like to hear it, they’ve resolved for themselves that when he says he’s going to get out, he will, in fact, get out. Of course, there was a lot of hand wringing. But if you look at the markets today, we basically bounced all the way back. Where we were pre-Iran on both the S&P and the NASDAQ. If in fact we land the plane, if JD lands the plane, and by the way, on Lebanon, yes, they were bombing yesterday, but Netanyahu has now said that you’re going to have direct government Talks between Israel and Lebanon. So if we land the plane on these two things, I think it’s off to the races in the market. And by the way, while everybody’s focused on Iran, stay tuned. I think we’re getting close to a deal on Ukraine, Russia, right? Venezuela is, you know, kind of going seemingly very well. I think there’s also going to be news on Cuba. You could envision a world, there’s risk to the downside, certainly, I will stipulate. But you also have to pay attention to the risk to the upside. (Time 1:10:10)
  • Israel May Be Testing The Limits Of US Backing
    • The discussion around Israel shifted from battlefield tactics to whether Netanyahu is eroding US support by appearing to drive American policy.
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said Israel should fear losing a predictably steadfast US ally, and David Sacks noted Israeli politicians are already worried by polling. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Right, well, let’s maybe up level this a little bit and talk about why we’re in this war to begin with. And that’s the big discussion amongst both sides of the aisle. On Tuesday, the New York Times dropped an inside-the piece on how President Trump made the decision. According to this report, if it’s true, I know some people don’t subscribe to the New York Times anymore or think it’s fake news, but how Trump decided to basically follow Netanyahu Into this war on February 11th. Netanyahu met with Trump at the White House, where he gave him a four-part pitch on attacking Iran. J.D. Vance, according to the story, if it’s true, disclaimer, disclaimer, warned Trump that the war could cause regional chaos and break apart Trump’s MAGA 2.0, the Trump 2.0 coalition We talked about here, the big tent. And that’s turned out actually to be true. There’s been a bunch of hand-wringing from Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, right on down the line. Rubio was anti-regime change, but he was largely ambivalent, according to this story about the bombing campaign. Susie Wiles, chief of staff, said she had concerns about gas prices before the midterms. Pretty good advice there. And General Dan Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this of Netanyahu’s pitch, quote, sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling. If you put this together with Rubio’s walk-back comments at the start of the war, we knew, this is a quote from Rubio, we knew there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and that’s why we did it. I had Josh Shapiro on the All In interview show, and he talked a lot about this. There is a big underpinning here, Chamath, that the United States foreign policy is being driven by Netanyahu. Every Jewish American person I’ve talked to feels Netanyahu is not doing Jewish American and the Jewish diaspora. Any favors here by his approach to these wars? What are your thoughts on why we got into this and how we get out of it? Chamath Palihapitiya I mean, the person that decides is the president of the United States. So a forum leader isn’t getting to call the shots in the United States. I think very practically speaking, the markets are effectively pricing in that this was a small blip for whatever people think. That’s just what the best prediction market that we have is telling us. I think that’s important to acknowledge that we’re probably in the end game here. And the second thing to acknowledge is if I was Israel, I would really be concerned that unless I help find an off ramp quickly, the risk that Israel loses America as a predictably steadfast Ally could go down. And I think that that’s problematic for Israel, far more than it’s problematic for the United States. So all of that kind of tells me that we will find an off-ramp. A, because I think economically it makes sense, and then B, geopolitically I think Israel will want to make sure that this doesn’t burn a longstanding relationship. Jason Calacanis Yeah, that seems to me to be the major issue here is Americans basically do not want to be in this war. Americans do not want our forest policy being influenced to the extent they believe. I’m not putting my belief in here, just Americans believe we are being dragged into this by Israel and that Israel has too much, or Netanyahu specifically, has far too much influence. And then people believe the anti-Semitism that’s occurring here. Josh Shapiro gave me a lot of pushback on this. But all the Jewish Americans I talked to say Netanyahu is causing, with his actions in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran. He’s gone too far, and it’s causing the anti-Semitism we’re experiencing today. So you can make your own decisions about that. Any final thoughts here, Brad, on the American foreign policy being influenced too much by Israel? Brad Gerstner It’s the discussion of the moment. I mean, listen, kind of like Sack said earlier, I think that we will ultimately be judged by the outcomes. Right. And everybody is an armchair pundit today on, you know, the the the approach that we’re taking in these two different places. I think we could be on the verge of a massive transformation of the Gulf States. You went there with me, Jason, Saudi, Qataris, Kuwaitis, Emiratis. I’ve talked to a lot of them this week. I think they’re very hopeful and optimistic. I think you could bring Iran into the fold. But listen, I’m an optimist on all of this stuff. I just want to remind people, doing nothing in Iran had tremendous risks. Nothing in Venezuela had tremendous risks. So it’s not as though this was, you know, something that I think wasn’t well calculated. But I think we have to let the cards be played and then let history be the judge. But I think there’s a risk in both directions, but I’m going to remain optimistic. Jason Calacanis You said in the Gaza situation, we should have a wide berth for criticism of Israel and Netanyahu. What are your thoughts on this belief here in the United States now in this discussion that Israel is having far too much influence over the United States foreign policy? David Sacks I noticed in my feed today that Naftali Bennett, who is a major Israeli politician who was a former prime minister, tweeted polling that showed that Israel was becoming very unpopular In the US. And he was expressing concern about that and expressing the need to basically address that or fix that. So I think you’re starting to see Israeli politicians raising that as an issue. And I think that’s probably a good thing. Yeah, there it is. And it’s really cool, actually, how X now just automatically translates things from foreign languages, in this case, Hebrew, and it puts it in your feed. So yeah, so here’s Naftali Bennett, former prime minister saying this is a very situation. There’s a lot of work ahead of us to fix everything. Now, obviously, this is not Netanyahu. This is one of his political opponents. But yeah, I mean, this is something for Israel to consider and think about. (Time 1:15:11)
  • X Auto Translate Opened Real Time Global Discourse
    • Jason Calacanis argued X’s auto-translate changes cross-border discourse by letting people debate in real time without shared language.
    • He said Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, and Russian posts now surface directly in feeds and both sides see replies translated automatically. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Have to say, just as an aside, this auto-translate feature has done more for understanding across borders than anything I’ve ever seen. And it is the most impressive tech feature I’ve seen released in years, putting AI and large language models aside for people who don’t know what’s happening, because of Grok being Really good at doing auto-translate, they’ve taken the pockets of the best of what’s happening in Japan, what’s happening in Israel, what’s happening in France, and they’re surfacing It auto-translated. Then when you reply as an American to somebody in Japan, they see it auto-translated as well, which has led to people who don’t speak the same language engaging on X in a very nuanced, Fun, interesting way. And that as a truth mechanism is just absolutely extraordinary. I think this is going to have such a profound effect. Maybe Elon and the X team should get like a Nobel Peace Prize award for this. I think it’s going to change. I mean, I hate to be hyperbolic, but have you been using this feature, Chamath? Has it been coming up in your feed? And which language is up in your feed right now? English. Okay, so you’re not part of the translation thing. Brad, has this hit your feed yet? And which regions are you seeing? Brad Gerstner Definitely see it on the Middle East stuff. And, you know, I’ve seen it on Chinese. I’ve seen it on the Russian stuff. David Sacks Super helpful. Let me tell you, base Japanese is a whole other level of base. Brad Gerstner Whoa, man. Jason Calacanis Base Japanese makes like Fuentes and Alex Jones seem tame. They’re like, look at this group of people, insert whatever group of immigrants you like. And they’re like, this is unacceptable behavior. This is not Japanese culture. These people need to be, get the hell out of Japan. It is wild folks. And if you don’t have an X account, you are missing out. Go to x.com and sign up for this reason only because you think about the velocity. Like journalists are not even taking the time to translate and cover what’s going on in those areas. And this is happening automatically in real time. So you start thinking about what happened in Ukraine. If you had people in Russia and Ukraine doing this and having conversations with each other, it would be wild. Chamath Palihapitiya You’re like such a good hype man. The problem is you hype buttered bread the same way you hype a nuclear reactor. And so it’s hard to really tell, you know, what you’re really hyping because your level of excitement, the intonation is exactly the same. Yo, man, there’s nothing better than a slice of great toast. I mean, if this is very, this in a way it is like sliced bread. Jason Calacanis It’s very simple, but it is so powerful in the experience. Well, it is true. Brad Gerstner X is better today than it’s ever been. And remember, they have 70% fewer employees than they had the day Elon walked into the building. And so if there were ever a debate about this, like, and I remember everybody saying, oh, it’s going to tip over. Oh, it’s going to be a crappy experience. The fact of the matter, here’s we are a few years later 70 fewer employees and every other company in silicon valley is looking at that i think for a lot of these tech companies we’ve hit Peak employment we’re going to create a tremendous number of new jobs but for the existing jobs these companies are all realizing they can do more with less (Time 1:21:49)