This is going to be fascinating to watch.
Absolutely. And that sort of segues nicely into the point that you were just making about what happens to some of these other open source players that don't have the luxury, like Meta does, of maybe just open sourcing for a power play and do need to make money off of it. So what happens to commercial AI in the wake of kind of this explosion of open source development?
Yeah, very much so. And the really interesting question is, for now, the open source models are not as highly performant as the commercial models, but maybe there's a world where they do become as performant and maybe even more performant. So what does that mean in terms of overall sort of distribution of value and who grabs the value where in the industry? That's going to be another part that's going to be fascinating to watch. So in the meantime, for the commercial LLM players, it's been like everybody's favorite question.
Question: given the enormity of the amounts raised in a very short period of time by all the LLM players, are we witnessing this crazy incineration of capital? People have called LLMs, I think the expression was, the fastest depreciating asset in history. Those are certainly interesting and valid points with a lot of strong rationale behind them. But equally, if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, they're doing very well, thank you very much. They're just growing at an astounding pace in terms of revenue.
So there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance, and obviously what is true now may not be true in the future. But I think for me, it really comes down to what is a product that you sell. If your product is the LLM itself, then maybe that's tricky. If you think, if you build something and the value of what you build is there, maybe getting more open source and all the things becomes tricky, and everything does get commoditized.
But I think the OpenAIs and the Anthropics are actually going for kind of like a richer play where, yes, there is a model, but they have a layer on top. And the layer can be developer tools, can be a consumer engine, which is ChatGPT, famously, can be enterprise products. OpenAI already has released all sorts of data plays. And so it's more of a full-stack approach, and it feels like a lot of the value is actually going to be captured and retained through that application layer.
In a way that is maybe not entirely different from the cloud vendors. You could very much argue that the storage layer of an AWS versus a GCP versus an Azure is entirely not differentiated. And the game companies have played is really to capture and retain people through all the tools on top of the storage layer. And so far that seems to have worked very well in terms of growing the pie for the industry and capturing the hearts and minds of developers and customers.
Yep, absolutely. And maybe to your kind of analogy there between the cloud players and others, what's fascinating about this industry is how quickly it's been evolving. So think about kind of cloud players took a long time to develop that market share and add those services, but OpenAI just seems to be moving at a pace that's insane. What's up with them?
So that part of the discussion very much falls in the camp of like, okay, we're industry observers. We're not investors in OpenAI, but just like everybody else, we've been fascinated with the company and its everything, right? The scale of ambition, the pace of innovation, and of course, all the drama from the CEO ouster that lasted a minute and a half to safety developers or engineers that were let go recently. I mean, it just seems like something new happens every minute, and it's fascinating.
It truly is amazing to see a company that sort of escapes the sphere where we all operate that's dominated by the sort of laws of gravity, where raising money is hard and all the things. This is a company that seems to have unlimited access to everything, including capital. And it's probably a good thing because they presumably are burning an immense amount of money and an immense amount of compute for their very ambitious goals, so that it sort of feels like they kind of have to continue raising, but they're very successful at it.
So it's just fascinating to watch. The question is whether they can continue to escape the laws of gravity forever. I don't know, but it's a fascinating effort at sort of doing all the things at the same time. Like, as we were saying a minute ago, they seem to be doing the consumer thing and then the enterprise thing and then the developer thing, and then to do it all around the world. And that seems to be a lot, and that seems to be a formidable execution challenge.
And then it seems that Sam Altman, who's the Steve Jobs of our generation—we're actually joking, the Steve Jobs of the TikTok generation—unlike Steve Jobs, who was fired and came back years later, he left and came back within what felt like a minute. But Sam Altman, being the Steve Jobs of our generation, seems to be doing a lot of different things as well. He's doing OpenAI, he's doing the Worldcoin project, he's doing apparently that multi-trillion chips company, he's doing the AI hardware consumer thing with Jony Ive, formerly of Apple.
So this company doing lots of different things, the CEO doing lots of different things—how long can you just completely escape the laws of gravity that every single startup seems to be subject to?
Like, where the mantra in the startup world is like, focus, focus, focus. You could argue that Coinbase is actually a good precedent for it. It's also a company that was early-ish to—well, actually early to—a very large industry and has been doing the consumer thing, the enterprise thing, the institutional thing. So maybe it's doable. But anyway, it's an incredible way of building a company. And it feels like a lot of the industry is now waiting with bated breath for GPT-5.
And how much of a jump GPT-5 is going to be in terms of overall performance over GPT-4, I think, is going to be super interesting. Very much like a bellwether of where the industry might be going. It sort of feels like if it's an incremental improvement, that may signify that this part of the hype cycle is ending. If it's crazy, as everybody's hoping, then yes, then it feels like we're still very much in that exponential curve somewhere. We don't know where exactly, but then that'll be a very exciting moment.
It feels like OpenAI does have a lot of responsibility, so much impact, and therefore responsibility for the whole industry.
We were joking that with the release of Sora, you can now write kind of a Succession x Silicon Valley episode entirely off of this, the OpenAI saga over the last several months. So maybe someone will do that and take that initiative once it's released.