AI has four layers : the application, the harness & context layer, the model, & the data center. Each faces a critical question about its future, & a shift at any one layer reshapes the other three.
Two CEOs now project $1t in revenue. Cloud growth is accelerating at $30b to $50b a quarter, but AI is eroding the legacy search & ad businesses that pay for the capex. The first $10t company will be the one that crosses that chasm first.
Arvind KC, Chief People Officer at OpenAI, on why efficiency is the wrong framing for AI, how companies democratize intelligence by amplifying their most valuable capability, & why EQ becomes the differentiator.
Security looks like the third AI market after coding & customer support. Attacks on banks, certificate authorities & open source libraries have never been greater, & every category of security work now carries heavy token consumption. Greg Brockman thinks security spend should vastly outstrip software spend.
Major build-outs run in two phases, per Carlota Perez: the infrastructure, and then the applications that pay for it. The internet took seven years to close the gap, and AI is closing it in about half the time. Whether that is circular depends on how large the circle is.
Granola's VP of Sales on why AI-era teams run smaller & quotas run bigger : eight-figure deals in two weeks, quarterly comp plans, & a sales pod that splits by layer.
Yesterday brought significant data to assess precisely the health of inference business models, & the data suggests they are quite healthy, even before the pricing ladder has room to climb.
Anthropic is the smallest & fastest-growing of the four clouds. At $1.5t to $2t, it would be valued equally to a standalone GCP.
Five frontier models now tie on intelligence within five points while their cost per unit spans 3.8x. Google's own silicon explains the gap, & every other lab is now racing to build the same advantage.
Every year we run an AI survey. Four results surprised us : security became the top pain with the weakest tooling, builders route queries on cost but not on trust, one vendor hosts the sandboxes, & the audit trail moved to agents.
