That is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a publication about AI and the tech trade, syndicated only for The Verge subscribers as soon as every week.
I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley convention in San Francisco, which is now in its third yr. I’ve attended this occasion for 3 years in a row as a result of Eric does an ideal job curating the audio system and the viewers, and the conversations are extra substantive than a typical trade occasion.
This yr was no exception; nevertheless, I discovered probably the most attention-grabbing a part of the day to be when the outcomes of an nameless viewers survey have been shared onstage. The greater than 300 attendees who participated within the survey primarily consisted of AI firm founders, adopted by buyers, different trade professionals (together with product leaders and engineers), and members of the media.
Listed below are the outcomes of the survey so as of how they have been shared onstage:
1. What might be OpenAI’s annualized income be on the finish of 2026?
Median reply: $30 billion.
2. What is going to Nvidia be value on the finish of 2026?
Median reply: $6 trillion.
3. What yr will an unbiased committee of consultants, as dictated by the Microsoft-OpenAI settlement, declare that we’ve got reached AGI?
4. Which enterprise capital agency’s AI portfolio are you probably the most jealous of?
The highest three most voted for, from first to final: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia.
5. In the event you may put cash in any personal expertise corporations at this time, what would they be?
High 5 corporations so as from first to final: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenEvidence.
6. What world firm’s mannequin will prime the LMArena internet growth leaderboard on the finish of 2026?
So as from first to final: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Qwen.
7. In the event you may brief a $1 billion-plus valuation startup, which wouldn’t it be?
First place was Perplexity. Second place went to OpenAI. Different names proven onstage: Cursor, Determine, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral, and Pondering Machines.
What stood out to me from these outcomes (Newcomer has revealed the slides for his paying subscribers):
- A softening on OpenAI: On condition that Sam Altman has stated OpenAI plans to finish this yr with $20 billion of annualized income, this group of AI insiders doesn’t count on subsequent yr to be as exponential for the enterprise because the leap from 2024 to 2025. The prediction that AGI received’t be declared till 2030 suggests a scarcity of religion in mannequin progress meaningfully bettering within the close to time period, though that reply is also clouded by the complexity of how OpenAI and Microsoft should choose the way it’s determined. (I’m nonetheless ready for both firm to share info on who its “unbiased committee of consultants” might be and the way they’ll resolve.) It was additionally notable that extra attendees needed to purchase Anthropic inventory than OpenAI’s, regardless of the consensus being that OpenAI would lead LMArena subsequent yr.
- Meta wasn’t within the dialog. It wasn’t named on the checklist of fashions more likely to lead LMArena subsequent yr. The presence of a Chinese language mannequin (Alibaba’s Qwen) within the prime 5 indicators a shift that’s already underway, as many corporations fine-tune open-source Chinese language fashions relatively than Llama. Meta has rather a lot to show if it desires to re-enter the mannequin race.
- Perplexity is controversial. However everybody working in AI already is aware of that.
Different takeaways from Cerebral Valley:
What’s driving reverse acquihires? I attended a breakout session about AI acquihires, equivalent to Meta’s take care of ScaleAI to rent Alexandr Wang and Google’s offers with Character and Windsurf. I’ve intently coated many of those offers over the previous couple of years, but it surely was attention-grabbing to listen to the group’s perspective on what drives them. Antitrust scrutiny of Huge Tech definitely performs an element, however some who’ve been concerned in these sorts of transactions additionally made the purpose that greater corporations are racing one another to shore up expertise and transfer sooner than their competitors. They’ve seemingly “infinite cash,” as one member of the group put it, and see it as a sport of putting bets on a really finite pool of expertise. One AI founder within the group, who fielded a number of gives of this sort, recalled a member of a Huge Tech firm’s company growth crew asking him how a lot he needed his startup to be valued for a deal.
Nobody cares about AGI anymore. On the first Cerebral Valley convention, the subject of AGI was a serious throughline. A startup founder onstage stated that “we’re going to be useless” by the point OpenAI releases GPT-10. This yr, a number of onstage conversations famous how AGI barely registered as a dialogue subject. As a substitute, many of the interviews centered on the enterprise purposes of AI. A number of corporations represented onstage on the first Cerebral Valley occasion didn’t exist and are actually value billions of {dollars}. There was a pressure of AI bubble concern all through the day, however principally, everybody appeared dialed in on how they might win market share and supply merchandise that individuals need to pay for.
Standout quotes from onstage interviews:
- Replit CEO Amjad Masad: “If you’re competing on value, then possibly you don’t have a enterprise.”
- Elad Gill: “Most corporations ought to promote in some unspecified time in the future. There’s usually a market-maximizing second the place you’re going to get the very best deal you may. A really small variety of corporations ought to by no means ever promote.”
- San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “Individuals are beginning to complain about visitors. Thank goodness. I would like these complaints. We nonetheless have loads of empty workplace house.”
- Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: “Time spent is, I can let you know, not on any of the dashboards that I take a look at. It’s simply not a important consideration.”
- xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba: “Data is simply crystalized computation from the previous.”