Topic

OpenAI

A collection of 26 issues

The Salience of Data

Let me begin with a thought experiment. Imagine you know nothing about OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s financials. No ARR figures, and no valuation marks from the latest round. Now add one more condition, and it may be less hypothetical than it sounds: assume every frontier lab has access to

Why Consumer AI Appears to be Lagging Enterprise

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg internally shared that AI agents haven’t progressed as fast as he hoped. While initially many interpreted this as Meta specific stumble on their agentic AI efforts in consumer, Alexandr Wang later clarified that Zuckerberg was talking about “the industry’s progress on agentic capabilities on

The ASIC-GPU Standoff

My friend Liberty recently highlighted an interesting paper from Google that goes through the evolution of TPUs. The objection to domain-specific silicon which might sound quite persuasive is the one about obsolescence: a chip may take two to three years to design, fabricate, and deploy, and AI moves fast

What's Embedded in OpenAI's Stock Price?

OpenAI is still a private company. They have recently submitted a “confidential S-1”, so we don’t know their financials for certain. However, Financial Times (and Ed Zitron) both recently claimed that they have come across OpenAI’s actual financials. Based on this report, I did an exercise to

Token Cost Conundrums

A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted a couple of pieces by Anjali Shrivastava who made the point that a token is not a fixed unit of cost. Today’s piece is a follow-up driving the point home that even though every model charges its API customers per token,

The Pendulum Between Intelligence and Knowledge

Over the last week or so, I have started noticing an interesting development that is worth highlighting. Let’s start with Microsoft’s announcement yesterday. From Microsoft’s blog yesterday (emphasis mine): “Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot’s deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward. Designed to

OpenAI's Dilemma

WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece: “OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”

Frontier AI Economics

When I say frontier AI model developers have somewhat “speculative” economics, I do not intend to mean it is destined to be bad even though “speculative” does have negative connotation. What I want to highlight is the range of outcomes for frontier AI model developers is still fairly wide, an

The Misunderstood Utility of Search Ads

I have been increasingly noticing an overwhelming negative perception on search ads. Ben Thompson often mentions how search ads can feel like skimming the advertisers as Google collects rent on economic activity that would likely happen anyway. Notice this piece from 2022: “…oftentimes search ads feel like a rake on

The Ecosystem Advantage

Like “Spotify Wrapped”, ChatGPT yesterday let its users see their 2025 stats which was fun to go through. I almost exclusively use ChatGPT Pro model (with extended thinking) which makes it hard for me to casually chat with ChatGPT as it typically takes 10-20 minutes for each of my