Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters

**Martin Shkreli** (0:00)
The two richest guys in the world don't just drop 400 million on a single deal. The biggest VCs, maybe, that's still a lot. So how'd this guy show up with 400 million to drop?
So there's 10 trillion dollars, whether it include all the other hardware coming out, the rest of the ecosystem, et cetera. Maybe it's five to 10 trillion dollars market cap up for grabs, and it's not an area where there's a lot of startups, which is really shocking. I don't want it to have data centers in space, I don't want to have nuclear reactors in my backyard, and I think that it'd be a lot easier if we just made a freaking better computer.
And we're how big of a mistake you made? There's always redemption. It's just you have to show the vulnerability, you have to say, I fucked up. Even if you don't say, I fucked up, you have to show a scar or wound or bleed a little bit.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:41)
What actually matters in AI right now? Better models or better businesses? A few years ago, the focus was intelligence. Who had the best system, benchmarks and breakthroughs? Increasingly, the real question is economic. Who captures the value, how it's priced and where the bottlenecks are? At the same time, we're hitting limits. Compute is getting more expensive and new approaches from photonic computing to specialized hardware are becoming more necessary. That creates a tension. Software is easier to build, but harder to differentiate. Meanwhile, industries like finance and biotech still require deep expertise and real world validation.
In this episode, I try to understand where the real leverage is shifting across AI, hardware, and pharma. I speak with Martin Shkreli, American investor and businessman.
We're talking a very exciting day. We have OpenAI about to make an announcement. I thought I'd start by just asking for you to broadly reflect on sort of the OpenAI versus Anthropic.
What's happening here? How do you make sense of the ecosystem?

**Martin Shkreli** (1:55)
Yeah, so just, you know, obviously, disclosure. You know, my wife sat OpenAI. She's one of the first people there.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:00)
So I have a little bit of a bias.

**Martin Shkreli** (2:03)
You know, I have a bias against Anthropic as well. So I have a dual bias.
But basically, just trying to be objective.
If you monetized ChatGPT, both enterprise and consumer, fully, you'd actually have, I think, quite a lot more revenue than today. So just case in point, my financial software company we have about 10 licenses to Anthropic, and it's supposed to be $20 a seat. We get a bill for $1,000, or like $1,500. And that's good, you know, 5 to 7x, kind of what we asked for. And, you know, OpenAI could do that to their customers, too. Their customers will pay it. They don't really care to bargain either way.
But if you try to ring every dollar out of your user, you know, that has some adverse consequences, I think. And OpenAI, I think, has figured this out and wants to sort of boost their ASP or whatever dollars per seat. And so they're working their way upstream. But I think the traditional VC, you know, entrepreneur advice would be don't, you know, convince your customer if you can't help it. And I think that, you know, for an anthropic sort of reason, they want to price through the roof with all these overages. I mean, people complain that two prompts eats up their entire allotted amount. And so I think if OpenAI did that, they probably could get their today's enterprise revenue to something like $100 billion. I know some people would be very surprised to hear that, but I think that's the case. And then on consumer, the same thing with ads, right? So they might have, you know, and again, this sounds preposterous to anybody listening, but, you know, if they were steady, if they did the same monetization effort as Anthropic, their real revenue right now would be about $200 versus their $30. So I think this idea that, you know, Anthropic's taken the lead or something like that, I mean, it's pretty far-fetched. Now, having said that, obviously, we're super impressive product, really great people at work there. I think Dario is, you know, he's not my favorite guy, you know, obviously, incredible entrepreneur, beautiful business he's made. But, you know, the whole, like, and he tried to scare the world by saying, AI is going to kill you, it's going to take over the world. Nobody really believed that. Ah, it's, you know, nonsense. And he says, well, let me, let me shrink that down a little bit to, oh, the AI is, the AI is going to hack you. And everyone's like, oh, you know, it could happen. And so it's kind of the greatest marketing trick. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, I don't think it's in great faith. And, you know, I do think to some extent these guys are true believers of the former hypothesis. And, you know, so it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. It's just conveniently also good marketing.