OpenAI Declares the Next Phase of AI

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:01)
Today on The AI Daily Brief, some big questions around the next phase of AI and whether what we now call AI is actually multiple things.
Before that, in the headlines, OpenAI joins the IPO filing party.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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For now though, let's jump into the headlines.
You can absolutely feel things heating up right now. We'll have some dimensions of that in our discussion in our main episode. But even throughout the headlines, the stakes are just getting raised, markets are firing up, energy is high. The whole AI space is just vibrating on a different level. One example of that, OpenAI has officially thrown their hat in the ring and filed to go public. The company filed their IPO paperwork confidentially on Monday. As I mentioned after the Anthropic filing last week, confidential filing is the industry standard and certainly doesn't carry any significant implications. All it really means is that we don't get to look at the company's financials until much later in the process. We also won't know the valuation sought by OpenAI until much closer to the listing. And while the press is casting this as an all-out race between OpenAI and Anthropic, the quotes don't suggest a lot of urgency from the companies themselves. When asked about the IPO last week, Anthropic president Daniela Amode simply stated that the filing gives us the option to potentially go public after the SEC review. In an ex-post on Monday, OpenAI said, We have not decided on timing yet. It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company, but it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best. Now, if you did decide that that was all just bluster and these companies were in fact in an all-out race, judging from the speed of the SpaceX IPO, you're probably looking at September as the earliest reasonable possibility, but who knows? When it comes to AI, a lot of norms are getting thrown out the window. Now, broadly speaking, I would say that there are two categories of takes when it comes to this IPO slate. The first is that the sequencing matters. Chebbi on X writes, going first could matter. The first major frontier AI IPO may define public market expectations for the entire sector, while later entrants risk being judged against that benchmark. And while that's certainly true, I find myself much more in the camp, shared by Lesan on X who writes, I have a prediction for Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX IPO. They will all go vertical. Or as the Kobayashi letter put it, we're about to witness the most incredible IPO run in history.
Now as the SpaceX IPO approaches, Elon Musk has unveiled further plans for putting data centers in space. In a half-hour-long video posted to X on Monday, Musk revealed a prototype design for the data center satellites. Each satellite will be designed to handle around 150 kilowatts of AI compute, roughly equivalent to a single rack of NVIDIA Blackwells. Musk said during the presentation, An AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and you still need some laser links, but you don't have all of the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. Given the two, the easier one to design for is the AI satellite. He later added, Part of what I want to convey here is that there's not some magic that's necessary that doesn't exist for AI satellites. A lot of this technology we've already made for Starlink V3 satellites. We don't think this is a super hard problem compared to things we already do.
Now, when many people first heard Elon start to talk about data center in space, there was a natural knee-jerk skepticism. And for people that dug in a little bit more, even outside of any pre-existing biases around Elon, there did seem to be some big, possibly insurmountable problems. Chief among them was heat dissipation, as the lack of atmosphere makes passive cooling impossible. We're now getting some details and it sounds like the SpaceX satellites will angle a thin edge towards the sun to minimize solar heating and use radiation panels to expel heat from the GPUs. The system is similar to the cooling already in use on Starlink satellites. Overall, the whole concept is starting to get a lot more credible in recent months, with Google reportedly in talks to partner with SpaceX for their own data center satellites. In other words, while there are still difficult engineering challenges, Musk is increasingly presenting a feasible pathway.