OpenAI Has Dots and Space To Share at Dev Day

Beth Lyons (0:00)

Hey, everybody. Good morning. It is a Wednesday today, but more importantly, it is the day after Dev Day, OpenAI Dev Day.

You are watching and listening to The Daily AI Show. It is episode 823 I am Beth Lyons. With me in the studio today is Andy Halliday. How are you doing, Andy?

Andy Halliday (0:21)

I'm well, thank you. Good morning.

Beth Lyons (0:23)

Awesome. Brian is on the road. Hey, Brian, we're waving from the studio.

Everything on my mind pretty much relates to Dev Day and the fallout of Dev Day. Do you have a more general world? Or is that your focus today, too?

Andy Halliday (0:43)

No, actually, I didn't watch Dev Day. I did read extensively, though, about the major developments that were announced there.

I have a takeaway on that is sitting aside the decision yesterday, as announced yesterday, that OpenAI is not going to do their IPO for some time yet. It could be later in 2027, Sam Altman saying, this is just not the right environment to do an IPO, and that raises some questions about whether it's also not a good environment for Anthropics IPO.

Anyway, we'll see. I think OpenAI will certainly work its way to a very much higher valuation than is currently accessible to them. I think that's part of the motivation. But now on Dev Day, one of the ways that they'll get to that higher valuation is with a renewed focus that's delivered on Dev Day for enterprise development teams. That's what they really want to penetrate and get the massive market share that's necessary to justify their valuations. Instead of pursuing as Muse might on the agentic front, an agent that is accessible and usable by individual consumers of all types, right from your Facebook experience and so on. I mean, there's a natural consumer focus for Meta. Instead, OpenAI is delivering a whole suite of things that are focused on the enterprise customers, and that's what Anthropic has done in their business strategy. It's delivered to them a higher valuation than OpenAI is getting right now, though both of them have about the same revenue run rate. I read that OpenAI is running at about 70 billion now, and the last time I heard, and I'm sure it's probably increased a little bit, is that Anthropic was running at a 65 billion annual revenue run rate. And of course, both of those companies are losing massive amounts of money because of the upfront costs of delivering the inference that is generating that revenue. But anyway, I want to go ahead. So my takeaway from Dev Day is, you know, oh, you're not going to give me dots? Bastards.

I'm a plus user. I'm kind of semi-pro, okay? But you have to have a pro account or an enterprise account to even experience dots.

And that's an expensive, you know, that's an expensive access ticket right there.

Beth Lyons (3:48)

And you can only use, you only get one as part of your pro account. Then if you want more, you can do other things. What I think is really interesting about what you just said is that you said that they're sort of equivalent in their revenue, right?

70 billion for OpenAI, 65 billion for Anthropic?

Andy Halliday (4:12)

Those are the most recent numbers I remember. I don't know what they are currently, but they're in the same ballpark.

Beth Lyons (4:18)

Which is amazing because the Anthropic has significantly fewer users, right?

Andy Halliday (4:24)

But they have paying users.

Beth Lyons (4:26)

But they have paying users. I mean, it's like, wow.

Because they're, like, we, I feel like we say them in the, we say them in order as though, right? I, Anthropic, OpenAI, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because they have parody in their models. Don't come at me. I like Anthropic better a lot of the time. But just across the board, we can say in general, they have parody across their models. But OpenAI has to solve so many more compute problems than Anthropic does. And yet, they're both at the edges of what they can serve, right? It's just the fact that they're both having like, we open something up, we got you addicted to it, and now we can't serve it to the level that you're used to. We're going to do something else behind it. That is in order of magnitude, a bigger problem for OpenAI than it is for Anthropic and Spark. Like, do your little niche thing that gets you to this top for fewer resources and same profitability. And they came out, Anthropic. Okay.

Did you see the Saturday Night Live skit with Dario?

Andy Halliday (5:54)