SPCX, Anthropic, OpenAI: Three Companies to Lead Next Tech Frontier

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Do want to shift our gears here though, bring Sam back into the conversation and turn our attention to three companies that our next guest says are on the frontier of technology. Joining us now, Ryan Zurrer, the founder and director of Dialetic. Ryan, thank you for being with us today.

Let's start with SpaceX because of the timeliness of its successful launch and finally reaching Earth orbit, placing some satellites out into orbit. When you look at SpaceX, what kind of company is SpaceX right now? Is it a rocket company? Is it an AI company? Is it a compute company? I had a guest a few weeks ago tell me they expect SpaceX to become the biggest Neo Cloud in the world. So where do you stand on SpaceX?

Ryan Zurrer (0:41)

Yeah. So if you take a look at the revenue, either the guided 100 billion ARR from the company, or are calculated in our open source model, 56 billion in 2026 revenue. That is split about one-third in the AI compute.

So outside of Cursor and GROK, but the actual compute. Starlink is one-quarter, and then launch is a little bit less than 20 percent. So what that tells us is that today, the company is primarily an AI compute business. It's important to remember that the core resource that SpaceX is actually selling is their engineering talent. They have the SEAL Team 6 of engineering, and they can point that SEAL Team 6 at different problems, whether it's AI compute, rocket launch, or connectivity.

The important implication to take away from this is that less than a year ago, there was a lot of conversation about whether the XAI acquisition was a bailout. And today, combined with the cursor one-two punch, it may go down as one of the best acquisitions in the history of technology, right up there with Instagram followed by WhatsApp.

SPEAKER_3 (2:05)

Again, obviously we need a lot of compute with what the Anthropics or the OpenAI's are doing in the world. I mean, I'm just wondering, I mean, it's been a fascinating 48 hours, what we've heard from both of these companies. I mean, this alarming leaked prospectus from Anthropic, which was generating a lot of debate in the market yesterday. On the other side of the country, you had Sam Altman saying, hey guys, we've got to put the brakes on this stuff, we can't release models because we've got to get the safety right. How are you thinking about these two companies right now and their endeavor to go public with all of this noise and this juxtaposition in the market of the dangers versus what to do about it?

Ryan Zurrer (2:48)

Yeah, I think the two companies are on a very different trajectory in this moment. Obviously, with S1 filed, Anthropic is looking to go public this year.

$2 trillion valuation on that, underwritten against trailing losses of $42 billion. So that's going to be a very price insensitive investor who's underwriting that purchase. It looks like OpenAI will delay well into next year. I would guess that that is probably due to the fact that they have not had the favorable quarters that Anthropic has in these recent two quarters. It has surprised me that Anthropic has not followed up the leak of some of the trailing numbers of 2025 with the more favorable 2026 numbers. But the net net here is that it does appear that both are going out the door as quickly as they possibly can. That may be due to the fact that they are seeing margin erosion. According to David Freeberg, as of 13 weeks ago, the split between compute tokens between open source and frontier models was 80 for the frontier and 20 for the open source. That has shifted to 2080 over the last 13 weeks. So we're seeing a huge shift in the market towards on-prem open source.

We see this on the ground in our own company as we move on-prem and open source. A lot of CEOs and peers that I speak with are saying, what our spring Claude bill was is 5 to 8X what our fall Claude bill will be. That's really important to look at moving forward.

SPEAKER_1 (4:49)

So if we've seen that dramatic shift then toward this open away from frontier, and you say that that has us looking at Anthropic rushing to market perhaps because of some of this potential erosion, what does that mean for the economics then and the competitive mode of these companies building frontier models who are expected to have these unicorn IPOs and arguably be massively successful companies once they IPO at least prior to the release of that data from the last 13 weeks?