Towards AI That Can Actually Interact

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, a new approach to AI called Interaction Models.
Before that in the headlines, OpenAI's big consulting arm is official.
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We kick off today with a story that is a follow-up to reports from last week. OpenAI is indeed launching a consulting company and now it is official. The business will operate as a separate company called the OpenAI Deployment Company or DeployCo for short. This is basically a forward deployed engineer shop that will pair developers with some of OpenAI's most important clients to help them on theoretically real deep AI and agentic transformation. Now, like the Anthropic Venture that was announced last week, DeployCo is structured as a joint venture, in this case with 19 partners across consulting, private equity and finance. The initial investment was $4 billion at a pre-money valuation of $10 billion, with TPG as the lead investor, Advent International, Bayne Capital and Brookfield as also co-lead founding partners. Now, one of the things of note here is that word on the street is that a big part of the motivation for the firms who are investing in this is to get first access to this set of engineers for their portfolio companies. In other words, this was effectively a buy-in cost to skipping the line when it comes to getting help on AI transformation. Of the partners announced, it looks like Goldman Sachs is the only one to back both DeployCo and the Anthropic effort, which is as yet unnamed. The guts of DeployCo are going to be built around an acquisition, specifically engineering firm Tomorrow, which will give DeployCo right out of the gate, about 150 staff who have experience in deploying AI solutions. At this point, there is basically no way to grow fast enough to meet this demand other than acquisition, so I would expect a lot more M&A soon. Even though this was a big part of the discourse last week, there was a surprising amount of conversation about this. Most of it was just a reaffirmation of what has finally started to become conventional wisdom, which is that it doesn't matter how powerful the models are, they are going to crash headlong into institutional inertia. And for enterprises to close the capability overhang and actually get the full value from these models, it is going to involve meaningful support structures being built around them, both inside and outside.
Now, one funny strand in the conversation that I've seen is a lot of folks running smaller versions of these agencies trying to sort of puff out their chest and make it clear that they still have a market because no matter how well resourced the efforts from OpenAI and Anthropic are, there's a massive long tail of people that need support too. And to them, I would just like to say, guys, don't worry. No one thinks that because OpenAI and Anthropic are in the game, somehow they are going to be able to consume the sheer tonnage of transformation support that is going to be needed over the coming decades to get these companies onboarded onto AI.
Next up, we have an interesting market sort of sub-story. You might have seen posts like this one from the Kobayashi letter, suggesting something about Anthropic or OpenAI's market implied pre-IPO valuation. Now, what that type of statement means is not a reference to evaluation in an actual fundraising round, but about weird gray secondary markets, usually filtered through some blockchain or another where market activity on those markets is being interpreted as actual price signal. In many cases, what you have is basically crypto tokens that claim to be backed one-to-one by stock held in SPVs that themselves own actual Anthropic stock. Anthropic, however, seems not to be a fan of this. On Monday, they updated a page in their support docs discussing unauthorized stock sales and investment scams. The article already stated that unapproved stock transfers were void and wouldn't be recognized in official records. Regarding SPVs, Anthropic noted, We do not permit SPVs to acquire Anthropic stock and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions. Any third party claiming to sell Anthropic shares to the general public is likely either engaged in fraud or offering an investment that may have no value due to our transfer restrictions. The Monday edition was a list of firms known to be offering access to the stock, with Anthropic specifically saying that, Any interest in Anthropic stock offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on our books or records.