Wall Street's Top AI Bull Reveals the Real Bottleneck (It's Not Chips) | Dan Ives

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Paris Hilton** (0:26)
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**Dan Ives** (0:56)
The reality is like Anthropic and OpenAI, they're playing a whole different game. Then no one will compare from a model perspective to where they are, especially when you think on the open source side.
I think the investors, maybe industry, everyone keeps waiting for some crack in the armor. The reality is that...

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:13)
What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special treat. We have Dan Ives, the legend himself, here in the studio. He is now the Partner and Senior Managing Director at Yorkville Ives. It's a brand new merchant bank that he's building. And he spills the tea on every single thing that you care about in the AI trade. We talk about the Chinese open source models, what's going on with the Anthropics revenue slowing down, where are the big bottlenecks? What does he think about these companies that have seen their stock appreciate so much? How is he thinking about politics and all of the regulation, the data center moratorium in New York City and so much more? All of that covered in this conversation with Dan Ives.
All right, Dan, the AI bears have all kinds of new things that they're worried about. Let's start with the Chinese open weight, open source models. Now, all of a sudden, everyone thinks that they're going to take out the big model labs. What's your take?

**Dan Ives** (2:00)
Look, it's a mini deep seek moment in terms of the fears, but I mean, you've talked about this.
The reality is like Anthropic and open AI, they're playing a whole different game. Then no one will compare from a model perspective to where they are, especially when you think on the open source side.
I think the investors, maybe industry, everyone keeps waiting for some crack in the armor. The reality is that the models will get cheaper over time, and there's going to be five, 10x more models over the next few years. The value will be in the data and the moat, and that continues to ultimately be, I think that's the game that Anthropic and open AI are playing. That's why they're so focused on the enterprise. That's the right move. Models and Carps talked about it, will become more and more commodities, but for the first time in 30 years, it's not even a question. The US is ahead of China when it comes to tech, and I think that's just such an important point where we are.

**Anthony Pompliano** (2:56)
Now, what's interesting to me is they're complaining that there's been this distillation attack, and that the Chinese models are essentially drifting, or drafting off of these big American companies. But there's a lot of people in America, they're like, wait a minute, I think Anthropic just signed a $1.5 billion settlement with 500,000 authors for taking the books. There's a lot of people complaining about, didn't you kind of just do a distillation attack off of the IEP to be able to train the model originally?

**Dan Ives** (3:23)
Yeah, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, right? And I think just the reality is the models are built off content. I think when it comes from a model perspective, what China's doing, it's smart. Because look, they also have like one hand tie behind their back. They don't have Nvidia chips. Allegedly.
But even if you do, you have a third-rate Nvidia chip. I mean, you have Huawei, you have some, you know, obviously some competition there.
But the models need to get smarter and smarter. I think what you've seen with the Gemini delay, look, the Gemini has come, you know, they've fallen back a bit. But I think that's why it speaks to the pressure, CapEx raising capital. These arms race, it is not slowing down, it's third inning.