The Ledger
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OpenAI is discussing launching an open-source model shortly, says Brad Gerstner
“OpenAI is talking about launching an open source model here shortly.”
Gerstner Predicts OpenAI Will Release an Open-Source Model by Summer 2025
“I do think you're going to see the open AI open source model. I mean, Sam's talked about it many times. I think you're going to see that in the next 30 days or so, certainly by the end of summer, but I would guess sooner rather than later.”
Gerstner: Abu Dhabi Announced 5GW AI Campus with Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle
“In Abu Dhabi, they announced a five gigawatt USAI, you know, it's a UAE USAI campus. It's an incredible architectural campus. It's in collaboration with NVIDIA and OpenAI and Oracle. And think of it as almost like a global Stargate. So to put that perspective,…”
Gurley: AI agents will disrupt Google's high-fee ad model to OpenAI's benefit
“I personally don't think there's any way when that world you're talking about, that agent world evolves, that that partner in a hotel is gonna pay a fee anywhere close To the fee that's paid to Google by someone that's marketing a service that I always say usi…”
Gerstner: OpenAI Has Shelved Multiple Products Due to Compute Shortages
“I think they have four or five products literally sitting on the shelf because they don't have the compute to deliver it to customers.”
Gerstner: Winning consumer AI platform will capture 70% to 80% market share
“So I don't think it's going to be win or take as much I don't think we're going to see a 99% monopoly here, but I do expect that, you know, we're going to see 70 or 80% share go to the winner.”
Gerstner: Frontier AI race is closed to everyone except Musk and Altman
“And so if you said, is this still an open sport? I'd say no way, right? I don't know anybody else other than the Elon and Sam at this point.”
Gerstner: OpenAI is accelerating and widening its consumer AI lead
“The odds on favorite there has to be open AI. I think they continue to widen their gap, by the way, Bill, I think they're accelerating at scale, but that's where the race is.”
Gurley: Leaked OpenAI forecasts show $20B annual losses in 2025 and 2026
“There was someone published the internal forecast of OpenAI, which included, I think, in 25 and 26, losing twenty billion each year.”
Gerstner: Letting ChatGPT launch first was Google's mortal sin
“The only thing that could attack Google was never anything head on. It had to be an orthogonal attack from something that was 10 X better, a hundred X better because it gave us answers instead of blue links, right? That's why it was such a mortal sin for them …”
Gerstner: OpenAI and other frontier labs will open-source models in 2025
“Sam and the industry response seems to be tipping more in the direction where we're going to go open to. And my suspicion is you will see that this year you know, out of folks like open AI”
Gerstner: Export controls will prevent DeepSeek from keeping pace with OpenAI
“So, said another way, this was the moment in time where their compute comparison to OpenAI was the closest it's ever going to be for a few reasons. Number one, with the export controls, they acknowledge They, they're going to have a very hard time keeping up w…”
Gerstner: DeepSeek's training run was up to 50% more efficient than o1
“Now, of course, they talked about the six million dollar final training run, and this, it's important to understand, this is also correct. Right? And as I said on CNBC, this compares to about 10 or fifteen million for O-one out of OpenAI. So apples to apples, …”
Gerstner: DeepSeek and OpenAI Deep Research will unleash massive inference demand
“I think we're going to need way more compute than we have. I think deep seek unleashes the amount of inference we're going to need. I think deep research out of open AI unleashes that.”
Gurley: Microsoft refused to build massive AI cluster Altman wanted
“I think my own interpretation is Microsoft didn't want to build this big, you know, open AI playground or one as big as maybe Sam wanted to build. And so he went somewhere else and everybody, But everyone at the surface behaving like they're okay with that.”
Gerstner: Google and OpenAI will launch superior coding agents in 2025
“I think you're going to see some pretty dramatic breakthroughs this year on coding, right? So think about all the startups that we've seen in the coding space. A lot of them have used prompt injection and other techniques in order to You know, kind of get thes…”
Patel: Reasoning models like OpenAI o1 increase compute costs by 50x
“When I do this with O-one, right, because it's doing that thinking phase of 10,000... It spends a lot of memory on generating this KV cache and reading this KV cache constantly. Now the maximum batch size, i.e. Concurrent users I can have, is a fraction of tha…”
Patel: Broadcom holds custom ASIC wins with Meta, OpenAI, and Apple
“Broadcom does have multiple custom ASIC wins, right? It's not just Google here. Meta's, Meta's ramping up mostly still for recommendation systems, but their custom chips are gonna get better. You know, there's other players like OpenAI who are making a chip, r…”
Patel: Microsoft earns 50% to 70% gross margins on OpenAI models
“Microsoft's earning 50 to 70% gross margins on OpenAI models, and that's with the profit share they get to get, or the share that they give OpenAI, right?”
Nadella: OpenAI is this generation's defining company, creating a 'Mag 8'
“If you think about open AI, in some sense, you could say it's mag eight because I think the company of this generation has already been created. Right. Which is open AI in some sense. It's kind of like the Google or the Microsoft or the meta of this era.”
Nadella: Unlikely any foundation model achieves a two-year lead again
“I don't think there will be ever again maybe a two-year lead like this. Who knows? We, you know, it's all, you say that and somebody else, you know, drops some sample and suddenly blows the world away. But that said, I think it's unlikely that that type of, yo…”
Nadella: Microsoft Will Not Run Redundant Pre-Training Duplicating OpenAI
“Well, what we won't do is do it twice, right? Because after all, we have the IP from, like, it would be silly for Microsoft today, given the partnership with OpenAI to do two unnecessary-”
Nadella: OpenAI's partnership with Apple is accretive to Microsoft shareholders
“Ultimately, these things will have some overlap, but I also, in that context, the fact that they have the Apple deal is, in some sense, for the MSFT shareholder, you know, accretive, right?”
Gerstner: OpenAI has escape velocity to fund future models, unlike competitors
“OpenAI clearly has hit that escape velocity. They can fund their own future. It's not clear to me that many of these other companies can.”
Gurley: Big Tech Is Aggressively Undermining OpenAI and Anthropic Fundraising
“One of the objective functions may be just precisely to make it more difficult for OpenAI or Anthropic to raise, you know, ten billion dollars that they need to fund the next two model builds.”
Gerstner predicts SearchGPT will not reach one billion users
“I would say that search GPT I don't think is going to be the product that gets up to a billion users, and it reminds me, it takes me all the way back to a conversation you and I had maybe in episode four Which is what is going to be the next, you know, GPT mom…”
Gurley: OpenAI Reaches ~$2B, Anthropic ~$100M, and Perplexity ~$25M from Subscriptions
“Playing around with credit card data, I think OpenAI is about two billion Anthropics about a hundred million in perplexities at like twenty-five million.”
Gurley: OpenAI's 12-Month Subscription Retention Rate Is Around 35%
“On the 20 dollar thing, but at 12 months, the retention even in OpenAI is like 35%, so I doubt that anyone that is looking at that, even at two billion, Feels great about that as a durable business model”
Lafont: Large unicorn IPOs require $1B in revenue and breakeven path
“There's two criteria as one is, can you get to a billion of revenue? Open AI would be check, check, check the box. But the second one is, do you have a sort of a break even or a path to break even?”
Gerstner: Apple will partner with OpenAI, limiting features to newer iPhones
“I think they're going to have a series of announcements, you know, in terms of integrating with OpenAI. They're going to make the phone better. They're going to say, you can only get it on 15 plus or 16. They'll drive a replacement cycle into, you know, that b…”
Gerstner: Frontier AI Labs Must Win Consumers to Justify Billions Invested
“So if you're going to be Anthropic or OpenAI or Mistral or anybody else, it's hard to see how you build a business, you know, with payback on the tens of billions that you're going to be required to invest unless you're in the consumer game.”
Gerstner: GPT-5 will introduce early memory and agentic actions
“Like I think in GPT-V, it's not going to be the final state, but I think you're going to see the beginnings of memory and the beginnings of actions. Right. And this is, you know, months away and you and I have a bet on this.”
Madra: Developers replace OpenAI with Llama 3 with no performance loss
“And people are doing a direct replacement with open AI across the board. They come to us. So they come to, you know, all the different providers and they replace out open AI. And they don't really see any performance impact or any reasoning impact”
Gurley: Free Meta AI eliminates consumer willingness to pay $20 for ChatGPT
“As long as Meta's free, I don't think anyone pays the 20 dollars. And I will say that is as things sit today. If some crazy feature comes along, you know, we've talked about personal memory, maybe, maybe that comes back, but for now, It feels dead.”
Gerstner: OpenAI has caused almost no share shift from AWS to Azure
“We've seen almost no share shift from AWS to Azure as a result of OpenAI.”
Gurley: Ecosystem partners distrust Google and prefer OpenAI and Perplexity
“I don't think Google has treated its partners well in the search ecosystem. And so there's a lot of angst there and a lot of mistrust. And so if, OpenAI or perplexity came along and said, would you integrate and pass tokens? They might say yes. I think they're…”
Levie: AI adoption is bottlenecked by compute costs, not architecture
“So like we're increasingly not limited by the architecture of the technology. And now we're just limited by like, can Jensen make these things cheaper? Can the, you know, can the engineers at open AI have more efficient model algorithms?”
Levie: Cloud-Credit AI Funding Music Will Stop, OpenAI Aside
“I think unfortunately there's like an inevitable, there's going to be an inevitable, you know, that the music will stop at some point on, on, on this particular dynamic. Open AI, you know, aside, just because they actually do have the traction, they probably d…”
Gurley: Mega-cap cloud credit financing will cause market distortions
“What I fear is that this is happening at such a large level and maybe we haven't seen the end of it, right? I think there's reason you can see more that it's going to create a market distortion.”
Turley: Giving flagship AI model away for free boosted revenue and retention
“So we just gave it away for free and that ended up being totally revenue positive and retention positive because it just provided access to the tech.”
Turley: Most ChatGPT ads inquiries ask how to run ads, not disable them
“The most common inquiry about ads is not, you know, how do I disable ads or turn off ads, but it's like, how do I run an ad?”
Turley: About 10% of the world currently uses ChatGPT
“We've got about 10% of the world coming to us now.”
Turley: Quantitative Knowledge Work Will See Agentic Breakthroughs Due to RL Suitability
“I won't be surprised if you see this happen for other forms of sort of quantitative knowledge work, just because it happens to have the properties that code has. It's testable. You know if it worked or not. It's very RL friendly.”
Turley: Raw GPT-4 Did Not Impress Anyone Before Post-Training
“A few weeks or so after I joined OpenAI GPT-IV had finished training, and I remember trying it out, and it actually It didn't impress me at all nor anyone else that week, because it kind of didn't work, and it's because we hadn't figured out how to post train …”
Turley: Early OpenAI reasoning model swore after making a mistake
“We were showing this chain of thought as it was streaming out of the model and the model swore and said, like, oh, damn it, may have to adjust, because it realized it had made a mistake in the puzzle. And the fact that it did that, But in particular, the fact …”
Turley: AI demand and token consumption increase despite falling prices
“When you just look at token consumption per user especially in the enterprise too, which is, you know a massive opportunity. You see a lot of very GPU hungry, hungry workflows, and yes, demand keeps going up even as prices go down.”