Mar 9, 2026 · 58m · big-technology
AI Revenue Explodes, Dario’s Memo, McDonalds’ CEO’s Baby Burger Bite
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Alex Kantrowitz and Ranjan Roy analyze surging revenues and massive cash burns at OpenAI and Anthropic, examine Anthropic's escalating clash with the Pentagon over military AI ethics, and review the viral 'Burgergate' fast food executive marketing blunder.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Alex holds 50.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Alex as informed peer 6.0 Guest teaching 4.5 Guest disagreement 3.4 Alex pushing back 3.5
speaking balance: gold is Alex, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 3:08 Ranjan rejects ARR metric framing
Ranjan strongly pushes back against Alex's presentation of annualized revenue numbers, dismissing standard ARR extrapolations as COVID-era hype.
Hardest push from Alex ▶ 14:54 Alex challenges Ranjan on Amazon's retail marginsAlex forcefully pushes back on Ranjan's thesis by pointing out that Amazon retail is a low-margin loss leader whose entire retail profit comes from ad placements.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 29:42 Ranjan's prior evaluation vindicatedAlex openly concedes that Ranjan correctly identified the importance of tool calling and reasoning while Alex had prematurely dismissed the model advance.
Alex holds their own ▶ 15:12 Alex details the core mechanics of Amazon's business modelAlex demonstrates superior grasp of corporate margin structures, explaining why AWS and ads subsidize retail rather than the other way around.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Alex as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Alex pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evaluating Anthropic and OpenAI's Skyrocketing Annualized Revenue | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Alex cites reporting on OpenAI and Anthropic annualized revenue figures. Ranjan pushes back on using ARR as an extrapolation metric, comparing it to COVID-era tech over-extrapolations, while Alex counters with Anthropic's multi-year trajectory. | |
| AI Industry Revenue Forecasts Versus Escalating Cash Burn | 7 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Alex breaks down OpenAI's aggressive revenue projections through 2030 alongside skyrocketing compute cash burn forecasts. Ranjan agrees with the skepticism, noting enterprise coding pivots and probabilities. | |
| Agentic Commerce Competition and Amazon's Strategy | 7 | 4 | 4 | 6 | Alex offers an informed thesis on Amazon's retail business model relying on high-margin advertising rather than low-margin fulfillment, directly challenging Ranjan's view on why agentic shopping affects Amazon. | |
| Speculating on OpenAI and Anthropic's Potential IPOs | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Both host and guest discuss Jensen Huang's comments regarding potential public listings for OpenAI and Anthropic, joking about potential community-adjusted EBITDA metrics and S-1 disclosures. | |
| Apple's Hardware Dominance and Local AI Computing Emergence | 6 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Alex and Ranjan discuss Apple's hardware efficiency and how local model execution on M-series chips positions Apple as an accidental AI infrastructure leader without heavy cloud spending. | |
| OpenAI Releases GPT-5.4 with Computer Use Features | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | Alex admits Ranjan was right on a previous episode regarding GPT-5's tool calling and reasoning advancements after initially dismissing the release. | |
| Pentagon Supply Chain Conflict and Anthropic's Backlash | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Alex details the Pentagon's decision to deem Anthropic a supply chain risk and debates whether Dario Amodei's posturing was principled or backfiring PR. | |
| Leaked Slack Memo Details Dario Amodei's Political Critique | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Alex reads and analyzes Dario Amodei's leaked internal Slack message criticizing political praise and domestic surveillance, while giving consumer advice on chatbot training opt-outs. | |
| Lethal Military AI Targeting and Consumer Strategy Dilemma | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | Ranjan highlights the severe public backlash and stakes when AI targeting tools cause fatal military casualties, while Alex contrasts Claude's surging mobile downloads against ChatGPT's scale. | |
| Viral Reactions to McDonald's CEO's Tiny Burger Bite | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | A humorous closing breakdown of McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski's viral, awkward nibble of the Big Arch burger and its surprising viral marketing success. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Kantrowitz: OpenAI surpassed $25B in annualized revenue
“OpenAI topped, topped, twenty-five billion in annualized revenue at the end of last month. That's a 17% increase from the 21.4 billion in annualized revenue the company was generating at the end of the year.”
Kantrowitz: Anthropic reached $19B in annualized revenue
“Anthropic annualized revenue recently topped Nineteen billion up nearly three times from the end of last year and up 36% from two weeks ago.”
Roy: AI ARR projections resemble unsustainable COVID-era Zoom hype
“I will say the last two months have been absolutely wild, but it's more, it's starting to feel like COVID era extrapolation of every single business that we talked about, that the whole world is gonna move towards like remote work only and zoom is gonna be wor…”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI projects revenue reaching $284 billion by 2030
“They expect to be thirty billion in revenue this year, sixty two billion in revenue next year. A hundred and thirteen billion in 2028, one hundred eighty four billion in 2029, and buckle your seatbelt for this one, two hundred and eighty four billion in 2030.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI reaching $284B in revenue by 2030 sounds impossible
“To go from where we are now to two hundred eighty four billion in 2030 and by goodness, I'm sure this clip will come out if they actually end up pulling it off. It sounds impossible to me and the numbers seem fake.”
Roy: Probability of OpenAI hitting long-term revenue targets is below 50%
“There's a very clear story for it, but the probability, if you're assigning a probability of it happening, I don't think it's like above 50%. I think it's a reasonable probability, but I don't think it's like the, it would not be the expected outcome in my min…”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI burned $8B in 2025 and expects $57B burn in 2027
“Last year, the company burned eight billion dollars in cash. However, the company expects to burn twenty five billion this year and fifty seven billion next year. About thirty billion more than the total previously predicted.”
Roy: OpenAI is scaling back resource allocation for shopping efforts
“The information had reporting this week that open AI is already looking to scale back its efforts or its resource allocation around its shopping efforts.”
Kantrowitz: Amazon makes all its retail profit from advertising
“Where are they making most of their profit on the retail side? Or shall I say all their profit on the retail side? It's advertising. And that goes away. If you, even if you're able to do this well, if one click fulfillment, that's the least Profitable part of …”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI will be the fastest-growing company ever
“Opening eyes is going to be the fastest growing company ever, so you probably do want a stake of that if you're a company with the means to invest, and Amazon certainly had the money to do it.”
Huang says Nvidia's investment in OpenAI might be its last
“Jensen Wong said the thirty billion dollars that he and NVIDIA invested in OpenAI might be the last. Why? Is it because he doesn't trust Sam Altman, or is it because, you know, he doesn't believe in the technology? No. He says the reason for that is because th…”
Kantrowitz: Anthropic is hiring multiple Salesforce administrators
“Anthropic, by the way, which is saying that, you know, I mean, not saying that software is going away, and we'll get to actually some of the job stuff from Anthropic, but they're hiring multiple Salesforce administrators for a company that people say software …”
Roy: Running AI models locally undermines centralized data center capex narratives
“Small models are gonna run locally on device. And that's actually gonna be how infrastructure gets built out. That throws such a wrench into any of these stories that we've been talking about for the last 30 minutes, like that completely destroys those stories…”
Kantrowitz: Anthropic published a prompt to export ChatGPT memory into Claude
“Anthropic put a prompt that you could copy to ChatGPT to export your memory. Like I was saying, memory's not sticky. They built the prompt that we were talking about, and you drop it in ChatGPT, it prints out your memory, you paste the memory in Claude, and th…”
Kantrowitz: Scale AI shifted majority of training to reinforcement learning
“I just did the story for with about scale AI saying that the majority of their training has moved to reinforcement learning where they train models to act in specific environments like filling out forms, and then they baked those capabilities back Into the mod…”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI sees Claude Code as serious competition and is catching up
“Also, it's clear that ChatGPT and OpenAI see Cloud Code as real competition, and they're trying to catch up.”
Kantrowitz: Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a US supply chain risk
“The Pentagon has formally notified Anthropic that it's determined the company and its products pose a risk to the US supply chain.”
Kantrowitz: Leaked Memo Will Make Anthropic and Amodei More Closed Off
“It's going to be a change in Anthropics culture. I think Anthropic will become him and Anthropic will become much more closed off.”
Kantrowitz predicts Anthropic will still reach an agreement with the Pentagon
“And ok, on the Pentagon side, my guess is they still end up coming to an agreement with the Pentagon.”