The Information reporter Stephanie Palazzolo shares usage data from a major AI inference startup following the release of DeepSeek-R1.
Assertion Partly supported
The Information: OpenAI hit $12B ARR as burn rose to $8B
“We had a story yesterday about open AI and how, like, I think they've reached about twelve billion ARR and yeah, but their burn went from like They projected, like, one billion to, like, eight billion or something.”
Assertion Supported
Palazzolo: Claude Code leads stayed at Cursor only two weeks
“We know that they went there, they were there for, I think, about two weeks, and they came back.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Palazzolo: VCs are growing frustrated with unconventional AI acqui-hire deals
“Talking to investors, I think they're starting to, I think they're kind of over these types of deals. Like, they're like, hey, I mean, like, this is, like, fine, but, like, we don't invest in companies so they can get, like, a weird acquihire situation a coupl…”
Insight
Palazzolo: Unbalanced AI acqui-hires are eroding employee-founder trust
“There's a sense that whenever you join a startup, like, you're gonna be compensated for the risk that you're taking on of joining, like, something that's unproven, and then now you're having these situations where, like, yeah, some people do get rewarded for t…”
Opinion
Palazzolo: Meta should focus on app integration over frontier models
“Maybe what's actually good for their P&L and their finances is to not focus so much on building these, like, insane, huge, state-of-the-art models, which they've obviously struggled with more recently, but it's to take things that are, you know, 70, 80, like, …”
Assertion Partly supported
Early GPT-5 testers report noticeable gains across coding, science, and writing
“And the story that we wrote, we kind of talked about how at least the people that we've talked to who tested it so far have been pretty impressed. They seem to think that it's been, you know, there's been improvements in a number of domains and both like scien…”