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This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the technology industry, is only distributed to The Verge subscribers once a week.
I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, now in its third year. I have been attending this event for three years respectively Because Eric does a great job of organizing the speakers and audience, the talks are more substantive than a typical industry event.
This year was no exception; However, I found the most interesting part of the day to be when the results of the anonymous audience poll were shared on stage. More than 300 people participated in the survey, primarily founders of AI companies, followed by investors, other industry professionals (including product leaders and engineers), and members of the media.
Here are the poll results in order of how they were shared on stage:
1. What will OpenAI’s annual revenue be at the end of 2026?
Average answer: $30 billion.
2. What is Nvidia worth at the end of 2026?
Average answer: $6 trillion.
3. In what year will an independent panel of experts, as dictated by the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, declare that we have reached artificial general intelligence?
4. Which VC firm’s AI portfolio are you most jealous of?
The top three most voted on, from first to last: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia.
5. If you could invest money in any private technology company today, what would it be?
Top five companies, in order from first to last: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenEvidence.
6. Which global company model will top the LMArena web development leaderboard at the end of 2026?
In order from first to last: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Qwen.
7. If you could short sell a startup worth over a billion dollars, what would you choose?
First place was confusion. Second place went to OpenAI. Other names on stage: Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral and Thinking Machines.
What caught my attention from these results (Newcomer He posted the slides For its paying subscribers:
- Easing on OpenAI: Given that Sam Altman said OpenAI plans to end this year with $20 billion in annual revenue, this group of AI insiders doesn’t expect next year to be as big a business leap as the jump from 2024 to 2025. The prediction that AGI won’t be announced until 2030 suggests a lack of confidence in the model’s progress being measurably improving in the near term, though that answer could also be clouded by the complexities of how OpenAI and Microsoft will settle. About how. It’s been decided. (I’m still waiting for either company to share information about who the “independent panel of experts” will be and how they will decide.) It was also notable that more attendees wanted to buy Anthropic stock than OpenAI, despite the consensus that OpenAI will lead LMArena next year.
- Meta wasn’t in the conversation. He was not included on the list of potential bidders to lead LMArena next year. The presence of a Chinese model (Alibaba’s Coin) in the top five indicates a shift already underway, with many companies working to improve on open source Chinese models rather than llamas. Meta has a lot to prove if it wants to get back into the prototype race.
- Confusion is controversial. But everyone who works in the field of artificial intelligence already knows this.
Other takeaways from Brain Valley:
What drives Reverse gains? I attended a breakout session on AI acquisitions, such as Meta’s deal with ScaleAI to hire Alexander Wang and Google’s deals with Character and Windsurf. I’ve covered many of these deals closely over the past couple of years, but it was interesting to hear the group’s perspective on what drives them. Antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies certainly plays an important role, but some who have been involved in these types of transactions also point out that big companies are racing against each other to shore up talent and move faster than their competitors. They seem to have “infinite money,” as one group member put it, and see it as a game to bet on a very limited pool of talent. One of the AI founders in the group, who has given multiple presentations of this kind, recalls that a member of the corporate development team at a major technology company asked for him How badly he wanted his startup to be valued for a bargain.
No one cares about artificial general intelligence (AGI) anymore. in First Brain Valley Conferencethe AGI theme served as a main line. “We’ll be dead” by the time OpenAI launches GPT-10, one startup founder said on stage. This year, several on-stage talks noted how artificial general intelligence barely registered as a topic of discussion. Instead, most interviews focused on business applications of AI. Multiple companies represented on stage at Cerebral Valley’s first event never existed and are now worth billions of dollars. There was fear of the AI bubble all day long, but for the most part, everyone seemed to be talking about how to win market share and provide products that people were willing to pay for.
Notable quotes from onstage interviews:
- Amjad Massad, CEO of Replit: “If you’re competing on price, you probably won’t have a business.”
- Elad Gale: “Most companies have to sell at some point. There is often a moment of market maximization where you will get the best deal possible. Very few companies should never sell.”
- San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “People are starting to complain about the traffic. Thank God. I want those complaints. We still have a lot of empty office space.”
- Anthropy Chief Policy Officer Mike Krieger: “The turnaround time, I can tell you, is not on any of the dashboards I look at. It’s not a major consideration.”
- Jimmy Ba, co-founder of xAI: “Knowledge is just crystallized calculations from the past.”
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