This is an excerpt from Alex Heath SourcesA newsletter about artificial intelligence and the tech industry, distributed only to The Verge subscribers once a week.
Yesterday I attended Eric Newcomer's Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, now in its third year. I have been attending this event for three years now. contract because Eric curates the speakers and audience well, and the conversations are more focused than at a typical industry event.
This year was no exception; however, I found the most interesting part of the day when the results of the anonymous audience poll were presented on stage. The more than 300 participants who took the survey were primarily AI company founders, followed by investors, other industry professionals (including product managers and engineers), and members of the media.
Here are the poll results in the order they were presented on stage:
1. What will OpenAI's annual revenue be at the end of 2026?
Average answer: $30 billion.
2. How much will Nvidia be worth at the end of 2026?
Average answer: $6 trillion.
3. In what year will the independent committee of experts, according to the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, declare that we have achieved AGI?
4. Which VC firm's AI portfolio are you most envious of?
The top three with the most votes, from first to last: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Sequoia.
5. If you could invest in any private technology companies today, what would they be?
The five largest companies (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 sell a startup worth over $1 billion, what would it be?
Confusion took first place. Second place went to OpenAI. Other names shown on stage: Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral and Thinking Machines.
What especially struck me about these results (Newbie published slides for its paid subscribers):
- Easement regarding 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 exponential for the business as the jump from 2024 to 2025. The forecast that AGI will not be announced until 2030 suggests a lack of faith in the model's progress to improve significantly in the near future, although this answer may also be clouded by the complexity of how OpenAI and Microsoft must decide how to do this. decided. (I'm still waiting for either company to share who their “independent committee of experts” will be and what decision they'll make.) It's also notable that more participants wanted to buy Anthropic stock than OpenAI stock, despite the general consensus being that OpenAI will take over LMArena next year.
- There was no meta in the conversation. It wasn't on the list of models that could top the LMArena next year. The presence of a Chinese model (Alibaba's Qwen) in the top five signals a shift that is already underway, as many companies customize Chinese open-source models rather than Llama. Meta has a lot to prove if she wants to re-enter the modeling race.
- The confusion is contradictory. But everyone who works in AI already knows this.
Other findings from Cerebral Valley:
What drives repurchase? I attended a breakout session on AI acquisitions, such as Meta's deal with ScaleAI to hire Alexander Wang and Google's deal with characters and windsurfing. I've covered many of these deals closely over the last couple of years, but it was interesting to hear the group's perspective on what's driving them. Antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies certainly plays a role, but some who have been involved in these types of deals also note that larger companies are competing with each other to support talent and move faster than their competitors. They have seemingly “endless money,” as one group member put it, and view it as a game of betting on a very limited pool of talent. One of the AI founders in the group, who submitted several proposals of this kind, recalled a member of the corporate development team of a large technology company who asked: to him how much he wanted his startup to be valued based on the deal price.
Nobody cares about AGI anymore. On first Cerebral Valley conferenceAGI was the main theme. The startup founder said on stage that “we will be dead” by the time OpenAI releases GPT-10. This year, many conversations on stage noted that AGI was hardly a topic of discussion. Instead, most of the interviews focused on business applications of AI. Many of the companies featured on stage at the first Cerebral Valley event did not exist and are now worth billions of dollars. There was fear of an AI bubble throughout the day, but mostly everyone seemed concerned about how they could gain market share and provide products that people want to pay for.
Standout quotes from on-stage interviews:
- Replit CEO Amjad Masad: “If you're competing on price, you probably don't have a business.”
- Elad Gill: “Most companies have to sell at some point. There is often a market maximization point where you can get the best deal. A very small number of companies should never sell.”
- San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “People are starting to complain about traffic. Thank God. I need those complaints. We still have a lot of empty office space.”
- Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: “I can tell you that time is not wasted on any of the dashboards I look at. It's just not a major factor.”
- xAI Co-Founder Jimmy Ba: “Knowledge is just crystallized calculations from the past.”
