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This is an excerpt from “Sources” by Alex Heath, a newsletter that delves into AI and the tech industry, exclusively syndicated for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, now in its third year. Having been a regular attendee, I can say Eric consistently excels at gathering an impressive lineup of speakers and attendees, making the discussions far more meaningful than those at typical industry meetups.
This year’s conference was no different. One of the standout moments for me was when the results of an anonymous audience survey were revealed onstage. The survey, which involved over 300 participants, mainly included founders of AI companies, followed by investors, various industry professionals like product leaders and engineers, and members of the media.
Below are the survey results as they were presented onstage:
1. What will OpenAI’s annualized revenue be by the end of 2026?
The median estimate: $30 billion.
2. What will Nvidia be worth at the end of 2026?
Median answer: $6 trillion.
3. What year will an independent committee of experts, as dictated by the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, declare that we have reached AGI?
4. Which venture capital firm’s AI portfolio are you the most jealous of?
The top three most voted for, from first to last: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia.
5. If you could put money in any private technology companies today, what would they be?
Top five companies in order from first to last: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenEvidence.
6. What global company’s 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 a $1 billion-plus valuation startup, which would it be?
First place was Perplexity. Second place went to OpenAI. Other names shown onstage: Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral, and Thinking Machines.
What stood out to me from these results (Newcomer has published the slides for his paying subscribers):
- A softening on OpenAI: Given that Sam Altman has said OpenAI plans to end this year with $20 billion of annualized revenue, this group of AI insiders doesn’t expect next year to be as exponential for the business as the leap from 2024 to 2025. The prediction that AGI won’t be declared until 2030 suggests a lack of faith in model progress meaningfully improving in the near term, although that answer could also be clouded by the complexity of how OpenAI and Microsoft must settle on how it’s decided. (I’m still waiting for either company to share information on who its “independent committee of experts” will be and how they’ll decide.) It was also notable that more attendees wanted to buy Anthropic stock than OpenAI’s, despite the consensus being that OpenAI would lead LMArena next year.
- Meta wasn’t in the conversation. It wasn’t named on the list of models likely to lead LMArena next year. The presence of a Chinese model (Alibaba’s Qwen) in the top five signals a shift that’s already underway, as many companies fine-tune open-source Chinese models rather than Llama. Meta has a lot to prove if it wants to re-enter the model race.
- Perplexity is controversial. But everyone working in AI already knows that.
Other takeaways from Cerebral Valley:
What’s driving reverse acquihires? I attended a breakout session about AI acquihires, such as Meta’s deal with ScaleAI to hire Alexandr Wang and Google’s deals with Character and Windsurf. I’ve closely covered many of these deals 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 certainly plays a factor, but some who have been involved in these kinds of transactions also made the point that bigger companies are racing each other to shore up talent and move faster than their competition. They have seemingly “infinite money,” as one member of the group put it, and see it as a game of placing bets on a very finite pool of talent. One AI founder in the group, who fielded multiple offers of this kind, recalled a member of a Big Tech company’s corporate development team asking him how much he wanted his startup to be valued for a deal.
No one cares about AGI anymore. At the first Cerebral Valley conference, the topic of AGI was a major throughline. A startup founder onstage said that “we’re going to be dead” by the time OpenAI releases GPT-10. This year, multiple onstage conversations noted how AGI barely registered as a discussion topic. Instead, most of the interviews focused on the business applications of AI. Multiple companies represented onstage at the first Cerebral Valley event didn’t exist and are now worth billions of dollars. There was a strain of AI bubble fear throughout the day, but mostly, everyone seemed dialed in on how they could win market share and provide products that people want to pay for.
Standout quotes from onstage interviews:
- Replit CEO Amjad Masad: “If you are competing on price, then maybe you don’t have a business.”
- Elad Gill: “Most companies should sell at some point. There’s often a market-maximizing moment where you’re going to get the best deal you can. A very small number of companies should never ever sell.”
- San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “People are starting to complain about traffic. Thank goodness. I want those complaints. We still have a lot of empty office space.”
- Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: “Time spent is, I can tell you, not on any of the dashboards that I look at. It’s just not a main consideration.”
- xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba: “Knowledge is just crystalized computation from the past.”
