What insiders anonymously think about the AI race

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, which is now in its third year. I’ve attended this event for three years in a row because Eric does a great job curating the speakers and the audience, and the conversations 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 an anonymous audience survey were shared onstage. The more than 300 attendees who participated in the survey primarily consisted of AI company founders, followed by investors, other industry professionals (including product leaders and engineers), and members of the media.

Here are the results of the survey in order of how they were shared onstage:

1. What will be OpenAI’s annualized revenue be at the end of 2026?

Median answer: $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):

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: