Limitless Podcast - OpenAI Has Been Losing Its Edge to Anthropic. But Not For Long.

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------Let's examine OpenAI's $122 billion raise and new acquisitions while they put others in the graveyard. We discuss the shift from data centers to cloud resources in response to competition from Anthropic and the implications of Sora's costly shutdown.With a potential $1.2 trillion IPO on the horizon, we explore leadership tensions over timing and strategy, alongside insights on the upcoming model Spud and Sam Altman's post-AGI vision.------TIMESTAMPS0:00 OpenAI's Comeback Story0:33 The Graveyard of Failures2:37 Competition with Anthropic4:11 The Closure of Sora5:06 Leadership Challenges6:06 Behind the Scenes of OpenAI12:28 The Path to IPO17:41 The Stakes of Success18:50 Sam's Vision for the Future------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

A lot of people have written off Open AI, but they might finally be turning things back around. They just raised $122 billion, the largest ever private funding round. They purchased TBPN for $200 million plus dollars. They cut out SORA, they reconsolidating every single resource into one singular super app. But there's tension amongst the rankings. Their CFO Sarah Friar is reportedly being frozen out ahead of a large IPO. The CMO just stepped down. And there's a lot of tension around whether Open AI will regain the throne

from Anthropic. And that's what we're going to be digging into in today's episode. We think that open AI is undergoing a pivot that a lot of people are currently missing. This is the comeback story. And I think it's told in three parts, right? It's like we start with, we have this graveyard of things that have gone wrong that led people to believe that Open AI is just kind of getting left behind by Anthropic. And market shares reflected this. But then we have all the things that are actually going on behind the scenes, followed by this conclusion, their magnum opus, which is leading into the IPO, and all of the things they're doing behind the scenes that maybe you're not privy to or recognizing. And starting with Stargate, which may be the biggest failure. I mean,

if the headline number was $500 billion for a data center. And if you remember, Samo was at the White House with Masayoshi from SoftBank and a few other people, announcing half a trillion dollars for these data centers to exist. Open AI has since scrapped the 600 megawatt ablion extension because it actually would have installed GPUs at a site where the power grid wouldn't be ready until the next-gen chips are available. So they've been having a lot of logistical issues. There was another problem that they had where the winter weather in Abilene, where they're building these data centers, literally knocked the liquid cooling offline for multiple days, straining the relationship. They've been having a bunch of issues, and the competitors

are kind of coming in to sweep up the mess, and it appears as of Open AI is kind of shifting the strategy from building these gigantic data centers to actually just deferring a lot of the money that they raised into cloud infrastructure and just borrowing the compute from other people. So this is the first sign of things that weren't going so well. Grand ambition. signed at the White House, didn't really convert into everything that they hoped and wanted for. You could also argue that OpenAI were the singular prop for the entire GPU economy, right? They started this whole circular economy by signing all these partnerships and deals, but it wasn't just GPUs. It was also the memory supply, which is required to build the GPU.

So every single layer of the picks and shovels, Open AI was involved. They committed to purchasing, I think, around 40% of the global memory supply, and they defaulted of that in the last two weeks. So a lot of this stuff is starting to implode and people are fearful of open AI success based off of that. But it's not just the infrastructure side of things. We have to talk about the competition between the other major competitive for them, which is Anthropic and Anthropic. And they've been cooking in multiple ways, the primary one being Enterprise. Now, if you looked at this chart about a year and a half ago, it would be the inverse. Open AI had the dominance in the enterprise market share. Everyone in Fortune 500 was using ChatGPT. And at some point in the last year

and a half, that flipped pretty aggressively. People became really fond of coding AI, started becoming productive within their own business, and Anthropic took the lead. They now have a 73% market dominance on first-time enterprise usage, and it's not just enterprise usage. Anthropic has also flipped their own trend on retail. Recently, they were adding around a million users or million sign-ups per day, and this came after the Pentagon fallout where Anthropics to their ground, and a lot of retail users really admired that. So, There is this shuffle or mix that has happened over the last year and a half where open AI kind of lost that gleam, that number one throne which Sam had held on to for the first couple of years of Open AI. And there's real competition in the play now. Well, for a while, chat GPT was synonymous with AI for a lot of people. It's like people thought that chat GPT was AI. It was the entirety of AI. And when Anthropic has done has kind of punctured a hole in that perception and saying that, hey, actually, AI is multiple companies. In fact, Anthropic is another player. And a lot of people have switched over. Now, this very much feels like what is it? Maybe the second inning. The first inning was dominated by ChatGBT. The second one now is showing some competition. There are some more elements in this graveyard that we need to get through before we can get to the good stuff. SORA being the next biggest.

one, I mean, SOR was costing allegedly $15 million to run per day with no revenue, and they signed a huge deal with Disney. Now, Disney didn't know that their deal was getting cut until the rest of the world did when SORA came out and announced that they were actually cutting the app. Now, this concerns some people. For me, it was this very exciting thing because SORA, I mean, it was the AI Slop app, right? Like, it's like TikTok, except for AI only. It was a totally different market than what it seems like they're moving towards now. Like we just mentioned the enterprise market is a huge market that they're going for. And SORA has absolutely nothing to do with that. So although SORA getting closed down could be perceived as a positive or a negative, there is

one last thing in the graveyard that is kind of just purely a negative and it has to do with the leadership shakeup that they're having right now. Yeah. So if we look at Open AI's products in general, they've been losing favor, but the team is what binds the company together. So they're the people who are building the products together. Even they have been suffering a bunch of reshuffling and tension amongst the ranks. So a few things happened over the last two weeks. Number one, OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fiji Simo, so not to be confused with Sam Altman himself, she has taken a leaf of medical absence for the next couple of weeks. There have been rumors for a while now that Fiji has been working remotely from California. And so, like, the fact that she's not going to be able to

have focus on this next stage of Open AI kind of suggests that maybe Sam needs to step in or they're under pressure from constrained resources to be able to pull off and execute their vision of securing AGI by the end of this year. There's also Sarah Fryer, the CFO, who is reportedly being frozen out from IPO talks. Apparently she disagrees with Sam's valuation. Apparently she thinks it's too extreme, and Sam doesn't really like that. Then you have the CMO, Kate Rouch, also stepping down from her position. So I understand that there's a period of consolidation of power under OpenAI.

I know that they called a code red about four months ago. So it's to be seen whether this is playing off. And I think the argument that we want to make here, Josh, on this episode, is that I think the pivot is working and a lot of people are missing that. The CFO news is really exciting. And if you stick around, we'll get into the CFO, OpenAI, IPO confrontation that's currently happening because I think that's probably the biggest part of the story. But this is where we go behind the scenes and kind of figure out what has been working. And I think a lot of people don't really, they see the headlines that SORA got killed, but they're not exactly sure why. And the

reasoning of it being actually something positive. Now, SORA compute was a lot. And as we know, because their data centers haven't been going online as fast as they needed to, OpenA is kind of constrained for compute right now. They have a very limited amount, and a lot of that compute has to go to serving users like us, but a lot of it also has to go to researchers for doing research and also training in order to train these new models. Now, by killing SORA, it frees up quite a bit of GPUs because generating video consumes a lot of compute to possibly help them train for this new model.

Now, this new model is codenamed spud, which is possibly GPT 5.5.5. or GPD 6, and Sam Altman confirmed that pre-training actually completed on March 24th. And Greg Brockman said this is the result of two years of research. And it seems like this is their perhaps not AGI moment, but this is the really big model they've been training for for a long time. And we've started to see the leaks coming out of what the outputs of this model can actually do. Yeah, so a lot of things have been leaked out of Open AI over the last week.

And we're not entirely sure if what you're seeing on the screen now, their new ChatGBT image two model is from the new spot model that you just referenced here, Josh, but it's pretty damn good. It's so good. Yeah, like, look at some of these examples. Like, what you're seeing on the screen here is four different examples of four different types of medium that you can generate as an image. So in this example, you've got the human anatomy in, like, incredible detail here, and it's all accurate. Like, you can kind of zoom in. This is such a basic thing, but a year ago, it couldn't do this. It couldn't spell English words correctly, let alone Latin. words and it is absolutely nailing it in this example. And then the one over here, it's nailed

like the entire global map. And then we have an example of like a real maybe photo of, what is this, Bath and Body Works, where it says, sorry, we're close for the evening, see you tomorrow. Now, a lot of these seem probably quite basic. We've got like a YouTube thumbnail graphic here as well. But in order to get the accuracy spelling, like look, this is not Mr. Beast that you're seeing on your screen right here. These aren't real videos that exist at all. Has been. incredibly hard, but now if you were to scroll on X or any other social media platform and see these images, you might be convinced immediately that that is real when really it's not. Yeah, whatever they're doing with this model, it seems like this is the moment in time in which

we will no longer be able to tell what's AI generated and what's not. Because if I saw any of these photos independently, I would have absolutely no clue that they were generated by AI, down to the handwritten note that we're seeing on screen here, where it actually looks really handwritten, very much like a human wrote it. And that hasn't been the case with a lot of previous AI models. So whatever they have done to kind of cook this image gen model in the background has worked in a way that's very impressive and really powerful. And it's also important to note that Anthropic has no image gen capabilities at all. When it comes to anything outside of text, Anthropic just doesn't exist.

They're not really a multimodal model at all. And it seems as if ChatGTPT now is kind of making a move towards even the Google side of things when competing directly with Nanobanana Pro or Nanobanamini. both of which are unbelievable model. So this is really exciting to see. And I think it's an early step into their new strategy that they're leaning towards, which is the super app. And the super app,

I think is probably the reason why a lot of people are switching over to Claude because they have this unbelievable desktop and mobile app that has everything that you want under one roof. If you use Cloud, you get access to, like, the anthropic models just to chat with. You get access to co-work and you get access to coding, along with all of the open claw functionality

that they've recently built in, like dispatch and we covered an episode last week. And I think that super app is a very powerful thing because the current chat GPT open AI ecosystem, it's very spread out. If you want to use SOR it, you need to download an app, log into your account. If you want to use Codex and write code, you have to create a whole separate entity. You have to download a separate app. It doesn't all happen on the same application. And it appears as if Open AI is officially doing the super app.

And this is a really important pivot for the company. Yeah. And the part I like most about this super app is their insane turnaround for coding AI. Now, I have to stress, at the end of last year, it was very clear what the number one coding AI model was. It was Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic, and it was number one by a country mile. Now, OpenAI since then called a Code Red, and they consolidated all their compute resources, all their research talent to focus on two specific things, building the best generalized LLM and to upgrade their coding model. Why? Because their argument was, if you have the best coding AI model, you will basically win the AI race because you could use. use that coding model to build every other single app that you want to, including the next AI

models that you release. And a lot of these companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are currently using their models to build the next model. So coding, very important. Codex right now is amazing. Now, it's not seen that way amongst the average user who is vibe coding. They still very much prefer Claude Code and Opus 4.6 because the personality feels right. It sounds intuitive. It's easy to understand. But for those of you who are serious about software engineering, lot of the feedback has since been that Codex is a much better coding agent. Now, that's not entirely true when it comes to spinning up multiple coding agents. A lot of engineers have said Codex kind of loses its ability to coordinate amongst themselves, and therefore they need to

use Claude Opus 4.6. But the turnaround that Open Air has managed to achieve has been nothing short of amazing. And I think Codex has around 2 million weekly active users, which was up from like 100,000 at the start of the year. So very impressive turnaround. It's growing very quickly. And it's a great product. I was building a little website just to test things out, comparing Codex directly with Opus 4.6. And Codex was faster. It was more effective, but Claude was easier to use. It was much warmer, much more friendly.

And the design I found was just much better in general, the design sense. So they're both spiky in their own ways, but Codex is an amazing product for people who are hardcore coders and just want the absolute best tokens generated. Now, all of this to say that opening eyes in a pretty good place. and they, there's been laying the foundation perhaps a little more quietly than they should have on the next step forward. And that next step forward really is driven by this IPO. And now, the IPO has been a major point of contention because there is some conflicts in the company. But before we get into the conflict, the new fundraising round is telling. EJ's, this is probably the final fundraising round they're going to have that's private. I mean, the next one is going to be

the full public offering. And it's the largest ever private round. I want to show you this graphic, Josh, just to put into context the scale of this race. So that's outrageous. Prior to this, the company that had the single largest private round was also Open AI in 2025 where they raised around $40 billion. This is almost 3x at that point. It is just a gargantuan round and puts things into perspective as to, you know, people really believe that the scaling laws are intact.

What they mean by that is a lot of this round is going to be used to acquire GPUs. compute, setting up energy infrastructure grids to be able to train the next model. And Greg Rockman on a recent interview last week, I believe, said the same thing. He said, if I could get my hands on all of the compute in the world, I would because it is a direct translation into revenue for open A. And they've proven that time and time again. I think Anthropics has done the same thing. But part of me just feel a little uncomfortable about this, Josh, because they've raised all this money, right? They've given all their investors, I think I saw Ashton Coucher in like a leaked cap table had made a 43X on his fund from his initial investment from open-a-e.

So they're already up passively. And now they're going to do this huge IPO, which has rumored to be around $1.2 trillion and above on open market. I feel like things might be getting a little bit frothy. I don't know if you have the same take here. But I know that they need the funds for scaling their AI, but I don't know if a lot of this, I don't know how much of this is just kind of PR to get the biggest IPO ever.

Well, there has been PR, and it hasn't been very positive, it because it appears as if Sam Altman has been fighting with the CFO of the company Sarah Fryer as it relates to the IPO timing and how they're actually going to initiate it. So from my understanding, and this is kind of what intuitively really makes sense, is Sam Altman wants to get out as soon as possible. We know SpaceX recently just filed for their IPO. It was privately, but it's going to happen sometime around June. They're going to come out of the gates first. They're going to raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. That's going to absorb a lot of money from the market. There's still a lot of enthusiasm for AI companies. Open AI surely wants to

get there first. I can't imagine a world in which you wouldn't want to be ahead of Anthropic when the resource that matters the most to scaling is capital. Now, Sarah Fryer is kind of, e-just to your point that you were mentioning earlier, she's a little bit more cautiously optimistic where she's like, hey, guys, we have a lot of money. We just raised a ton of money. Our problem isn't actually raising money. It's deploying it effectively. And we haven't proven that we can deploy this capital effectively, So why are we going to rush to raise so much more? And I think that's a totally valid argument. And I understand the case for both.

One is very pragmatic. One is very CEO optimistic. We are going to raise a ton of money and we are going to deploy it effectively and bring 10 gigawatts of compute on by the end of the year. And I don't know which one is right, but it appears as if Sam is going to win. And having more capital on the balance sheet, maybe it's not a bad thing. In the case that things are frothy, in the case that capital does start to, disappear, they want to have at least some amount of runway to continue to scale these data centers.

And that's what this IPO would afford them. So we'll see. But all of this is kind of guiding towards a gigantic IPO at some point this year for Open AI possibly ahead of Anthropic. So what do we have as major IPOs this year? We have Anthropic that you mentioned. I think they're rumored to go IPO at around $800 billion. So they don't quite hit the trillion dollar mark. And then you have SpaceX, which last week Bloomberg reported that they're apparently valuing it at a $2 trillion IPO. So OpenAIA, I think wants to come to... You think it's too high?

SpaceSets? 1.75. 1.75. Okay, okay, so you're fine with $250 billion discount. Got it. Okay, right. Yes. Okay, okay. But the point is, I think Sam wants to kind of mark the ground, plant the flag that

Open AI is a serious company and that they are capable of raising huge amounts of capital for a very necessary technology. Now, there's the optimist to take where if things are going well, you kind of want to add fuel to the fire, but also if things go horribly wrong, it's kind of nice to have $122 billion in the back, I guess, to kind of bail yourself out. So I see the angle that they're going for. Again, to my earlier point, apparently this is their leaked cap table that I'm showing you on screen, which shows how much original investors in Open Air are up, including recent ones, by the way, such as SoftBank, who wrote a 64 or 65 billion dollar check and is already up one and a half times. The only one that's

actually down, ironically, is Nvidia, the richest company in the world, who is underwater by $500 million because they recently invested $30 billion into the $122 billion round. So a lot of people are up. Ashton Coucher, again, greatest investor of all time is up around 43X. The point is there's a lot of money here. Evaluations are hugely inflated. Open AI cannot afford not to deliver at this point, because if they do, I fear it would lead to the implosion of a lot of capital markets, not just AI. Yeah, but if they do, if this new model named code name Spud does land sometime in April or May, and it performs as advertised as this pseudo-artificial general intelligence,

then every single open AI is dead narrative kind of reverses overnight. Yes. And then the GPT Exodus becomes a thing of the past. And the bet that Sam is making is that he's going to be able to create the most consequential product probably since GPT 4.0. And if they could do that, if they could pull that off, and if they could do so, leading up to their IPO, then that's a very strong headwind that they can have leading into this giant fundraising round, hopefully giving them a ton of money on the cap table, but also raising quite a

large valuation. So there's a lot of things that play here. There's a lot of strategy being deployed and great products being built. And I think over the next coming weeks and months, we're going to see the fruits of their labor kind of come to life. And I'm hopeful that they are a grand slam, home run, incredible products, and I'm pretty stoked for the future of Open AI. Well, what if I told you Sam had written a industrial policy on post-AGI economics, aka universal high income, where he dropped this this morning, and he basically describes a world where AGI basically does and automates all human labor, and so we need to figure out a way to give dividends to humanity.

So he talks about restructuring the entire tax system, giving people a salary every couple of weeks or every month, and humans just get a four-day work week, which sounds amazing probably to a lot of listeners. So I'm just saying he wouldn't probably be writing this manifesto if part of what he's claiming to deliver on Israel. Yeah. So bullish on Open AI as a company,

bullish on the roadmap, bullish on the kind of foundational work they've been doing the last few months, and just very excited to see where they end up. I think a lot of people who are doubting them, who are canceling their premium subscriptions, are going to find themselves sadly mistaken over the next coming weeks and months,

particularly starting with this new image model, which seems pretty incredible. I imagine once it's fully released and it's not just in its leaked form, we're going to be getting some really amazing demos. We'll be offering them up here on the show, as always. And as always, thank you guys so much for joining us and for watching this episode. We're kicking off another strong week in the world of AI. If you enjoy this, please don't forget to share with your friends, your family,

anyone who you think would be interested in this type of content. And each has any final words before we take off for the day? Nope. Thank you guys so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one.