Prof G Markets - OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google Gains Ground

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Ed Elson is joined by Alex Kantrowitz, host of the Big Technology podcast, to unpack why OpenAI has declared a “code red,” and what that signals for the broader AI race. Then Michael Green, Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager at Simplify Asset Management, comes on to discuss his viral essay arguing that the real poverty line in the U.S. for a family of four is $140,000. Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Follow Scott on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And in other news China's entire podcast industry just collapsed. Money markets left. If money is evil, then that building is hell. Welcome to Profi Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is December 3rd. Let's check in on yesterday's Market Vitals. The major indices rose as Bitcoin staged a rebound

climbing back above $92,000. Intel jumped 9% on news that it will supply chips for Apple. Meanwhile, Apple hit an all-time high after the company named its new AI chief. And finally, shares of Warner Bros. Discovery rose 3% as details on bids for the company were revealed. Comcast reportedly wants to merge Warner Bros. Discovery with its NBC Universal Division. Meanwhile, Netflix and Paramount have submitted revised cash offers. Okay, what else is happening? Open AI has declared Code Red.

Those were the words that Sam Altman used in an internal memo following the meteoric rise of Google's Gemini. According to the memo, OpenAI is refocusing its resources on improving the quality of chatGBT. That also means delaying work on other initiatives, including advertising. Google's Gemini 3 release has outperformed OpenAI on several metrics, but most importantly, its market share has surged this year

from 6% to 15%. Okay, here to help us break down what this Code Red means for OpenAI and for the AI race at Lodge. We are speaking with Alex Cantorwitz, host of the Big Technology podcast, Alex. Very good to see you. Thank you for joining us on Profty Markets. Great to see you, Ed. It's awesome to be here.

So we want to get into this Code Red from OpenAI. I just love that term Code Red. it all sounds very dramatic. What do we know about what this means? Why is Sam Altman saying or declaring Code Red at OpenAI? What does it say about the AI race right now? Well, it's very funny because if you think back, actually Google declared Code Red not long ago

when it saw Open AI encouraging, like taking some of its search territory, and at Google, that Code Red worked. And they built a great model in Gemini. And now all of a sudden, And Sam Altman internally has been admitting that in some areas, Gemini is better than the GPT models that OpenAI has. So he sees, I think, for the first time, a real threat coming to take market share from ChatGPT. And it's code right inside OpenAI now.

And basically what Altman is doing is focusing the company on making ChatGPT better. I think what they're really going to do is try to make the bot more personable, try to make it remember you better. and do whatever they can to sideline other initiatives within the company, to focus on chat GPT and make sure that it maintains its lead against the others, even as the technology isn't as differentiated as it once was. Is it just Google? I mean, it seems based on what we've been reading, that it's Google that Open AI is worried about,

specifically Gemini, obviously Gemini 3 recently released. So is it just Google, or is Sam Altman also? worried about all the other ones as well. What is this really about? I think it's primarily Google. Beforehand, the models that rivaled ChatGPT or the GPT models within Open AI, you could probably list some of the open source models, which are a threat for their own reasons, and Anthropic, which had been focused on enterprise. But with Google, what you have is really this potential to eat into Open AI's market share in the consumer front. Like Google makes consumer products. They're not great at social products, but lots of people.

people use their products. They're not just an enterprise company. And so what you can see now is basically you get a whole constellation of companies coming for OpenAI. You could have some of the open source models taking some of their enterprise work. You could see Anthropics, taking some of their coding work, and now Google is a threat on the consumer front. And if you think about what Open AI has done, it's built this amazing product, ChatGPT with 800 million weekly active users, that is the bread and butter of that company right now. They had seeded effectively some of the enterprise stuff to Anthropic. And so that's why it's code red within Google. A, you see all these different companies picking apart the company's lead. But on the other

hand, the company had hung its hat on being the best consumer application for generative AI, and now Google has entered the ring in a very big way. I think one of the most interesting things that we learned as well is, I mean, they've decided that they need to focus on the quality of the product, and that is going to be at the expense of building out the ad model. And, you know, we've been saying on this podcast for a while that they need to build out that business because how are they going to monetize this thing?

And it appears that they've again taken a step back and said, no, we need to spend more on basically market share, basically growing our users, which seems as though they're going to kick the can monetization even further down the road, which seems to me kind of concerning. What do you make of this fact that Code Red basically means less money and less time and less effort spent on building out the ad business? Yeah, look, I hear you that it makes a lot of sense for a company like Open AI to show that it can make money because it's effectively building out this new category,

right? We didn't have generative AI as a category up until recently. Now we do. We have Open AI on on the hook for 1.4 trillion in infrastructure build out in the coming years. So if it can't show that it can build the revenue side of that category, why should companies fund it? But the other side of this is really important. It's going to get this money because its funders believe that it can be better than anybody else. Once Open AI isn't also ran. Once Open AI is just building the same thing Google is, then what is the rationale for a company to say, you know what, here's the billions of that you need to keep running. The company is expected, according to internal documents,

to lose $74 billion in 2028. $74 billion. So even if it shows that it can make some money with its advertising business, ultimately the only way that it can keep this train running, keep the momentum going, is if the product is better. And that's why you're seeing them say,

you know, monetization can wait. That's secondary because the only thing that matters to be able to keep running Open AI. The way that Open AI has been running is to be the best, and without that, everything falls away. Yeah, it's really all or nothing in a lot of ways, which is exciting and also pretty concerning

if you are an investor in Open AI. I also want to get your reactions to this other news that we got earlier, which is that Thrive, which is one of the largest investors in Open AI, and they have this Thrive Holdings, company they've created. So we learned that open AI is taking a stake in Thrive Holdings, which was another development in the circular transaction story that we all know about at this

point where a lot of these AI investors are investing in the AI startups, and then the startups are going back and spending money on the investors we saw it with Nvidia, and Open AI, we saw it with Oracle. Now we're seeing it again with another investor in Open AI. I mean, in a lot of ways open eyes taking the money that Thrive invested in them and they're going back and buying a stake in Thrive. I'm amazed that this continues to happen in AI. And despite the fact that we're all talking about it and saying this probably looks a little shady, it looks indicative of a bubble, it continues to happen. Your reactions. You know, Ed, I came to this one and I was prepared to say what the hell, the way that I've been saying, what the hell to all these other circular financing deals.

And it wasn't my reaction, actually, when I looked into the details of this. So here's what Open AI is going to do. So Thrive Holdings has a bunch of companies underneath it. And so Open AI is going to take a stake in Thrive Holdings and then work with the companies within it to make them effectively AI native to integrate the GPT models as deep as they possibly can into the fabric of these companies. And now it makes sense for a couple of reasons. Number one, if they are able to be successful, these are going to be very big. valuable companies. And so it sort of provides some incentive for open AI to basically show that this can work. And the other side of it is just that. It demonstrates, it would demonstrate

that the GPT models that they've built are commercializable, are something that enterprise can take out and say, you know what, we are going to get an ROI on this. Everybody in the AI world today is talking about is there an ROI from artificial intelligence? There was this MIT study that said 95% of businesses aren't getting an ROI on their AI efforts. I think that's a flawed study from multiple perspectives, but it resonated because people are like, well, what the hell do I do with this technology? So with this partnership with Thrive,

what Open AI is basically saying is we have some ideas about how to implement it within real companies for return on investment. We're going to work deeply with them. And for that, we're going to take an equity stake. It's not as bad as some of these others like Nvidia invests a billion dollars in companies. and then company X, and then company X buys a billion dollars of

Nvidia GPUs. I actually think this one is better. Okay. Final question for me, and then we'll let you go. Just from an internal comms perspective, or really from public relations perspective, I'm fascinated by the idea of Sam Altman sending an email to the whole company saying code red. He must know that gets leaked. And I would say the same thing about Google,

sending a memo to the company saying code red. I mean, it's the kind of thing that everyone's going to talk about, and it's a very sort of plainly bearish signal to most investors. I'm wondering if you think there's any strategy behind that. Why would Sam Altman, instead of, you know, dressing it up in other language, why would he just flat out say Code Red? I would say the Code Red is even better than the worst thing that Altman said within the company, which has been unearthed by some reporters, which is that. He admitted effectively that Gemini and Google had outpaced them in some areas. And me, and that got leaked. Me, that's even more concerning than having to declare code red.

On the internal side, I think he just has to show that there's urgency and new urgency within OpenAI to be able to maintain the lead. That is something that you can't hide. And it seems to me that this was something that was always coming. I mean, the foundation for the GPT models, this paper about, attention is all you need. It was put on the internet by people within Google. Open AI was the first to take that and really turn it into something into an amazing product, which was chat GPT. That was three years ago. And people saw how economically valuable that was. And all of a sudden,

everybody got in the game. You talk about Open AI, Anthropic, Gemini, even Elon Musk said, hey, I know how to build this because the instructions are on the internet. So I'm going to go ahead and do it. everybody was going to catch up in some way to Open AI at some point. They've been, they've shown, Open AI has shown that they're the best at product when it comes to building within generative AI. And I think it's code red from here on in. And Altman might have known that that was going to leak, but you got to show that there's a newfound urgency in this world as it exists today.

And, you know, I think that's exactly what he was doing. All right. Alex Cantowitz, host of the big technology podcast. Alex, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate the time. Thank you, Ed. After the break, a reconsideration of the federal poverty line. If you're enjoying the show, give property markets a follow.

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That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-3 at O-D-O-D-com That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com We're back with property markets. Investor Michael Green has gone viral after making a provocative claim that the U.S. has made a serious math error in a substack essay last week. He argued that the federal poverty line, which is around $32,000 for a family of four,

wildly understates what it takes to stay out of poverty today. His budget for health care, housing, childcare, and other necessities puts the real threshold at $140,000, four times the official figure. This essay has inspired a lot of attention, both praise and criticism, economists at think tanks like AEI and Cato have dismissed his claims, but even critics recognize that Michael Green is raising a crucial question, and that is how much income does a family really need to feel secure in America today, and how

should we measure that? Well, to answer these questions, we are actually speaking with the author himself, Michael Green. Michael is the author of the Yes, I Give a FIG substack, and also chief strategist and portfolio manager for simplify asset management. Michael, thank you

very much for joining us on property markets. Thank you for having me. So we want to get right into it. It's been a pretty busy week for you. You wrote this essay on Substack. It went viral. Everyone's been talking about it. Some people love it. Some people hate it. I think let's just start with kind of the basics. What do you say in the article? What is your argument? And what is the issue with this poverty line, which is roughly $32,000 as of today? Well, it's $32,000 for a family of

four with two earners and two children. That's the official level. There's multiple poverty levels that move all the way, I believe, from a low end of about 12,000 to 32,000 is about the upper limit. The reason why those levels matter is because they are used in the calculation of benefits for things like SNAP, for things like child care assistance, for things like health care subsidies, et cetera. And the point that I was raising in the article was that the withdrawal of those benefits is happening at a level that reduces the cash income for people below about $100,000, making it roughly equivalent to those who are only making $40,000. That high level of effective marginal tax rates was referred to as the benefits cliff creates the phenomenon that I

call the Valley of Death, where a family is expected to work harder and harder with no material improvement in their life as the state removes benefits, even as they are ostensibly adding income. And part of this is a problem that goes back to the I mean, one of the things that you lay out is that this metric, this line was created actually in 1963 when the poverty line was actually introduced. And one of the things you point out is that things have changed a lot since then. So perhaps this doesn't really work anymore. Tell us a little bit about how the poverty line was created. What were the metrics that went into it? And in what sense Has it changed or not changed since then?

Well, in 1963, an economist with the Department of Health and Human Services named Molly O'Shanski created the poverty line analysis. She observed that for a typical family, they spent about one-third of their income on food. And so by taking the USDA minimum food budget and tripling it, she created a level that she described as the point of crisis. She explicitly declared it's impossible to know how much is too much, but we can perhaps define what is too little. And so the poverty line was established at that point because at a level of three times the minimum food budget, you would expect that people would be barely able to cover their housing costs, barely able to cover their other lifestyle choices, clothing, food, etc. The problem with that analysis is that food has fallen very rapid. in the budget today.

And so as a global agricultural superpower who went further and opened up our food markets to the world on a free trade platform, that's led to food appreciating significantly less. Now, in 1969, they actually formalized it at that level and began inflating it by the CPI index, which is the index that we usually think of as representing the cost of living. The problem with that is that there are, first of all, just like the poverty line, there are multiple CPIs that are used for different purposes. And the reason why the CPI, as it's currently constructed, is not appropriate for a poverty level budget for basically using as a discount factor for the poverty level budget,

is because the CPI includes many luxuries that are falling in price and becoming standard fare when they weren't historically. That means things like air conditioning, et cetera, you show in CPI a continuous benefit associated with it in the form of lower and lower prices for air conditioning that's captured in the CPI through the housing adjustment, it means effectively that housing in CPI doesn't go up as fast as the actual cash outlay for housing. That's actually an accurate representation of improving quality. It's not that there is a giant conspiracy theory to deprive Americans of their appropriate cost of living allowances. But if you're at that level,

you're basically deciding, I just need housing. I don't really care whether it has air conditioning or not. That's a false choice. You're not actually expressing what's called in economics a revealed preference for air conditioning. What you're really saying is today there's almost no non-air conditioned units available, but the government claims I'm paying less for the apartment because I now have the benefit of air conditioning. Right. That's just not correct when you think about a budget that is limited at the very low level. And as a result, the poverty line has fallen significantly. This leads to claims statistics that poverty has largely evaporated in the United States. And unfortunately, it's how we calculate it that is really driving that analysis. More and more families are finding themselves at that $100,000 to $140,000 level, in which they're incurring all of the costs associated with raising children, with raising those future taxpayers, raising those future contributors to our,

economy. And the government is basically saying, yeah, that's a negative value activity. So we're seeing less household formation. We're seeing less family formation. We're seeing less children because people are being forced to make these choices for purely economic reasons. So you do the analysis and you kind of, you adjust for all of the points you're making here and you land on roughly $140,000 as what should be the real poverty line. I think that's the part that has gotten or raised a lot of controversy because people say, no, it's not 140,000, it's this number, it's that number. How did you reach that number, 140,000?

And then we'll maybe discuss in a moment the backlash that you've been receiving. Sure. So the level was actually created using the MIT Living Wage Index. I had written a prior article called Are You an American that exposed behaviors that were being generated on Twitter to create a mocking around the claim that, you know, the 1950s, a single income could afford this house. The piece that I wrote prior to the one that went viral

called Are You an American really identified this process, what I call the mockery machine that's designed to effectively remove the validity of the concern, right? Housing is unaffordable. The cost of living is too high. That's a very legitimate concern. Yeah. The reaction to that was, well, in the 1950s, people could own castles. A single janitor could own a castle or a peanut farmer could, you know, get the White House sort of thing. And I recognize that that did actually happen. The, what I identified in that was a town, Caldwell, New Jersey, in which there were ostensibly affordable homes based on a very extensive and thoughtful piece that was written by another commentator. I evaluated that.

The 136,500, which is the actual number that I arrived at in the piece, was built using the MIT living wage to identify what were the expenses you would expect to incur as a family with two earners and two children. Huge expenses that most people don't think about. Child care. in that area is about $32,000 a year. The mortgage or the payment for rent was estimated at about $2,000 per month. When I looked to find units available to rent in the Caldwell, New Jersey area, I couldn't find anything less than $27.50. So in many ways, it was a conservative reflection of building up the cost to simply say, what would it cost somebody to live in this area and not save any money? What's the level of what I'm

described as the participation level or the precarity line where people begin to escape from that feeling that you're just barely holding on by your fingernails. Yes. So that's where the new work came from. It was built up using the MIT living wage. So you put the post out there and then it begins to get a lot of traction. It begins to be viral and then you start getting a lot of pushback from people. Many, you know, other Stubstack writers, many other economic commentators saying, no, 140,000 doesn't make sense. And I think one of the arguments has been that I think that's roughly median in America, which would kind of imply, well, that means that, you know, somewhere near to a majority of Americans are barely hanging on.

And therefore, not possible. What was your reaction to the pushback? So unfortunately, that's a somewhat uncharitable read of what I actually said. So again, I isolated to a two-earner, two-child family. Yes. The median household income for the nation at that level is about 150,000. So really we're talking about those who are below the median who would hit that threshold. What I really highlighted, though, was the people who are choosing to make that transition, those who are at the median at the $80,000 level, which is the national median, which is the national median, confronted with the next life choice of do I get married, do I have children, do I make these choices, they're now suddenly facing an extraordinary increase in expense that raises that level. Yes. The criticism basically boils down to, well, that's silly, right? There are some more technical criticisms that are tied to things like, well, we're actually

taking that food budget from 1969 and adjusting it for the CPI, which in the language of the commentators captures all of the budgetary changes, it unfortunately understates the cost of participation, the cost of being very poor. I gave a few examples. For example, if you use an inflation-adjusted cost of telecommunication services in 1963 to participate in the economy, you would have needed a landline. Nobody expected you to be in constant contact with your telephone. nobody used their telephone for complex banking or for checking their child's school portal, etc. So the reality is the inflation-adjusted telecommunications cost for that family would be $58. The reality is when shoe factor in internet broadband and cell phone plans, you're looking at something closer to $200.

So that would be a really good example of where the CPI simply does not capture the actual cost of living increase for a family that needs. to participate in the modern economy. Yeah. You wrote a line that we really loved in the follow-up. You said, quote, the most common layman's critique is that the middle class has always complained about how hard it is to get ahead.

They say every generation struggles. But the distinction today is not the presence of the struggle, but it's nature. I love that statement. I think it's very true, but I want to hear more about it. What exactly do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by it is exactly what I said.

I think that is true. And this, unfortunately, is the conversation that people are not having. We have an older population that correctly is looking back and saying, well, we complained about it too. We had to deal with it. You guys just need to toughen up. They're not doing the math because they haven't been presented with the math. They don't have a reason to do the math.

Yeah. And really part of the reason that my article, I believe, went to, viral and resonated with so many people is it gave them the tools to have that conversation. Yes. The number of messages I received from people saying, I printed this out, I shared it with all members of my family, from grandparents to my teenage children, and we talked about it at Thanksgiving dinner table. And we really had understanding and breakthroughs in a way that we haven't had in years to try to explain what's ultimately happening is really what makes it worthwhile, right?

I don't care about the substack. I give it for free to anyone who asks. It's not my day job. It's what I do to keep myself intellectually stimulated and treat it basically as an exploration of things that are interesting to me. For me to have had that ability to let people sit down and talk about what they're experiencing in their lives with their families and to understand, man, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, I think we could have a longer conversation about this at another time. We're going to let you go.

But I'll just say, I loved the article. And a lot of the topics you bring up are topics that we discuss on the podcast frequently, but we hadn't thought of investigating the poverty line. And when I read your article, I was like, wow, we should have. So we really appreciate it. So thank you for joining us. Well, I'm really glad. And like I said, anyone that wants to read it, reach out and ask, I give it for free.

You know, if you can pay, it's always nice to have people value. of the stuff that's put in front of them. But the real point was to get the conversation started. We've succeeded on that. And let's continue. Absolutely. Thank you, Michael Green. Thank you. Well, regardless of whether you agree with Michael's findings, what is obvious to all of us is that this article struck a nerve. It was debated on CNN and in the Washington Post and in many other outlets, it received many passionate rebuttal.

from various think tanks and commentators, and the article itself has been viewed millions of times. And this isn't to be used as hard evidence, but generally what I have found is that when economic arguments like this trigger people in the way it has done, it usually signals that at the very least, there is an important kernel of truth within the argument. It doesn't mean that the whole argument is bulletproof,

but it means that there is something in there, that is certainly worth paying attention to. And this article is the perfect example. Because, yes, maybe $140,000 isn't the perfect or the right number. Maybe the real poverty line is something else, something slightly lower than that. But beneath these numbers lies a truth that actually no one seems to disagree with. And that is, many of the economic tools that we use to measure how Americans doing are at best outdated and at worst completely and utterly flawed. And the poverty line

is ground zero for that problem. Michael's core insight isn't this $140,000 number. His core insight is simply a recognition that the federal poverty line, as we understand it today, this universal metric that we all kind of mindlessly accept as the number, the legitimate number. that metric was created in 1963, and it hasn't been meaningfully updated since then, and we still use it. In fact, I used it in an analysis on this show just a few weeks ago, and I had no idea that the metric was created in 1963. And let's be clear, a lot has happened since then, not just technologically, but also economically. The cost of housing has risen twice as fast as inflation, the cost of cost. has risen four times as far as the cost of health care, 14 times. We live in a fundamentally

different economy today, which means that we need different measurements, different ways to take our temperature. And so even if Michael's math isn't 100% perfect, perhaps this is the kick in the else that we needed to start measuring things differently. Perhaps we'll start to wean ourselves off of these generally arbitrary and oftentimes not very useful metrics, not just the poverty line, but also GDP and also GNP and even the S&P. Perhaps we'll start to look more closely at the data that tell us the story of what is actually happening in people's lives. The fact, for example, that more than half of Americans under 50 don't want to have children. That's a stat that is not talked about that much, but it seems to be a pretty big deal.

Or the fact that more than a third of young Americans still live with their parents. Or the fact that deaths of despair in America are now hitting all-time highs. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us a story. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us something about what is actually going on in a person's life. because, yes, economics can be a fun intellectual exercise, but that isn't really the point of economics. The point of economics is to understand people, and more specifically, the lives that people lead.

And too often, but perhaps now less often, it fails to accomplish that. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Patterson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Isabel Kinsel, Chris Nodonoghue, and Mia Silverio. And our technical director is Drew Burroughs. Thank you for listening to Proftery Markets from Profit Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.