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Sebastian Mallaby
Council on Foreign Relations
First call on the ledger
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else is a labeled paraphrase. Every call links its original source. Before you trust the call, check the record.
Where they stand
Views on the record but not scoreable bets: no single number and deadline to grade. Shown in their exact words, never scored.
Reaffirming his January call that OpenAI runs out of money within 18 months
“Yeah, I do hold to my prediction. Back in January, the burn rate was just crazy.”
On OpenAI's five-year internal burn projection
“And even though Sam Altman is a magician, when it comes to raising money, he wasn't going to be raising $660 billion, which is what the internally projected burn rate was for the next five years”
On the $122B raise: about two-thirds was conditional promises or payment in kind, he says
“the actual real money was a small share of the total fundraise, which raises the question, why announce this massive 122 billion headline number? When anyone who digs into it can see it's rubbish?”
On OpenAI's IPO delay to 2027; invokes the WeWork 2019 precedent
“if it tries to do the IPO, it may not succeed and then it's really cooked.”
Contrasting with OpenAI
“I think Anthropic has been way more laser focused on the part of the market that makes sense, which is the enterprise part, and just better managed.”
His sharpened call: an OpenAI bubble, not a general AI bubble; possible buyers he names: Amazon, Microsoft
“I'm just saying there's a 50% chance that by next summer we'll find they couldn't really go public in the private markets, they can't raise enough money, and they have to sell themselves at some sort of discount to another company.”
The other half of his split call
“so I fundamentally think that AI as a sector and therefore the demand for the semiconductors, the data center businesses, all these things that people worry about, I don't think that's a bubble. I think that's for real.”
After his China trip
“We have imposed chip export controls on China to try to hold them back. It hasn't worked. These guys are moving ahead.”
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