Ep. 020 - Anthropic vs OpenAI Usage, Margins, Meta Compute, Future of MSL (Tokenomics) | Crystual Huang, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart, Jordan Nanos

Ep. 020 - Anthropic vs OpenAI Usage, Margins, Meta Compute, Future of MSL (Tokenomics) | Crystual Huang, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart, Jordan Nanos – SemiAnalysis Weekly

Market views

Bullish

ANTHROPIC— Anthropic is currently profitable with 80%+ API business providing high margins (85%+), allowing aggressive reinvestment in training to extend model advantage. Strong enterprise focus and coding data purchasing strategy has driven superior model performance.
OPENAI— OpenAI has recovered from flat growth in March/April with successful 5.5 and 5.6 model releases. Net new ARR is now comparable to Anthropic, with strong API business growth since late March driven by Codex and newer models.
AILABS— AI lab ARR is growing rapidly with strong enterprise adoption and power user spending. Top companies spend $100k per employee annually on AI with clear ROI, particularly in coding use cases which represent 70%+ of API revenue.
AMZN— AWS benefits from highly profitable token-as-a-service business with 20-30% revenue share from Anthropic that flows directly to bottom line. Strong enterprise distribution advantage for AI model consumption.
AIMODELS— Reinforcement learning data market is experiencing explosive growth with total data budgets across frontier labs exceeding $10B in 2024 (10x from 2023), with potential for another 10x in 2027. Labs will pay any price for high-quality RL environment data.
META— Meta's compute rental strategy with clawback clauses provides downside protection while allowing aggressive CapEx spending. Can monetize compute at premium rates (3-4x market) while maintaining optionality if MSL proves successful.

Bearish

GOOGL— Google/DeepMind is clearly in fifth place with poor model quality (Gemini 3.5 Flash) and lack of conviction shown by long-term compute deals without clawback clauses. Key researchers leaving due to leadership not being AGI-focused.

Not investment advice.

Mentioned

Market views