A Spring Break Mailbag: RIP Sora, Ads and Surplus, F1 Going in Reverse, Elon Inc., Smartphone Parenting, and More

Bearish:

• $OPENAI - OpenAI's Sora product shutdown and high compute costs suggest challenges with their consumer strategy and business model sustainability.

  • “the amount of compute this appears to have been using even now with no one's using it feels astronomical. And that's in the end, that's maybe the biggest critique of this.”

    Ben·8:58

  • “I saw $15,000,000 a day thrown out. I don't know what the actual number is, but, yeah, I mean, was it was obviously compute intensive on day one.”

    Andrew·9:17

  • “not having zero marginal costs is sort of debilitating. Mhmm. And it it ends up in an all or nothing scenario where either this takes off and is a huge deal or within a matter of months, it's dead.”

    Ben·12:31
• $ANTHROPIC - Despite rapid growth trajectory, Anthropic appears to be using aggressive revenue accounting methods that may overstate their actual business performance.

  • “this report and the information is that Anthropix numbers are basically the GMV version. It's like everything. Whereas OpenAI's numbers is like the percentage on top of what's going to the clouds.”

    Ben·19:09

  • “I don't think anyone denies that the anthropic trajectory is more vertical at this point than maybe the OpenAI one, even if it's possible the OpenAI lead is larger than you might think.”

    Ben·19:29