Anthropic’s Bet on Coding Is Working (OpenAI Shopping Pivot, A16Z’s Top 50 List, $1B Tennis Channel)

Summary

More or Less

Episode: Anthropic’s Bet on Coding Is Working (OpenAI Shopping Pivot, A16Z’s Top 50 List, $1B Tennis Channel)

Date: March 13, 2026
Hosts: Dave Morin, Jessica Lessin, Brit Morin, Sam Lessin

Episode Overview

This spirited, freewheeling conversation among friends and longtime tech insiders dives deep into the current inflection points of the AI business. The discussion centers around Anthropic’s surging momentum in the developer market, OpenAI’s evolving consumer strategy and pivot away from consumer shopping, the challenges of monetizing “intelligence” as a utility, and the growing relevance of “dark pools” and proprietary networks in a world where software is increasingly commoditized. Other topics include notable new AI products (and some weird corners of the internet), upcoming entertainment industry events, and whether buying the Tennis Channel is a smart play.

---

Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Business of Selling Intelligence: Commodity or Goldmine?

• Opening Frame: Dave Morin sets the tone with the central question: Is selling intelligence (AI) a good business or just a commodity? He analogizes the situation to selling bandwidth in 1995—potentially lucrative for a while, but the real value may accrue to what’s built on top.

  "Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a commodity, maybe it's cable... It's like being in 95, asking if selling bandwidth is a good business. It's not where the money ended up. The money ended up in what people built on top of it."
  (Dave Morin, 00:00)

• Margin Compression: Sam Lessin points out that in a hyper-competitive, frictionless global market, any incremental gains in “intelligence” pricing will vanish due to arbitrage and open-source competition.

  “It’s so much worse than the cable business...with total perfect competition globally. It’s going to be a way worse business than the cable model.”
  (Sam Lessin, 23:32)

---

2. OpenAI’s Consumer Pivot: From Chatbot King to Shopping Platform?

• OpenAI’s Path: Jessica Lessin highlights OpenAI’s massive consumer growth and early attempts to convert usage into revenue, particularly through shopping integrations. However, the company’s recent shift away from allowing end-to-end transactions within ChatGPT signals unresolved friction and uncertainty in consumer monetization.

  “Commerce from a revenue potential is one of these big moments where OpenAI could prove… that it is actually going to turn it into a business. And early on we see them pivoting, shifting, whatever you call it”
  (Jess, 15:00)

• Skeptical Counterpoint: Sam Lessin is highly skeptical about commerce as a lucrative path for OpenAI. He draws distinctions between attention-driven ad businesses (Google, Facebook) and commerce-driven ones (Amazon), contending that the latter is much harder and lower margin.

  “Everybody keeps saying ‘why don’t you just do commerce?’. Because commerce is a bad business. What’s good is the attention.”
  (Sam Lessin, 16:25)

---

3. Anthropic’s Bet on Developers—and the Exponential Payoff

• Data Trends: Dave Morin and Brit Morin discuss charts showing OpenAI’s consumer lead versus Anthropic’s rapid (and superlinear) revenue acceleration, driven by developer adoption and code-centric offerings.

  “Anthropic accelerating dramatically because of this strategic choice they made... if they hadn’t, they may not be in the same position that they are today.”
  (Dave Morin, 08:42)

• Developer vs. Consumer: The panel explores why developers may have a much larger “ARPU” (average revenue per user) because they see immediate value in scaling app-building, while most consumers have limited high-value use cases for AI.

  “Developers are like, I just fucking built an entire app... in 20 minutes and launched it...so like, yeah, I’ll just burn a ton of intelligence to do that, right?”
  (Sam Lessin, 10:14)

---

4. Is AI Unlocking a New “Indie” Creative Wave?

• Democratizing Creation: Dave argues that AI is breaking down the divide between “consumer” and “builder,” enabling creatives of all stripes (not just developers) to make significant cultural impact with new tools.

  “AI is turning everyone into a builder... I was down in Palo Alto... these guys are filmmakers, writers, creative people… and they're building things with AI now.”
  (Dave Morin, 19:15)

• Comparison to Past Mediums: Dave draws parallels to the indie video wave sparked by cheap camcorders, arguing AI is the next creative inflection point.

  “When camcorders got cheap, the film industry started using them and doing really interesting things... This new medium is going to cause really, really interesting things.”
  (Dave Morin, 31:10 & 31:34)

---

5. The Death of Open Marketplaces & The Rise of “Dark Pools”

• Collapse of Open Marketplaces: Sam contends that as software becomes easier and cheaper to write (or just generate via AI), competitive advantages increasingly depend on proprietary access, closed networks, and dark pools rather than open marketplaces:

  “When markets get too efficient, they're bad businesses and technology and AI make markets efficient. The only way to have a good business is to have proprietary deal flow... dark pools.”
  (Sam Lessin, 36:29)

• Commoditization of Software: Brit and Jess argue there will still be rare, defensible network effects (e.g., Instagram’s dense social graph), but moats are harder to sustain.

  “Not all Sam is saying all software is dead. And I just disagree.”
  (Brit Morin, 42:27)

---

6. A16Z’s Top 50 AI Web Products & The Rise of AI “Romantasy”

• Brit’s Bot Corner (44:07):

  • Fewer creator-centric tools in this year’s A16Z Top 50 list, perhaps due to Google’s Gemini rise in the creator tools sphere.

  • Discovery of surprise hits in adult/romance AI chat space, e.g., Janitor.AI, Spicy Chat, and Crush on—mostly anime-style, chat-based erotica with enormous unique visits.

    "They're all AI, Anime Eroticism. I'm not sure what's happening here...You just chat with it. And it's like your ... anime misogynist husband chatbot. And this is what people pay for."
    (Brit Morin, 46:06)

  • Longer discussion about how AI fantasy platforms are focusing not on hyperrealism, but on prompting the user’s imagination—“the mind is the most powerful machine.”

    "The mind is the most powerful machine, and all you're looking for with these AIs is unique... that's why things like lo-fi cartoons or anime that's like over weird tentacle porn..."
    (Sam Lessin, 47:54)

---

7. The Tennis Channel for $1 Billion?

• Deal of the Week: Jess floats the prospect of buying the Tennis Channel for a billion dollars – a sports media ploy reminiscent of what happened to F1.
  • Panel weighs whether it’s a smart business, noting viewership is growing, profitability (~$73 million/year), and whether the real asset is broadcast rights or the fan experience innovation opportunity.

  “F1 had minuscule viewership 10 years ago and they just made it great and it boomed... you’d have to make a bet on making the tennis viewing experience great.”
  (Jess, 51:17)

---

8. Sports, Oscars, and Pop Culture Wrap-Up

• The crew briefly riffs on the return of Travis Kelce & Taylor Swift, Oscars predictions (Leonardo DiCaprio film “One Battle After Another” favored, “Hamnet” trending as a tearjerker), and wardrobe hype ("Emma Stone will wear something great").
• Brit and Jess joke about future “AI agents” recommending pop culture to each other and the fact that “agent” now has a double meaning in both Hollywood and tech.

  “Are agents in Hollywood mad that we now call agents something that are machines?”
  (Sam Lessin, 56:02)

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• On where the money in AI will flow:

  “It's not like, will the intelligence get cheaper? Is there margin in the intelligence? The question is like, what can you make with it that you couldn't make before?”
  (Dave Morin, 00:00 / 28:17)

• On AI business models and margin pressures:

  "Just because you use a lot of something doesn't mean it's valuable or a good business...I think anything that is basically software...is just going to be an undefensible business because it's too easy to replicate."
  (Sam Lessin, 21:28 / 35:11)

• On global, hyper-competitive AI markets:

  "You have a global frictionless competition for the cheapest power and the cheapest intelligence you can get anywhere, right? And that means that it's going to be a way worse business than the cable model."
  (Sam Lessin, 23:32)

• On the creativity unleashed by AI:

  “AI is turning everyone into a builder...I was down in Palo Alto last night...they're building things with AI now.”
  (Dave Morin, 19:15)

• On Britt’s experiments with AI adult bots:

  “One of them, you just...chat with it. And it's like your AI anime misogynist husband, chatbot. And this is what people pay for. And this is in the top...”
  (Brit Morin, 46:37)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00: Is selling intelligence a good business? (Opening debate, bandwidth analogy)
• 06:38: Key news headlines: OpenAI's shopping pivot; Anthropic vs. OpenAI; Abilene infrastructure shakeup
• 08:05: Comparing OpenAI and Anthropic revenue charts and business models
• 10:14: Developer vs. consumer ARPU and why Anthropic’s strategy is paying off
• 14:55: OpenAI’s push into commerce, pivoting away from direct shopping in ChatGPT
• 23:25: The global commodity nature of intelligence and power vs. cable business analogy
• 31:10: AI as a new creative medium, parallels to indie video/film movements
• 36:29: “Death of the open marketplace” and rise of dark pools and proprietary networks
• 44:07: Brit’s Bot Corner: The A16Z AI web tools list, rise of AI “romantasy” chatbots
• 51:10: Is buying the Tennis Channel for $1B a smart play?
• 53:33: Sports/pop culture wrap-up: Taylor Swift, Oscars, AI “agents” vs. Hollywood agents

---

Takeaways & Insights

• Utility AI margins will be squeezed by global competition; the real upside will be software and services built on top.
• Anthropic’s focus on developer tools and code has created exponential business momentum.
• OpenAI’s search for a consumer business model faces very real friction—even with massive mindshare, translating usage to revenue is nontrivial.
• Commoditization of software means future moats will lie in proprietary networks, relationships, and data—not in the software layer itself.
• There’s a Cambrian explosion of creative potential thanks to AI democratization, but turning these creations into large, defensible businesses is far trickier—and dark pools/closed communities may be the dominant model.
• Surprising new consumer behaviors are emerging, like paying for AI “romantasy” chatbots in the top web products lists.
• The business of traditional media (e.g., Tennis Channel) is still about rights and the race to innovate the experience.

---

For next week: Will the dark pools concentrate power, or does the creative explosion find ways to break them open? And, as always, how will the narrative (and the charts) shift?

Transcript

[Dave Morin]

We keep analyzing whether selling intelligence is a good business, and maybe it's not. Maybe it's a commodity, maybe it's cable. Whatever. That's like being in 95, asking if selling bandwidth is a good business or not. The answer was sort of. But it's not where the money ended up. The money ended up in what people built on top of it. It's not like, will the intelligence get cheaper? Is there margin in the intelligence? The question is like, what can you make with it that you couldn't make before?

[Brit Morin]

Is it no or is it yes?

[Jess]

We'll debate the tech.

[Sam Altman]

That's less.

[Jess]

We get more or less.

[Brit Morin]

Dave and drip no salmon.

[Jess]

Put it all right to the test. More or less. Why? Hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. We're all back in our homes.

[Brit Morin]

What's on Sam's head right now? Can we talk about it?

[Sam Altman]

Oh, my goodness.

[Jess]

I mean, we could. I don't know if we want to.

[Brit Morin]

Looks like a lobster meets a pineapple or something.

[Dave Morin]

It's probably some weird logo for a secret society, kind of.

[Sam Altman]

It's like. It's this Instagram account I found of these old Jewish sauna men, and they have all this great merch. So this is they. I bought there. We have a. Now a beautiful tote that says schlep on it.

[Dave Morin]

It's a sauna hat.

[Sam Altman]

We've got a schlep tote. We've got sauna hats. I got hilarious T shirts about the sauna Olympics. It's my favorite things. Old brilliant Brooklyn Jewish men in saunas. So I'm here to represent it.

[Jess]

This explains a lot. I was wondering what the tote bag was. So this. Thank you for clarifying.

[Brit Morin]

Feels like a lot of deals could happen with old Jewish men in saunas.

[Sam Altman]

So it's literally called. The account is called Old Jewish men. It has 600,000 followers. They're very funny. And, you know, I'm in because it's all about sauna and chicken and schlepping.

[Jess]

Okay, guys, before we get started, I'd like to talk about my latest product placement. This would be Kim Kardashian.

[Brit Morin]

This is Kim Kardashian's energy drink.

[Jess]

This is Kim Kardashian and Wendy Murdoch, who's the one who sent it to me. Energy drink called Update, and I haven't had it yet. For those of you I am opening a can of energy drink.

[Brit Morin]

We are Magic Mind. Only in the Morin household.

[Dave Morin]

Wait, don't we have an actual ad that we have to do?

[Sam Altman]

We do. Guys, wait, hold on. I got paid a thousand bucks for this. Hold on.

[Brit Morin]

Why did we get paid? You got paid 250, Sam. Let's be clear, guys.

[Jess]

It's actually delicious. Oh, my God. This is really good.

[Brit Morin]

Authentically.

[Jess]

I've never tried it.

[Brit Morin]

It's no magic mind. Let's move on.

[Jess]

Magic mind is, like, intense. This is delightful. It tastes like.

[Brit Morin]

Hold on.

[Jess]

Tastes like. Come back to me. It like. It's very sweet.

[Dave Morin]

Sorry, no caffeine. We went fully commercial.

[Sam Altman]

Well, this guy emailed me.

[Jess]

No one's paying me for this. This is out of friendship here.

[Sam Altman]

This is. This is definitely getting paid for. This is actually very exciting. Guys. I have my first ever on air ad. Someone wrote me back on my newsletter and had this whole thing, and he said, sam, I want to advertise on your podcast. So you ready? This is our ad. It's. It's from getviktor.com and V I K

[Brit Morin]

T O R V I K get

[Sam Altman]

V I K T O R dot com. It finally works for reals. An AI coworker lives in Slack, connects to everyone, does actual work. So we need to raise our check out. Get Victor.com.

[Brit Morin]

a thousand dollars ad should go at the end of an episode, not at the beginning when everyone's listening.

[Jess]

We're like, a thousand bucks for that puppy.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah.

[Jess]

First of all, was there a vote on whether to accept this ad that I missed? Did we vote?

[Sam Altman]

I hope this works for you and your company.

[Brit Morin]

Sam opted in on our behalf, Jess.

[Sam Altman]

Guys, we are. We are.

[Dave Morin]

Sam, you better be taking us to dinner.

[Sam Altman]

Well, I. I'm gonna happy to. You each get $250. You can spend it on whatever you want. I'm very excited about this.

[Jess]

Okay, close.

[Sam Altman]

Wait. So wait. Sorry. Let me. Let me read it one more time.

[Jess]

Yeah.

[Brit Morin]

Oh, my God.

[Jess]

What?

[Sam Altman]

Get Victor.com, your first AI coworker, lives in Slack, connects to all your tools, does actual work. One message can span your entire Slack. Think of it as a colleague that never sleeps and never forgets your company's context. Built by X meta AI and Google engineers. And then it says, riff on that, however, feels natural. So is that.

[Brit Morin]

Okay, let's finish by saying, now we get $2,000 because we just did it twice.

[Jess]

No, no. But first, I do think there are other things that do this. I know I can't speak skeptically about said advertiser.

[Sam Altman]

This is our advertiser. What are you doing?

[Jess]

I'm excited to try it.

[Sam Altman]

Apparently, looking at the website, you can have a hundred dollars in free credits with no Credit card required and it's SOC 2 compliant.

[Brit Morin]

We're done. Let's move on. What's the news, guys?

[Jess]

We've got real. We have real news. I. I'm sorry. This is gonna be an AI heavy AI business heavy episode because there's a lot going on. First of all, I have been very interested in the hard pivot of chatgpt away from shopping and what it means when you say hard pivot's too strong.

[Sam Altman]

EQ hard pivot for something you never launched.

[Dave Morin]

Yeah, like I didn't even know this was happening.

[Sam Altman]

You're pivoting the narrative. It's a narrative pivot. That's great. You don't even have to build anything anymore.

[Dave Morin]

Jess. You have a lot of. You have a lot of power to pivot these narratives. I don't know if you should just hand it out like that.

[Jess]

Well, first of all, check the thread. I gave you guys all fair warning and gave you access to all clips relevant to said discussions. Point. I know your thread has been about buying domain names, which we should also talk about, but I'm going to make a case for why this is important. We also have to check in on Anthropic v. Government, anthropic v. OpenAI and

[Sam Altman]

just how good Anthropic is because, like, I'm having a lot of fun.

[Jess]

I want to posit a more or less style debate with a very specific question on this topic, which has also been previewed in the chat. If you would like to fast forward and prepare, because I think we're at a very interesting inflection point in this battle. I think those are our major two topics. We can check in on the Molt Book, acquisition of Meta and what's happening in openclaw land. We can check in on Brit going full bot crazy based on her social media. And we can also check. I don't know if this group likes this topic, but there's been like major infrastructure shakeups. Oracle and OpenAI have pulled out of a part of one project which has sort of rattled the markets.

[Sam Altman]

Oh, I thought you meant actual infrastructure shape because it's getting bombed.

[Jess]

No, but that's also happening because that's

[Sam Altman]

also a thing that actually matters.

[Jess]

The information reported that both Meta and Microsoft are now trying to swoop in and grab this part of the big Abilene project that you may have heard of. So that's also. That's also news, but little known fact.

[Brit Morin]

My extended family is in Abilene, but also I want to cover the top. Yes.

[Sam Altman]

Do you mean the bots that are your extended family live in Abilene.

[Brit Morin]

All kinds of extended family nowadays.

[Sam Altman]

So many my family of bots live in Abel Dean, Abilene, Sam, whatever though

[Jess]

do you check in on how Britt's bots are doing? Like I really worry sometimes. She's like too many bots. She seems stressed.

[Dave Morin]

She's into some pretty weird bots, you guys.

[Sam Altman]

The misogyny bot you're into. I want to hear about your misogyny bot.

[Brit Morin]

Guys, I this is what I was going to say. Dust. I would, I would be reticent to end this pod without going through the top 50 gen AI web products by unique monthly visits which a16z put out this week and some common themes I I felt about this report.

[Jess]

So for everyone we are going to end with Brit Spot Corner which is going to feature her own personal experience as well as this data that I do think every time I open X I am confronted with a new chart that claims either OpenAI or Anthropic is leading in some metric by a mile. Oh, we're the most time spent. Oh, we're an enterprise. So the net effect of this all has made me very skeptical of AI sort of consumer survey charts.

[Dave Morin]

As you should be. These guys can't stop.

[Sam Altman]

Were you not skeptical before?

[Dave Morin]

They can't stop talking about each other.

[Jess]

But that said, because I'm nothing if not hypocritical, I'm going to present a chart that I think is very important. Do you guys see this chart?

[Brit Morin]

Yeah.

[Jess]

This would be the annualized revenue of Open in AI and Anthropic featured in the information's new chart library but has run in multiple of our stories going back to October 2023. And yes, we have had revenue for these companies at every step of the way, these non public companies. And you'll see that the latest Data point has OpenAI at 25 billion.

[Sam Altman]

I believe it's pronounced Billy.

[Jess]

Billy and anthropic at 19 Billy.

[Dave Morin]

This chart is great strategy work, right? Like that's what this shows.

[Jess]

Say more Dave. Say more.

[Dave Morin]

Anthropic was not on this trajectory as of October last year or maybe middle of last year. And it was really clear that they made the decision to just double down on code as the main thing that was going to be their strong differentiator. So what this chart kind of shows is on the one hand you've got the consumer OpenAI juggernaut, right? That's got a billion users or so and a reasonably large API business. But Anthropic accelerating Dramatically because of this strategic choice they made, which I think you could argue if they hadn't, they may not be in the same position that they are today.

[Brit Morin]

Yeah. And I would, I would like to tag on with, with a. Can I take over the screen? I'm going to show a different chart for those of you who can see this.

[Sam Altman]

Oh, what wars of charts.

[Jess]

This is my branding. This is what you can't.

[Brit Morin]

Okay, okay, sorry. But, but I think this is, this is kind of to what Dave's saying. Like anthropic went for developers and developers are obviously paying a lot of money and a lot of tokens, but who is winning the mainstream consumer so much token is really like hands down, open AI. And this chart shows, shows that with OpenAI at roughly like 75 to 80% share. Gemini next with like more than maybe

[Dave Morin]

10 or 15% on this chart, cloud

[Brit Morin]

is like a tiny blip. So it says a lot about the business model for sure.

[Sam Altman]

Well, but here's the question. Can I ask a question?

[Jess]

You may. Then we're going back to my chart.

[Sam Altman]

Who's going to spend all the money on the quote unquote, intelligence? Like, if you think about it, I think here's the thing I, the question I have, and my understanding is that, you know, a lot of the consumer AI use cases, people are still like, they have, like, don't really know what to do with AI really. Like the engagement is actually much lower than you'd expect, like day to day because like, what do you really need it for? And like what are the consumer. It's like not clear. Like, it's like, it's like slightly better. Google, fine, but it's not clear. You pay for more intelligence that way. The thing that's interesting about developers, I think what's going on and why Anthropic is hooking the way they're hooking up is basically everyone's like, oh shit, I could totally use way more intelligence. So like the ARPU is just like through the roof and there is this thing where you're just like, oh yeah, like if intelligence, if quote unquote, intelligence is cheap, I'm just gonna assume an incredible amount of it. Right. And so to Dave's point about the strategy, I just, it's not clear to me like that there are great, really important deep AI use cases for more intelligence for the average human. I mean, what do they want to do? They want to flip some videos on their phone, you know, veg out. Like they're, what are they gonna do with more intelligence? Whereas, like, developers are like, I just fucking built an entire app. I like, my head is exploding literally in 20 minutes and launched it in the App Store. And you guys all have it and can use it and it's great. So like, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll just burn a ton of intelligence to do that, right? And so that's the thing, right?

[Jess]

Can I try a thesis out on you guys? And this is why I think OpenAI's shopping pivot is such a big deal. Because for the last two years we've seen that incredible consumer growth. By the way, OpenAI's revenue also, if we go back to my chart, which we won't, has some big lines too, Dave. So Anthropic is closing the gap for sure. But if you just saw OpenAI's revenue chart, you would also have your socks knocked off. Although it's. Well, yeah, Sam.

[Sam Altman]

Well, although there's two things we. Look, put up your chart again for some branding.

[Jess]

Oh, I'd love to. Thank you.

[Sam Altman]

Put that chart back up. Brought to you by the info.

[Jess]

Brought to you by the. I mean, it is. But also this data, guys, this data doesn't exist. Can I just tell everyone that, you

[Sam Altman]

know, so look, here's the thing with that. If you look at that chart, here's the thing that investors and everyone actually cares about is like, are we linear or are we super linear, right? And what you see in the last, you know, if you look from one's

[Jess]

going this way, one's going this way,

[Sam Altman]

it's all just like, what, like what curve are you on? Like, what's going to be really interesting is what this looks like in two months. Because if Anthropic is on a super linear, you know, traditional, like a growth curve with no asymptote in sight, right? They're going to like blow OpenAI out of the water if OpenAI is not. Now the interesting thing about OpenAI is like, if you just read the numbers, you're like that, thank God they had a good jump from October whatever to November. I don't know what that is. Maybe some enterprise spend or something, God knows what. But like, that is not what looks like a super linear chart, right? That looks like. And that's the, that's the big question. When you, when you pull it out, that chart looks like a company scraping to make number go up. Whereas Anthropics, at least if you look at the last few months, looks like, ooh, that looks very nicely like an X squared.

[Jess]

So we should also, there's this is ARR. So you can calculate, I don't know, R. You can calculate R in a lot of ways. I believe they both. We have gotten to the bottom of it on a four week. I mean, again, these are generous ARR calculations and I think they're apples to apples, but we would, we would have to.

[Sam Altman]

I'm just saying it's like, it's. That's the only thing that matters at this stage is like, what is the slope? What is the slope? And if the slope is asymptoting or linear, you bad. And if the slope is exponential, maybe you good.

[Brit Morin]

We don't know.

[Jess]

But, but here's something that I think is happening that very clearly right. ChatGPT got the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the consumer business mindshare in the chatbot wars, races, whatever, so far, and raised 10,000 bazillion dollars, or however much based on this idea that usage translates to revenue. Like this was the dream that Meta, then Facebook sold for years and years and years and has generally worked. It's generally been a safe bet that if you can build an audience that massive, that quickly, and in this case revenue, you're going to have some great opportunistic business models. So everyone bought that. And then we heard the next phase where they started to announce these other things they were doing, like shopping, which is how you eventually show your investors and build up that revenue stream that supports your cost. And it's very clear that people inside of OpenAI think they have an opportunity to build the world's greatest shopping advertising engine beyond what Google has done, beyond what Amazon has done.

[Brit Morin]

Right.

[Jess]

And those are the two gold standard business models in the universe. And what we're seeing early on is that specifically OpenAI abandoned the plan to kind of close the loop within ChatGPT and to get merchants to basically close that payment loop themselves. And they're now pushing merchants to do these in more apps that they're building for ChatGPT. The second level problem now is discovery of those apps, which we know from the history of the App Store and everything else is not something you build overnight. But the reason. And then I'll go to you, Sam, I think this is important because I think commerce from a revenue potential is one of these big moments where OpenAI could prove that it hasn't just, you know, built this incredible brand and usage, but that it is actually going to turn it into a business. And early on we see them pivoting, shifting, whatever you call it, to figure that out. And I think the reason that investors are obsessed with this story. And I may have mentioned this on prior pods because we've been reporting about it, but this is the number one topic. People are interested in the information right now even more than the Trump memo or all the other stuff that we've done. And I think it's because investors are really wondering if this thesis as a business model for them is tricky.

[Sam Altman]

What?

[Jess]

Maybe we can't just assume that they're going to win in advertising. Maybe we can't just assume that all these business models are there for the taking on the consumer side.

[Sam Altman]

To be clear, you just Google and Facebook, right, as your two examples, Amazon. Well, let's start with Google and Facebook, which are actually much more profitable businesses, right? Amazon's a tough business, right? Like those two businesses are not commerce businesses, they're attention businesses and like an advertising businesses. Commerce. I remember for years everyone's, I was like, well, why doesn't, you know, meta spend time on commerce and there have been some attempts or whatever. You know why? Because commerce is a bad business. What's good is the attention. Like that's the efficient business, that's the good business. It's not closing the transaction. Now the problem that ChatGPT has in the advertising game is advertising fundamentally is like a time spent game, right? Targeting time spent, whatever. And like, sure, they might have an advantage in targeting. They're not going to have an advantage in time spent or engagement anytime soon. And so then the problem becomes is like how are they supposed to tell that story, right, without saying, well, the magical moment is we just buy all the things for you and it's an amazing experience. But that's a hard business especially to actually pull off. So look, I think the story, we've talked about this a thousand times, in fact, the bot has picked up that all I care about is narrative, right? But it's like you got to remember the original OpenAI story was not about commerce and consumers, right? The first story was about AGI and the race to AGI. Whoever got there first would just win, right? And that would be like an insurmountable thing. It was a winner take all market. That's clearly not true, right? That's not where we're going at all, right? So then there was a pivot. You know, for a while it was like, oh, the developer platform matters and enterprise matters, but ChatGPT doesn't. Then I was like, no, no, no, ChatGPT matters. Like it's been this, like this hunt for a story that holds up effectively financially and, and I think what we're seeing here is like, you know, they're continuing to hunt, right? Everyone, you know, thematically this stuff is good. How you actually make money on it is very tbd, Right. And I just think the reality is, is they keep selling stories and then testing them and finding out they don't work.

[Jess]

You know, except. And I want to go to Dave on the consumer, like, what would your consumer revenue playbook be for ChatGPT? But just to add, we cannot forget OpenAI does have a massive enterprise business too. And I think Claude with code and then cowork are winning a lot of mindshare. And we saw with even the own government, they got ahead of a lot of big contracts, but OpenAI is there too. So it.

[Sam Altman]

But that's bad for both of them.

[Jess]

Well, I don't see a world in which OpenAI doesn't build a massive enterprise business. I really do believe that. But the trillion dollar valuation and. And they're. What they're spending a ton of time on is the consumer business side as well.

[Sam Altman]

So the way they don't build a huge business though, or it just looks like Accenture all over again, is the question of just like, how commodity is this quote unquote, intelligence?

[Jess]

Yes. No, I know. Yes, Dave.

[Sam Altman]

And it's not clear you can build a big business that way.

[Jess]

It's not clear. But it's not clear you can't.

[Dave Morin]

I just think that the frame is all wrong. Everyone's arguing consumer versus developer, like, these are two different teams. But what's actually happening is that AI is turning everyone into a builder. Like, the line between these two is disappearing. The first business model that materialized out of this entire industry was tokens, right? Like, people were using tokens to do creative projects. And at first it was software developers, and the software developers are certainly the ones making the most noise. But, like, you know, I was down in Palo Alto last night for a dinner with our friend Scott Belsky, who's over at a 24 now. And, you know, these guys are filmmakers, writers, creative people, right? And they're building things with AI now. And they're actually really excited about it. Right? They're using tokens to make cultural impact. You know, a 24 is arguably one of the most influential storytelling machines on the planet right now.

[Jess]

And.

[Dave Morin]

And they're like, really, really excited about what they can do with this intelligence that Sam's talking about. And so, like, that's kind of the thing that I don't totally.

[Sam Altman]

It's power, though. It's like, I don't I hear you, Dave, but, like, I was with another entrepreneur of ours recently who's spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year right now on, like, all the LLMs. Right?

[Brit Morin]

Like, hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah. They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year run rate on inference. Right.

[Jess]

You got to get your run rate

[Brit Morin]

up, which, no, now I'm like, okay, I bet I can choose who this entrepreneur.

[Dave Morin]

No, Brit, there were four labs at the table last night that said the same thing. They were like, we raised $1 billion and we're spending 900 of it on inference.

[Sam Altman]

Here's the thing about it. There's no margin for the people underneath them because they're sitting there like, like opener. So they've built models and they just, like, arbitrage between them to zero. Right. To your point about the Chinese open source models, they'll sit there and be like, okay, well, this one's going to take longer, but it's cheaper. Whatever. It's just the price of energy. So, like, this is my whole thing about OpenAI in particular, being a company that sold this vision for cheap capital and buys $0.20 on the dollar of infrastructure for it to become a power company. Right. Is that like, just because you use a lot of something doesn't mean it's valuable or a good business. Right. And, like, I think this is, like, the upshot is, like, I don't disagree with you.

[Dave Morin]

Fine. But, like, we've said this over and over again. I guess. So, like, where are we? Where, like, I don't know.

[Jess]

I'm just searching ideas.

[Dave Morin]

Well, I'm, like, searching for, like, a new, like, where are we going from here?

[Sam Altman]

Where we're going is that these are not good businesses, but everyone's using them.

[Dave Morin]

Sam, like, you're freaking out. Like, it's like, it's so fun. Yeah.

[Brit Morin]

How much more would you pay, Sam? How much price elasticity does cloud have?

[Sam Altman]

For Claude? Very. It's for me. Look, the reality is, like, I don't.

[Dave Morin]

I mean, they keep raising the price

[Brit Morin]

and people keep paying and Sam's willing to pay it. I know, that's what I'm saying. Like, maybe there could be a good business model.

[Sam Altman]

If you told me that, for instance, this is why maybe the pro anthropic thing, if you said, look, anthropic, for whatever reason, is able to build an insurmountable data flywheel in lead encoding so no one will ever be as good as them. Right. And I actually think the way to think about it is, like, what Claude really is is it's like the ll, it's the AI platform for rich people because you're like, ah, it's maybe like a little bit better, but it's more expensive. But I'm rich, so who cares? That is not the way business works at scale.

[Jess]

That, by the way, is what ChatGPT wants you to think. They have their executives tweet that all day long.

[Sam Altman]

Well, that might be right, but the thing about that is like that, you know, it's if they actually have a sustainable advantage like Apple's for rich people too, right? That's a great fucking business, right? And so like if you could be a premium priced thing that actually is better and is more expensive, maybe there's a, there's a defensible model in there. But I think the vast majority, the bulk of quote unquote intelligence, it really just will be this ultimate arbitrage game where I don't know how anyone makes money because it's too easy to arbitrage, it's too easy to change models. Like it's too easy.

[Jess]

Well, maybe I think that that's true, Sam, but, but the, it's not just about the. I mean I interviewed Brett Taylor a year ago and he talked about the business model of the foundation models being like the cable infrastructure, right? Like that being the low margin.

[Sam Altman]

But this is, but just to push you that here's the thing, it's so much worse than the cable business or the power business, because cables.

[Jess]

He's the chairman of OpenAI, so he's right.

[Sam Altman]

But I'm just saying like, so like, maybe that's his analogy, but his analogy is almost the point, which is cable businesses are regional and local monopolies, right? Power businesses have this problem, right? Which is power distribution. You lose so much without superconductivity, you don't have a globally consolidated power market, right? And so as a result, just because of the physics of these things, you have to like literally put cables in the ground. You basically end up with a, like a semi monopolistic, like legally enforced monopolies on whatever. And like they're okay businesses, they can print cash, they're not amazing. This is so much worse because you have a global frictionless competition for the cheapest power and the cheapest intelligence you can get anywhere, right? And that means that it's going to be a way worse business than the cable model. Like imagine cable, but with total perfect competition globally.

[Jess]

I think it's too early to call it. I follow everything you're saying and I think that dynamic is Way stronger than the people in the industry are willing to talk to. And as I've said here, when I talk to like Intrader, the CEO of Core Weave, and he's like, there's always going to be infinite demand for intelligence. I'm like, what about the margin? Like I, I agree with all of that, but it's still so early and I think, I think it is reasonable to make a bet that all of us using these tools and having these mind blowing experiences that some of these companies will find some way to make money off that and it could be around different parts of it. But I want to say so to wrap this segment. Oh well, Brit consumer. And question for you too. Like, maybe commerce isn't the thing that is a viable consumer business model for chatbots. I want to point out that in Asia it is. And that agentic commerce in all these like vertically integrated Chinese apps, WeChat, ByteDance and Douyin and all that is really growing. Early, but growing. And I think it's interesting because we saw both with messaging and then the on demand economy that like the China Internet sector kind of figured it out and then the US really tried to imitate it. Now they're complete. The companies there are vertically integrated in a way that it can work, but not here.

[Dave Morin]

So.

[Jess]

But I imagine there are a lot of people looking at that saying there is a way for OpenAI and anthropic to make commerce work. But what do you think?

[Brit Morin]

I think there definitely is a way and I think there's consumer demand for it. Like, of course I want there to be less friction when I'm shopping and I just want to allow my agent to buy things, some things for me and to bring me other things and for me to click a button and for me to have my agent compare notes with your agent, Jess and like bring both of us the things we should wear to the thing we're going to next weekend or you know, like, I think there's a social, like there's so much cool innovation still readily available for commerce. Agentic commerce is like all over the place. And by the way, Asia's been to your point, years ahead of the US in terms of commerce for so long now. I remember when like live commerce was this crazy thing to us Americans and now it's everywhere, right? And it took us like five to ten more years to adopt it. So I definitely think it's going to be baked into all kinds of agentic experiences. But to your point, I'm not sure this is like the huge lever OpenAI or even Anthropic has to create the next big business. That said, I think where I'll push back on Sam is that like, yes, for Google in Meta, it's, it's clearly like those are ad driven businesses. But the commerce related portion of that for Google is like 25%, which of like, you know, of $300 billion, let's say that's like 77 billion per year in things like shopping ads, retail searches, like travel bookings. And those are things that obviously can create like a massive amount of revenue. So I don't, I don't think it's trivial that OpenAI can't take a huge swing at this market. I just think like the actual checkout function and all of that is going to be an uphill battle.

[Sam Altman]

They can do something. But like, I'll give you an example. Like I am the king of Instagram purchases. I buy everything on Instagram, right? Like, and I buy all this random shit that's just advertised to me and I see it six times and I eventually convert. In fact, you guys don't know.

[Jess]

Let me talk about. Why did you buy the string bat?

[Sam Altman]

Because it was advertised to me.

[Brit Morin]

String bat.

[Jess]

This is like a bat.

[Sam Altman]

This is Max vp. I actually got a message from someone on Instagram this week that was like, Sam, since you've bought, I thank you for your reviews of all the baseball equipment. As a baseball dad, do you have advice on xyz? And I'm like, I'm not even a baseball dad. I just got. I just buy all the things and like play with that.

[Brit Morin]

If I wanted to be the ultimate troll to Sam and if I could get into like meta's, psychographics, demographics and like narrow, narrow, narrow all the way down to what I know Sam nanotar just do nanotargeting just as Sam and then have my agent create only products I know Sam would buy. And then it's just a business of Brit selling things.

[Sam Altman]

That's the future.

[Dave Morin]

You're making the point, which is that the medium is the message. Like, we keep analyzing whether selling intelligence is a good business and maybe it's not. Maybe it's a commodity, maybe it's cable, whatever. That's like being in 95 asking if selling bandwidth is a good business or not. Like, the answer was sort of, but it's not where the money ended up. The money ended up in what people built on top of it. It's not like, will the intelligence get cheaper? Is there margin in the intelligence? The question is like, what can you make with it that you couldn't make before.

[Jess]

So Dave, how do you model the intelligence makers coming to market seeking trillion dollar IPOs in calendar year 2026?

[Dave Morin]

It's fine, but like yeah, like let it, I guess it's just like let it happen. But like I'm just excited about the next thing, right. These things are already trillion dollar businesses that like no one in the public market is going to benefit from like the growth of like they're going to get like a little bump, you know as these things go into the multi trillions fine. So great. You can get 2 to 5x or something like that, right? Yeah, optimistically. And it's like I'm just way more excited about the fact that like yeah, every creative person I know from like every software engineer I've ever met to everybody in film and creativity are like oh my God, I can make things that I couldn't make before.

[Sam Altman]

Amen. Well said Dave. Well said. I mean I think this is the thing is like the story.

[Jess]

Do you need the double arm Sam? I mean people viewing like Sam is like hallelujah.

[Sam Altman]

I think Dave is exactly right. And that's the right direction to take the same which is like look, here's the reality. The, the narrative of like single AI company control universe, 100 trillion dollar company is like clearly wrong, right? It is more like bandwidth. It's a fine business commodity. Whatever. The creativity, what you can build on top of it is wildly awesome, right? Like wildly awesome.

[Dave Morin]

It's a new medium. Like it's literally a new medium.

[Sam Altman]

Well, it just, it unlocks like I, you know, we're doing next week. In fact you guys, if you want any to join you can. We're doing, we're starting to do bot summit specifically for creators that we've backed. Right. Because our thing is that you think about all these creators. The most excited people I've talked to in my universe about all the bots who are doing the most interesting stuff with them are these solopreneurs to people who have big audiences who have historically been hyper blocked because it's super hard to find the right developer to work with. And now they're like oh my God, I can just do this stuff. And so you know, the implications of the rise of the, you know, solo created the Jonathan Katz Moses of the world. Like that's where it changes things. Now there's also the macro of like that might be bad for the economy in certain ways but like Jonathan cats mo is going to crush us with this stuff. You know, like you Know, these. These people who are, like, effectively blocked on pushing code around. Right. Are now fully unlocked, and there's gonna be wildly good stuff from them. It's just hard when you're talking at 100,000 vertical feed to talk about how that manifests, because most people aren't them.

[Dave Morin]

I just think it's so cool. Like, when you look back at the indie movements that have happened throughout, like, in media over the last many decades, it's like, when camcorders got cheap, the film industry, like, started using them and doing really interesting things. Like when the iPhone came along, we got the influencer movement. Right? Like, this new movement, this new medium is going to cause really, really interesting things.

[Sam Altman]

Interesting, but not necessarily, like, it's just interesting when you think about the economic impact, because they would argue the camcorder didn't really do anything. Was it important?

[Dave Morin]

I don't know, man. Like, the. The entire, like, 90s media business was enormous. That gave way to the Internet, which, like, gave way to what we currently now have as the influencer business, which you have an entire fund built on top of. Right. Like, people are going to have entire infrastructures built on top of agents.

[Sam Altman]

Yes. It's just. It's relatively small. I don't know, man.

[Brit Morin]

I don't agree. I don't agree with that.

[Dave Morin]

I was walking down the street last night in front of Facebook's original building where I worked for many years of my life, and I was like, man, the last time I was talking about developers, I was like, you know, having coffee with Jessica at Koopa. You know, we were like, talking about profiles, and now it's like we're talking about agents. Right? Like, it's like, this is the new medium and it's going, by the way.

[Brit Morin]

Yeah. I mean, you look at, like, Pulsia from last week, which, like, took everyone.

[Jess]

Like, it's like, Brit.

[Brit Morin]

Oh, my God.

[Sam Altman]

Crazy.

[Brit Morin]

Okay, this is. What. What is Pulsia.

[Dave Morin]

One of our companies.

[Brit Morin]

This is pulsia. Pulsia.

[Sam Altman]

What?

[Brit Morin]

Pulsea.com live this was like, all the rage over the last week in VC land, at least.

[Sam Altman]

Did you get paid a thousand bucks for that?

[Jess]

There are many Internets.

[Dave Morin]

No, we don't need to. We're huge investors.

[Brit Morin]

100 to 200% week over week. It's run by one person, and it has now 4,000 active companies in, like, the last two weeks that are being built. It builds companies for you. It's like taking just. You could drop in a business idea and then just, like, run with something. And by the way, we have like another company that does this called Auto, which Heinrich Rodolin, which you might know started, and that's. It's.

[Dave Morin]

Auto has an open cloth skill. It's amazing.

[Jess]

Can't cloud build me businesses. Why do I need these other things?

[Brit Morin]

No, this can do it with all of us. Not only creates your app, but then runs the whole company for you. It like manages all your ad campaigns, all your marketing campaigns. It's like doing bookkeeping back office legal, like all the stuff it does.

[Dave Morin]

This is actually an important and slightly different topic than what we were just talking about, which is, I think the power of the harness. Right. Like there's this new concept of that. Like I build this harness around the LLM or around the AI tools in order to accomplish the thing that I want to accomplish. And you know this entrepreneur that we funded actually many years ago, he's been on this amazing journey. We should tell the story sometime, have him on the podcast. But he's been building this incredible harness for the last year. And he actually built it to build a different company, but he actually figured out that the harness he was using to build the company was the thing that was the most valuable. And so he started giving it to other people and saying, and a harness

[Jess]

software that controls llc.

[Sam Altman]

It's a markdown file. It's a markdown file.

[Dave Morin]

Well, it depends on how complex it is. Like, Sam, I think you would be impressed with the harness.

[Sam Altman]

I'm not saying I wouldn't be. I just think anything that software is so easy to replicate that it's extremely hard to imagine any of this stuff is defensible, right?

[Jess]

That is the question.

[Dave Morin]

We'll see. I mean, this thing, he's building businesses, he's developing customer relationships. There's like a real network effect at play. And the reason that it's growing on a nice exponential curve is because every person that signs up, you know, either generates a business idea or takes their current business and feeds it to it. And then it starts actually reaching out to people over email. It starts tweeting on your behalf. It starts giving you the next tax to do. It comes up with research documents. It helps you do design.

[Sam Altman]

I totally get it. Does all the things I don't. I'm unconvinced it's a business, but I get it. Just because, like. Well, just like, it's like, yeah, that's. I mean, first of all, there's. Well, we can get to a few angles on it. I think it's great people are doing that and like it feel. But I Just don't. You know, I think anything that is basically software, anything that's writing is fundamentally just going to be an undefensible business because it's too easy to replicate over and over and over and only gets easier. You have to. The only way to build businesses is with dark pools or with. Basically you need to have. What's a dark pool?

[Dave Morin]

Can you tell the people what a dark pool is?

[Jess]

Well, that's what you've been talking about, Dave, right?

[Brit Morin]

Dark factory.

[Dave Morin]

I've been talking about dark factory.

[Jess]

Oh my God. Harnesses dark pools and dark factor.

[Brit Morin]

Yeah. This is leading. Teeing me up so well for my topic later in the pod.

[Dave Morin]

Brits down some really. In some really dark pools.

[Sam Altman]

Here's my dark. Here's my, here's my, my, my thing. I've talked to a bunch of companies recently. I've been thinking about a bunch of this from a bunch of different angles. I actually think one of the things that LLMs and this era will do is going to be the death of the open marketplace. Right? Because you can't make any money in an open marketplace. It's too efficient. Right. So the thing that people miss about capitalism is that when anything's open, it ultimately collapses margins to zero. That's like how capitalism works, right? So it's kind of like in the public markets you can't win against the people who are algorithmically trading super fucking fast in like the public markets.

[Dave Morin]

Yeah, Singularity happened on Wall street like

[Sam Altman]

20 years ago if you think about it in our world, in the venture world, the public market is all the random ass companies in YC or things that everyone knows about. You can't make any money on everything on Twitter. You can't make any money on those. And the reason you can't make any money on those is because with open access someone will always overbid or overpriced. There's no. It just doesn't work, right? So it turns out that like when markets get too efficient, they're bad businesses and technology and AI makes markets efficient. The only way to have a good business, right, the only way to do a good venture deal is to have proprietary deal flow. Right? You need a dark pool of deals that no one else knows about or dark pool of founders that no one else knows about or access that no one else has that's sustainable and ideally compounds. Right. And I think we're going to see this in a lot of things where like the Internet was all about bringing liquidity to marketplaces saying okay, there's this Inefficient market and we're going to make it more efficient and make money on it by, by effectively aggregating demand, supply and demand and like host the market. I think that goes to zero value because it's too efficient and everything becomes in a company building sense about forget the software, forget the market story. It's all about can you own and control dark pools of value effectively and then monetize them consistently?

[Dave Morin]

What if it's dark pools everywhere because everyone's talking to the same AIs and so it's leading them all to the same place and so the number of dark pools is actually increasing.

[Sam Altman]

Well, I think it, I think like this is the whole thing with like the again how the world is becoming more aristocratic and openness is collapsing and we're all kind of going into our little like chat message threads that are private for all real information. This is like what is happening in a lot of places. It's really bad. Like it's socially create social stuff. Dark pools are not about open openness and efficiency and access and mobility. Dark pools are like very medieval, right? Is what I would basically say. But I think it's where we're tending also.

[Jess]

This is my concern. I think it's great that you can have a product, find an audience and get a revenue stream all with bots. But I don't want to be teaching the entrepreneurs of tomorrow that like relationships don't matter and other like in person human skills in part because how do you find those dark pools and those edges? Relationships are a big part of that.

[Sam Altman]

That's my point Jess, is that it's all relationships in the future. Actually the irony is the people who are building the bot businesses, those are all going to zero, right? Like because the market will make them efficient.

[Dave Morin]

Oh man, like this is like such a pessimistic take stop pessimistic People, people. If, if you believe the narrative, which I don't believe that you know, AI is going to rid everyone of their jobs and like we're going to have this mass social unrest. If you believe that then something has to teach entrepreneurship solopreneurship to everyone so that they can actually go and do something that gives them meaning, purpose, has work, you know, is their own little small business. And thus far the tools that the Internet have done for this haven't been that efficient or good. It's like you can go on YouTube and learn about it. It's really hard. It doesn't teach you through the practice of it.

[Jess]

Dave, no one's Doubting that it solves an interesting opportunity. But it's substack, right? And how many professional journalists went to substack thinking they were going to become, you know, they were going to build amazing businesses and then realized no, it was cool, it was creative. Maybe there's some revenue attached, maybe the entity as a whole has some value in the platform level, but maybe it got you started.

[Sam Altman]

It'll happen for some people.

[Jess]

But anyone. The number of substackers who are actually have built full time revenue streams for themselves is.

[Dave Morin]

Would you say that about Shopify? I mean Shopify was the same thing, right? Like you know, like Toby started that thing to try to sell his own snowboard stuff, right? And then gave it to everybody else.

[Jess]

I'm glad these businesses exist in the world. I'm glad they exist in the world. But you're not going to build the next open AI off one of these, in my opinion.

[Dave Morin]

Do you need to though? I guess that was my point from the prior, prior comment which is like we need a Cambrian explosion of like Shopify and substacks on top of OpenAI next.

[Sam Altman]

I don't think it's going to. I mean my personal view is this is the real conundrum is Dave, what you're describing. I love entrepreneurs too. I obviously back them. I think they're great. Let's pretend I am not worried about the top 1% of anything of intelligence, of drive or they're going to find they're going to figure out how to build cool businesses and things on top of platforms will make it easier and more efficient for them. Whatever. I think the question is what happens to the P50 P75 people, right? You're smart, you're not the smartest, you're driven, you're not the most driven. There's like that's most people by definition. And the problem is, is that if all of a sudden I don't need anyone to build my super good idea, I can just do it on my own, which is super fun for me. Then the problem is, is that like it be it creates this dynamic where like I actually do think it's a real problem. It basically says that if you are exceptional you're going to do great. And so the question is your only option is to try to create an economy where everyone is an exceptional at something and therefore everyone can be in the top 1% of what they're doing, which I think is extremely difficult to do. Or you have this fundamental problem which is you just need so many fewer people and so Much less labor, both physical and mental to do anything that you don't take anyone along for the ride.

[Brit Morin]

I thought the point you were trying to make, Sam, was that like, all software is commoditized and Dave was reacting that it wasn't. And I think like to add on to what Dave was saying, of course some software is going to be commoditized, but like, there are different pockets, dark pockets of the software industry that won't be right. It's stuff that has like real network effects, real like proprietary data behind it, but it's gonna be like easier than

[Jess]

ever to copy those. Right. I see one of these things that's doing these things and they tell Claude, no, not the human, not the human.

[Brit Morin]

So hard to switch out of Instagram right now because your friend graph is like located.

[Jess]

Well, you're not going to build Instagram off one of these things.

[Brit Morin]

I'm just saying, like, not all Sam is saying all software is dead. And I just disagree.

[Sam Altman]

Well, all is there's going to be exceptions, but I don't think it's. The point is there'll be network effects for sure. There'll be dark pools for sure. Software is totally commoditized. So the only thing you use software for is a lever to build the trust and a dark network or build the software as a lever into, you know, you know, security or a brand or something that no one else can replicate. Like, you cannot just write software that's valuable.

[Jess]

It'd be hard to build Shopify today. Dave, I agree Shopify is a valuable business.

[Dave Morin]

Yeah, but like, I agree, but I guess you can't agree with me that what people build on top of this new intelligence medium is going to be like wildly awesome. But then also say that like, you can't build anything valuable. Like, it's like, well, but why not?

[Sam Altman]

It can be awesome but not valuable.

[Jess]

I think the moats are harder. I think the business moats are harder. They're not impossible, but I think they're harder. I think that.

[Brit Morin]

I agree they're harder, but on the

[Jess]

other side, the other side of the coin to democratizing software. Software, right. They're just harder. And I think they'll be based on things that aren't the software itself. And so it's really important for entrepreneurs who are starting these businesses to still be thinking about the comparative advantage that goes beyond the coding. I mean, our buddy Adithya Agrawal wrote a great op ed in the Information and had a great interview on TITV of what it's like to be Like a very senior software engineer in the Valley, realizing that your life's calling has become, you know, as free as air. Right. And he goes on and on about that. So. To be continued. Brit, it's time for Brit Spot Corner. Take us there.

[Brit Morin]

Oh, God. Well, the Brit Spots Corner is just that I've been building a lot of things in the background. But what I do want to talk about, like I mentioned at the top of this pod is, is, you know, the top 50 AI web products by unique monthly visits came out. This is, I guess, and now an annual thing. A16.

[Jess]

What's an AI web product? Vers a non AI. Like, what's an AI web product?

[Dave Morin]

I think it's just an excuse to make another list of 50.

[Brit Morin]

You just have to use AI in it.

[Sam Altman]

How many of these people are already in jail? It's the logical conclusion of all lists. Yeah.

[Brit Morin]

All right. Two. Two call outs that I will pull from this list because all the normal suspects are on there.

[Dave Morin]

Tell us about the dark corners, Brett.

[Brit Morin]

Well, the first one is not a dark corner. I do think it's interesting, though. Last year there were like, seven creator tools on this list, and now they're only three. And I think that's because Gemini in particular has, like, started to really eat up the creator tools market. Like, we talked about Anthropic going after developer, GPT going after, like, mainstream. And I think Google's rise in creator tools with, like, Nano Banana and everything else has been, like, really exceptional this year.

[Dave Morin]

We haven't even talked about the fall of Cursor, which is like, the next.

[Jess]

Yeah, that's a whole topic in and of itself. They keep leaking their revenue to convince people they're not dying.

[Brit Morin]

The second theme I pulled out from this list was there were three in the top 50 that I have never heard about that squarely fit in this weird adult entertainment AI category called Janitor. AI Spicy Chat and Crush on.

[Jess]

And I was like, you've never heard of Janitor? I ran an op. Editor, founder of Janitor.

[Dave Morin]

Is it a marketplace for janitors?

[Jess]

It's Romantasy. It's Romantasy.

[Dave Morin]

It's Romantasy.

[Jess]

It's Romantasy.

[Sam Altman]

Women want to fuck the janitor.

[Brit Morin]

But no, they're all anime.

[Dave Morin]

I'm so confused, Sam. I thought this was like Bannerman for janitors.

[Sam Altman]

I mean, God, I gotta buy a mop. Yes.

[Brit Morin]

Literally, just vacuum for Jess and you will have a great night tonight. Okay? The weird thing about all these, as I saw from their websites, they're all AI, Anime Eroticism. And I'm not sure what's happening here and what the anime AI thing is all about, but I tried it because I had.

[Jess]

I was just like.

[Brit Morin]

Like, anime cartoonish. Like the anime men with, like, eight packs that are anime, like, Japanese.

[Dave Morin]

Yeah, we know. You picked the one with the eight pack and I.

[Brit Morin]

And one of them, you just. It's not even like a video. You just chat with it. And it's like your AI anime misogynist husband, chatbot. And it's like, this is what people pay for. And this is in the top.

[Dave Morin]

The question is why you picked that one.

[Brit Morin]

It was at the top of the list.

[Jess]

It's research.

[Sam Altman]

It's funny. I can't judge, you know, but, like, here's my thing. Here's my thing. Like, I have an OnlyFans account. You have to. It's research. The. The. Here's my thing is. Brit, I think what you're actually talking about is an old theme of ours that's come back around, which was, like, the whole pursuit of hyper realism, with VR being, like, the wrong way to think about this, right? And so I think there's this era of technology that. And, like, technologists that were, like, obsessed with, like, how do we pixel perfect, recreate the real world? And, like, that's what's valuable, right? The hyper realism. But actually the reality is the mind is the most powerful machine, right? And what you're paying for is the prompting for imagination. You're not paying for, like, hyper reality, if that makes sense. So I actually think, if you think about what's going to happen in a lot of spaces in fantasy, whatever, like, hyper realism, I think, is quite overvalued. This goes also for, like, you know, these AI generators that make these, like, Instagram creator girls that, like, are really hot and, like, they're all over Instagram now, I'm sure. I don't know if you guys get

[Dave Morin]

those lo fi, hi fi.

[Sam Altman]

I don't know if you get those, but, like, Instagram is, like, full of fake. You don't get any fake bikini girls. It's like half of my Instagram and they're all one.

[Jess]

I did get a Dakota Johnson Calvin

[Sam Altman]

Klein ad, so there's like, a ton of that stuff. But the thing is, it's like, honestly, you just, like, fry your neurons out of it and, like, the reality of it doesn't matter, right? Like, that's not. Like, that's not interesting to humans. Like, the mind, again, is the important machine. And all you're looking for with these AIs is like unique, which is why things like lo fi cartoons or anime that's like over weird tentacle porn or whatever is like, oh my God.

[Dave Morin]

So.

[Sam Altman]

Well, these things exist, Jess. Like this is like a thing. It's like.

[Jess]

I know, I know exists. Okay, Britt's gonna wrap up her box.

[Brit Morin]

I would like to interrupt you. Okay, I'll say. Is this to Sam, what percentage of the man's mind versus the woman's mind needs the like light touch, Reddit style, anime style porn? Because I think women need like the fuller picture, the story, the visualizations, the romantasy. And, and so I would imagine maybe the real opportunity here.

[Dave Morin]

Wait, do you mean they need actual media or just the words?

[Jess]

The words work. I mean that's why the, the category is so big.

[Brit Morin]

Yeah, yeah, Romance.

[Dave Morin]

But the books don't have photos.

[Brit Morin]

Right, but they're very detailed. But like very detailed.

[Sam Altman]

Okay, so I, I think this is like very biological and extremely simple. Right? Which is.

[Jess]

I also think this is way beyond the purview of this podcast. But finish Sam, and then I have a deal proposition for you.

[Sam Altman]

You don't like this topic?

[Jess]

No, no, I like the topic as it relates to AI. I think now we're getting into gender stereotypes that I don't think I. I don't think our podcast listeners are interested in our.

[Sam Altman]

I think it's like very simple to understand biology, which is like by design. Like men that are very visually tuned and women are very not visually tuned. Like they're tuned to other things. Things. Because women can have one child at a time and have to seek safety and community to support children. And men can have lots of children at a time and are looking for sexual fitness. And so like, it's just a very basic biology that leads you in different directions in terms of what all this stuff is.

[Jess]

And brought to you by Charles Darwin.

[Sam Altman]

Yes. Well, it's not complicated. I mean, it's like that's just like. I don't think that's even controversial. Like, it's just.

[Jess]

It's not controversial. It's just. We're moving on. Here is my business proposition. Would you like to buy the Tennis Channel for roughly a billion dollars? Now hear me out.

[Dave Morin]

Tennis Channel.

[Jess]

The Tennis Channel is the way that you can watch every tennis match, professional tennis match, except for the Grand Slams, all the time, round the clock.

[Dave Morin]

Where do you find the Tennis Channel?

[Jess]

You find the Tennis Channel through its app.

[Dave Morin]

It has an app.

[Sam Altman]

It's 60 bucks a year.

[Dave Morin]

I've never tried it. I always watch tennis on YouTube, TV,

[Jess]

the slams, ESPN has the slams and now Turner has the French or something. But the Tennis Channel, tennis is a year round sport. You can watch professional tennis. Most of the time on the Tennis Channel plug for this year is Indian Wells. The youngsters are rising. So if you're not paying attention, this is a very consequential thing going on right now. But I think we should all ponder this business opportunity because tennis is growing and they've got all the rights except for the Slam. So I think someone should buy the Tennis Channel. If anyone out there watching, are you

[Sam Altman]

just buying it for the rights? Rights? Like what, like what's the. Oh, oh, no, but I think why, like, obviously you're not buying the app and you're not buying the user base, right? So, like, what are you buying?

[Jess]

The rights. I mean, I also, I've been debating that discussion this with my tennis buddies and they pointed out that like F1 had minuscule viewership 10 years ago and they just made it great and it boomed. So I think you'd have to make a bet on like making the tennis. This viewing experience great. It's already pretty great, actually.

[Sam Altman]

Well, I'd say if you're gonna do this, you should obviously call Ken Solomon before you do it.

[Jess]

Okay, well, I should call a lot of people, but.

[Dave Morin]

Because he.

[Sam Altman]

That was his thing and he's a buddy and like, he's left, he's out.

[Jess]

But I think, I think we should ponder this. A billion's a lot. A billion's a lot.

[Sam Altman]

He knows a thing or two about it.

[Jess]

But compared to buying the World Surf League or this. I think this is much better.

[Sam Altman]

To ask the obvious question, though, like, Jess, like, what do you actually like, is it profitable? How much money do they make? So it's a billion. A billion could be either very little or a lot, depending on a bunch of profitable.

[Jess]

I think it's profitable. Tennis CHANNEL FOR SALE Profitable.

[Brit Morin]

I don't know. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go under on this.

[Jess]

If you are a tennis. Yes, it posted 73 million in earnings last year.

[Sam Altman]

So if you wanna. If you wanna pay a billion dollars for 73 million in earnings, like a 12 adult.

[Jess]

No, I don't.

[Sam Altman]

Any debt on it.

[Jess]

You're asking me too many questions. But this is what a real dealmaker does. I haven't given it to Claude yet to do the diligence, but I think I thought that was an interesting F1 comparison. Right. Like, it's not great. Execution has turned many of these franchises into like amazing things. That they weren't today. I mean, because the viewership of non grand slam tennis is not massive in the United States today. So I think that would be kind of what you're betting on.

[Sam Altman]

ChatGPT says it would be a full price. Maybe slightly high, but not insane. Depending on strategic.

[Jess]

Oh, a full price.

[Brit Morin]

Okay.

[Jess]

Well, someone should do this. I'd be happy to advise. And everyone should be tuning in. It's the rise of Fonseca. Almost beat center. Not really. Two tie breaks. You've got tn. You've got Mickelson. It's a very exciting, very exciting next few days over at Indian Wells, which you can watch on the tennis channel for 60 bucks. So.

[Sam Altman]

But maybe that's the problem. Is it? Charge more.

[Brit Morin]

Speaking of sports and getting into our pop culture corner to wrap up.

[Jess]

Yes.

[Brit Morin]

Guys, Travis, Kelsey is back for another season with the Chiefs. That means Taylor's coming back in the box he referenced. You know, she still has the stamina to keep going, so. I do too. I love it.

[Jess]

I thought that's a great.

[Brit Morin]

It's a great story. You didn't.

[Dave Morin]

Chiefs need to get their act together next season.

[Brit Morin]

They're going to. They're going to. And then lastly, we've got the Oscars coming up this weekend. So I. Have you seen any of the best picture nominees? Are you up to date on this?

[Sam Altman]

It's the. What you figured out one of the only things I could care even less about than sports.

[Brit Morin]

The Oscars.

[Sam Altman]

No.

[Jess]

Give us. Give us a knit one or two of the best picture. I'll tell you if I've seen them.

[Dave Morin]

I mean, the Leonardo DiCaprio one's going to win everything, right?

[Sam Altman]

What's Couch saying?

[Brit Morin]

Okay. Begonia. Also very good. One battle after another. Is the one Dave's referring to. So good. Marty supreme is up there. I haven't seen Hamnet yet.

[Jess]

Oh, everyone loves hamnet but says it very sad.

[Brit Morin]

I know. I need to watch Hannah before Sunday.

[Sam Altman]

One battle after another is the dominant winner likely on Kelsey for best player. For best.

[Jess]

Who will be best dressed? Does Kyle. She have an opinion on that?

[Brit Morin]

Emma Stone will wear. Will wear. Sorry. We'll wear something great and win best.

[Sam Altman]

Who's called Thomas Anderson because he's got a lock on best director.

[Jess]

Oh, I was gonna say he's an actor, but he's not. He's a director.

[Sam Altman]

This is probably Hollywood's new business model is basically betting on the things they make.

[Jess]

Are you watching Love Story before we wrap? You watching Love Story?

[Sam Altman]

No.

[Brit Morin]

Should I be?

[Dave Morin]

What?

[Jess]

What have you Been doing all week.

[Brit Morin]

AI coding in bed.

[Jess]

Well, you can do these. You can multitask.

[Brit Morin]

Oh, this is the JFK one.

[Jess]

Yeah.

[Brit Morin]

Okay. I know. Well, apparently people are. She's really upset about. Carolyn Bassett is, like, super upset about the facts that have not been painted correctly, is what I heard on the Today show.

[Sam Altman]

Is there an aviation theme to it?

[Brit Morin]

No, it's a love. It's a love story, Sam.

[Jess]

It's. I mean, the clothing is excellent. And I'm getting advertised like.

[Brit Morin]

Like, the clothing is excellent.

[Jess]

The clothing is excellent. I mean, it is totally. Like, everyone's trying to dress. I wore a neutral today in honor.

[Brit Morin]

So in the future, I want your agent to tell my agent what you're watching and, like, use my preferences on top of it to be like, Brit. Out of the five things Jess has watched recently, these three are worth checking out.

[Jess]

And I'll be like, great, but British died, by the way, so she's not on the Today show because she died in a horrific crash, which is the whole point of the story.

[Sam Altman]

Here's a question. Are agents in Hollywood mad that we now call agents something that are machines? Are they, like, sad? Their branding has been.

[Brit Morin]

I think they are. It's getting really.

[Jess]

Yeah.

[Sam Altman]

Because it's, like, pretty funny to hand somewhere a business card being like, I'm an agent, you know, It's a good point.

[Jess]

I don't think the Hollywood people think enough about us to actually. Us being the tech people.

[Sam Altman]

No, I think the Hollywood agents think nothing about nothing but about us. Are you kidding?

[Brit Morin]

Yeah. They hate us.

[Sam Altman]

No, all they do is think about technology all day long.

[Jess]

If you called Ari right now, I mean, again, he would not be worried that he's known as an agent and that your bot is known as an agent. That would not register into whatever is going into his head. I mean, I don't. I don't. It's still Mars and Venus over here.

[Sam Altman]

Do you guys know about Ava? Assistants versus agents?

[Jess]

Do we need to. Okay, you should bring us some clues with this. Great.

[Sam Altman]

Well, that's the thing. If you care about Hollywood and Hollywood culture and, like, what's going on in that. Ava, which is assistants versus agents, is like, the key account on Instagram, and they do a bunch of cool events and live events. Guy who runs it's great. So I would. If you. If you care about that. And I'll tell you, those people think a lot about what's going on in the entertainment industry versus.

[Jess]

All right, with that, I'm going to finish my glass of update. This can of non caffeinated energy.

[Sam Altman]

So apparently, guys, if you want to be featured, you can either send us

[Jess]

a $3 can of soda stuff and send it. Take $1,000.

[Sam Altman]

So that's your option? Send me a thousand bucks or send Jess a soda?

[Jess]

I mean, if you send me clothing, I will wear it.

[Dave Morin]

My price is higher.

[Sam Altman]

What's your price?

[Dave Morin]

I'm not sure. I got to think about it.

[Brit Morin]

Let's have an agent tell us what it should be. Yeah, which agent? Oh.

[Jess]

Oh, my God. We're devolving. And Sam, we have an appointment coming up we have to address. So with that, another great week of more or less. No, you're not. We're leaving.

[Brit Morin]

10 minutes.

[Jess]

What are you talking about?

[Sam Altman]

Perfect. That's perfect.

[Jess]

It better be heated already.

[Sam Altman]

Or not. We're heated already. I started before the podcast.

[Jess]

Thank you, dear listeners and viewers. We appreciate you. We would love a good follow, we'd love a good comment, and we will all be back here next week for another episode of More or Less Us.

[Brit Morin]

Bye. Bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for more or less avemorin esson lesson. And as for me, I'm rit see you guys next time.