
A deeply researched report on the foundation model industry as of mid-2026: a sector where two labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, capture roughly 89% of startup AI revenue; where hyperscaler capital spending has tripled to an estimated $725 billion a year; where inference has overtaken training as the dominant cost; and where open-weight Chinese models now trail the closed frontier by only months. The report maps market structure, competitive strategy, the economics of scale, regulation, and where value is migrating up the stack.
When a customer asks ChatGPT about your company, the answer is not pulled from your website in real time. It is assembled from what the model absorbed during training - Common Crawl web pages, Wikipedia, news, reviews, Reddit threads, job postings and structured databases like Crunchbase and Wikidata - frozen at a knowledge cutoff months before the model shipped. This story explains where that knowledge comes from, why it drifts stale, how gaps and old narratives creep in, and what companies can actually do to correct the record.
At Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO and Chair Mark Benioff unveiled the Agentforce 360 platform and declared the arrival of 'the agentic enterprise' — a new era where humans and AI agents drive customer success together. The keynote positioned Agentforce as the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, having handled more than 1.5 million customer service conversations in nine months. Benioff framed the moment around a central choice: whether AI replaces people or elevates them, arguing that AI built on trust and deep data context amplifies human potential. The keynote featured new products including Agentforce Vibes (vibe-coding), Data 360, Agentforce Voice, and Agent Script, alongside five customer stories from Williams-Sonoma, Pandora, PepsiCo, FedEx, and Dell.
Microsoft is a global technology company founded in 1975 that builds software, cloud services, devices and gaming platforms used by billions of people and organizations. Best known for Windows and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity suite, it now anchors its future on the Azure cloud and Copilot AI, positioning itself as core infrastructure for enterprise computing and the generative-AI era.

This documentary-style video traces how artificial intelligence went from a cheap labor-replacing miracle to a runaway cost center. After ChatGPT's 2022 launch, companies raced to adopt AI and cut tens of thousands of jobs across tech and fast food. But forced internal adoption, token-based performance metrics, and a status-driven culture of 'token maxing' inflated demand far beyond real need. Combined with data-center component shortages and canceled construction projects, token prices more than doubled between late 2025 and mid-2026. Giants like Microsoft, Meta, Uber and Nvidia are now confronting AI bills that rival or exceed the human labor they replaced, and with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to go public and raise prices, enterprises are being forced into an unprecedented choice: tokens or humans.
LiveKit is an open-source platform and global edge network for building real-time voice, video, and physical AI applications. Born as a WebRTC media server for livestreaming and conferencing, it has grown into the infrastructure layer that lets AI agents see, hear, and speak with sub-100ms latency. Its technology powers ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode and is used by developers at OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, and Spotify, collectively facilitating billions of real-time calls each year.
Matador Network is a San Francisco-based travel media company founded in 2006 that publishes original stories, videos, and city guides for modern, adventure-minded travelers. Bootstrapped from an $11,000 start into one of the world's largest independent travel brands, its content reaches well over 100 million people a month across web and social. In 2023 it launched GuideGeek, a free OpenAI-powered travel assistant that answers questions inside Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and now licenses white-label versions of that AI to tourism boards and destination marketing organizations worldwide.
Recorded live at the RAISE Summit inside the Louvre, this two-part All-In Podcast conversation, hosted by Jason Calacanis, features ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski and Legora founder and CEO Max Junestrand. Staniszewski details how ElevenLabs raced from a research project to roughly $600 million in annual revenue in under three years, why the company runs on small engineer-embedded teams with zero product managers, how it protects voices from impersonation while paying creators over $22 million, and how it out-competes frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic on voice. Junestrand explains how Legora is compressing the trillion-dollar legal-services market with AI agents, growing 50% quarter-over-quarter for seven straight quarters, deploying 'forward-deployed lawyers,' and disrupting legacy players like LexisNexis and Westlaw.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei sits for a wide-ranging interview at what the host calls the center of the AI universe. He describes the felt experience of running the fastest-growing company in the industry as a 'smooth exponential' that feels like accelerating away from Earth at relativistic speed. Amodei explains why Anthropic bet on enterprise and coding over splashy consumer apps, recounts why he left OpenAI (a loss of trust, not merely a safety disagreement), and defends the company's controversial choices: working with the Department of Defense while drawing red lines against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, warning about entry-level white-collar job loss, and holding back Mythos, a cyber model so capable that early testers called it a 'super weapon.' Throughout he returns to a single thesis: respond to AI's accelerating power rationally and steadily, never 'yo-yoing' between complacency and panic.
In episode 280 of the All-In Podcast, hosts Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks are joined by 'bestie' Brad Gerstner (David Friedberg is on vacation) to unpack a trillion-dollar rush to the IPO exits led by SpaceX and expected to be followed by Anthropic and OpenAI. The group debates the sustainability of exploding AI token spend, the tug-of-war between frontier labs and cheap open-source models, sovereign AI ambitions, and whether enterprises can actually prove ROI. The emotional centerpiece is the launch of 'Trump Accounts' (the Invest America Act), a $1,000-at-birth investment account for every American child that Gerstner championed for four years, now live as the number-one app in the App Store, with billionaire philanthropists like Michael Dell and Gwynne Shotwell seeding accounts for lower-income kids.

Aliisa Rosenthal is a General Partner at Acrew Capital and the firm's first GP hire since founding in 2019. She was the first commercial leader at OpenAI, where she scaled enterprise revenue from roughly $10M to roughly $10B and built ChatGPT Enterprise's go-to-market motion. She invests in AI-native companies reshaping enterprise software.

Joe Betts-LaCroix is the co-founder and CEO of Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco longevity biotech on a mission to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. A scientist-turned-serial-entrepreneur who once held a Guinness World Record for building the world's smallest Windows PC, he now leads a company backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026, that has run an Alzheimer's clinical trial and co-developed a longevity-focused AI model with OpenAI. He came to biology by an unlikely route: a D-average high schooler who tinkered in shared houses, then earned straight A's, transferred to Harvard, and did research at MIT and Caltech before co-discovering principles of electron transfer in proteins.
Formation Bio is a New York-based, AI-native pharmaceutical company that acquires and in-licenses clinical-stage drug candidates and runs them through a proprietary, technology-driven development platform to bring treatments to patients faster and at lower cost. Formerly known as TrialSpark, the company rebranded in December 2023 and raised a $372M Series D in June 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sanofi. It pairs in-house drug selection expertise with AI tools for trial design, recruitment, regulatory writing, and safety monitoring, and partnered with OpenAI and Sanofi to build purpose-built AI agents for drug development.
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
Leah Bibbo is a seasoned technology marketing executive with 20+ years of experience in strategic communications. She spent eight years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), rising to Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications, where she was instrumental in landmark initiatives like the AWS DeepRacer autonomous racing league. Known for her philosophy of embracing uncomfortable opportunities, she has since moved to OpenAI as Vice President of Strategic Pursuits, helping drive enterprise scale and global expansion at one of the world's most consequential AI companies.
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace that recruits domain experts - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - to train and evaluate frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, it has grown from a hiring tool into the human data backbone of the AI economy.
Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise AI agent platform valued at $15.8 billion following its $950M Series E in May 2026. A Stanford computer science graduate, he co-created Google Maps, helped invent Facebook's Like button, served as Facebook CTO, co-founded Quip (acquired by Salesforce), and rose to co-CEO of Salesforce before founding Sierra in 2023. He also chairs the OpenAI board, having stabilized the company after Sam Altman's brief ouster in November 2023. Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in 2025, and Silicon Valley has nicknamed him the 'Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley' for his uncanny presence at every landmark moment in the internet age.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.
Jonas Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Daedalus, an AI-powered precision manufacturing company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, building the factory of the future. A former OpenAI technical lead and co-founder of its robotics team, Schneider left Silicon Valley in 2019 to solve a problem he lived firsthand: getting precision-manufactured parts takes months, and the world's most advanced machines sit idle 80% of the time. Daedalus deploys proprietary AI software across CNC shop floors to double machine utilization, catch defects in real time, and preserve tacit manufacturing knowledge before it disappears with retiring machinists. The company has raised $41.1M in total funding, including a $21M Series A led by NGP Capital in February 2024, and operates a 50,000-square-foot factory serving defense, medical devices, aerospace, and semiconductor clients.

Kurt Beidler is the Chief Executive Officer of Quizlet, the AI-powered learning platform used by hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Appointed in July 2024, he brings 17 years of Amazon experience scaling subscription businesses - most notably growing Amazon Kids+ into the world's largest youth-focused subscription service and launching Kindle into China. Under his leadership, Quizlet has grown revenue to $139M annually while aggressively integrating AI tools including a native ChatGPT app integration, lecture recording features, and an OpenAI partnership aimed at keeping students' entire study workflow on one platform.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Nikhil Buduma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ambience Healthcare, an ambient AI platform that automates clinical documentation, coding, and revenue integrity for health systems. A two-time International Biology Olympiad gold medalist, MIT-educated computer scientist, and author of O'Reilly's 'Fundamentals of Deep Learning,' Buduma built Ambience from the ground up - first by running a medical practice, then by creating the AI platform his clinicians needed. The company has raised $343M total, reached a $1.25B valuation after a $243M Series C in 2025, and built a platform that supports 100+ medical specialties across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings.
Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that gets users speaking out loud from day one. Backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund, Accel, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the San Francisco company reached unicorn status in December 2024 after raising a $78M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its AI tutor offers unlimited conversational practice and instant feedback to over 10 million learners.
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Daniel Lewis is the Global CEO of LegalOn Technologies, the most well-funded AI platform for in-house contract review, having raised over $200 million. A Stanford Law grad who co-founded Ravel Law from a Stanford dorm, partnered with Harvard to digitize 360 years of U.S. case law, and then led LexisNexis's Practical Guidance division before taking the helm at LegalOn in 2022. Under his leadership, LegalOn's US and UK business quadrupled, secured a $50M Series E led by Goldman Sachs, and struck a strategic partnership with OpenAI - all while building attorney-curated AI playbooks that help legal teams cut contract review time by up to 85%.

Russ d'Sa is the co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, the open source real-time communication platform that became the connective tissue of voice AI. When you tap the voice button in ChatGPT, your phone is talking to a LiveKit server. He has built five companies, shipped Twitter Cards, sold a launcher app (Evie) to Medium, and now runs the nervous system for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Agentforce, Tesla, Spotify and thousands of other voice agents.

Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.

Kevin Moody is the co-founder and CEO of Mem, an AI-powered knowledge management platform backed by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz. A Stanford Computer Science graduate who once worked at Google X on drone delivery, he spent five years quietly building toward a single obsession: making your past knowledge work as hard as your present focus. Mem has raised $34.7M and is redefining how individuals and teams capture, connect, and retrieve information at the speed of thought.

Cole Pergament is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, one of the most storied venture platforms in Silicon Valley. A Wharton summa cum laude graduate who founded his university's undergraduate fintech group, Cole cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Group before spending four years at BOND Capital, where he backed companies that became household names in AI and enterprise software - including OpenAI, Decagon, AlphaSense, Weights & Biases, and Wiz. He joined Sequoia in July 2025, bringing a reputation for seeking founders who embrace discomfort, question convention, and are fully committed to their vision.