OpenAI's Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani's First Tax, Swalwell Out

TL;DR

The All-In crew debates OpenAI's identity crisis vs. Anthropic's growth, datacenter bans, NYC's pied-à-terre tax, and Eric Swalwell's political exit.

Key Points

• 1.Mamdani's proposed NYC pied-à-terre tax targets second homes over $5M at ~3.9% annually. The hosts argue this effectively doubles the purchase price over 10 years, will crater demand for second homes, and mirrors London's stamp tax collapse at the high end of the market.
• 2.Zohran Mamdani was criticized for pointing at Ken Griffin's NYC property on video. The hosts called it a dangerous dog whistle — especially the same week Sam Altman's house was firebombed — and said it could trigger violence against wealthy individuals.
• 3.Austin is held up as the counterexample to NYC's housing failures. By allowing construction, Austin doubled in size over a decade while rents fell, proving supply-side policy works where Democratic cities with NIMBY politics have failed.
• 4.OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser sent a leaked 4-page memo attacking Anthropic. She claimed Anthropic's $30B run rate is inflated by ~$8B via revenue-share accounting and accused it of being built on 'fear, restriction, and elite control' of AI.
• 5.Anthropic is growing at roughly 10x per year vs. OpenAI's 3–4x, raising existential competitive concerns. Sacks noted Anthropic went from ~$1B to $10B ARR in one year and reached $30B by end of Q1 2025, on track for $80–100B by year-end.
• 6.OpenAI closed a $122B funding round — the largest private raise ever — yet secondary markets now price Anthropic higher. Investors quoted by the FT say OpenAI would need a $1.2T IPO valuation to justify its last round, with no current buyers at $850B.
• 7.The panel agreed OpenAI must focus on enterprise and coding (Codex) rather than remain unfocused. Chamath noted Codex outperforms Claude on complex long-horizon coding tasks, and enterprise token-metered revenue scales far better than consumer $20/month subscriptions.
• 8.Both Anthropic and OpenAI are hitting compute constraints and will need to build their own data centers. The hosts compared this to Friendster's failure — if you can't keep the infrastructure running, a faster competitor (like MySpace/Facebook) takes all the market share.
• 9.Datacenter construction is being blocked across America due to a mix of NIMBY activism, doomer groups, and populist anti-tech sentiment. Chamath cited a town that approved a $6B datacenter only to vote out its board overnight; Maine passed a bill banning all new datacenter builds.
• 10.Sacks argued Anthropic's alliance with doomer and NIMBY groups is now backfiring. Having helped 'salt the earth' against data centers as a strategy to constrain OpenAI and XAI, Anthropic now urgently needs its own compute infrastructure and may struggle to build it.
• 11.Allbirds rebranded as 'Newbird AI,' bought H100 GPUs with a $50M convertible note, and the stock surged 450%. The hosts called it peak bubble behavior, likening it to 1990s companies adding '.com' to their name, and noted Allbirds had sold its brand assets for just $39M.
• 12.Elon Musk's Colossus cluster is expanding to 555,000 GPUs across three buildings at $18B investment, and XAI just signed a compute deal with Cursor. The hosts noted the MAG7's strategy of using core business profits (Meta, Google, Tesla/SpaceX) to fund infrastructure gives them a durable advantage over capital-raise-dependent frontier labs.