Chamath Palihapitiya

Your margin is my opportunity: AI version… The biggest surprise of 2026 is that the capability gap between the best open-weight/source models and the best closed models has narrowed much faster than the pricing gap. The pricing gap remains enormous while the capability gap is quite narrow. What does this means in practice? For a company consuming 1 billion input tokens and 1 billion output tokens per month: GPT-5.5 Pro: ~$105,000 Claude Opus 4.8: ~$30,000 DeepSeek V4 Pro: ~$5,220 DeepSeek R1: ~$2,740 I asked ChatGPT what it thought about this and it answered as follows: “If I were building a company today, the economic frontier would look roughly like: DeepSeek V4 Pro / R1 for high-volume inference. Claude Opus for premium agent workflows where reliability matters. GPT-5.5 Pro only for workloads where its incremental capability demonstrably produces enough business value to justify a 20–40× token premium.” Most CEOs have no idea that, instead of this nuanced approach, their teams are running amok internally by picking the most expensive models in most cases and burning through massive budgets with zero governance, audit ability and control. As control planes like our Software Factory become more standard, you can expect the run rate revenue growth of the frontier labs to go down meaningfully and the revenues of the open models to skyrocket. Why? Because we can implement the nuanced approach above and be agnostic to model - instead focusing on customer intent, model task and cost management among other things.

Chamath’s Liquidity takeaways and reflections: The state of private and public markets is changing. In recent decades, companies have stayed private longer while competitive advantage deepens with scale. Now, some of the most valuable private companies in the world are preparing to go public at unprecedented valuations just a few years after being founded. A historic liquidity wave is arriving as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic prepare to go public and lockups expire. These three companies alone are projected to exceed the entire prior decade of venture exits combined. That capital will go somewhere, and right now the focus is on the physical substrate of AI. Power, memory, copper, and specialized silicon are the current key components. The AI model layer itself is competitive, and the frontier labs are searching for profit pools in application layers. Six themes carried across the room. 1/ The liquidity wave & the barbell 2/ AI is a power problem 3/ Models commoditize, compute doesn't 4/ Public vs. private trends are shifting 5/ Can the US build a moat China can't cross? 6/ One scarce edge is human judgment Full breakdown of each theme, along with Chamath's takeaways from each speaker, here: liquidity.socialcapital.com

Notes from liquidity:

@wlthxyz good idea. exploring this now...will be an All In collab with a big fund partner most likely.

Companies should own their "edge". One way to do this is to use Software Factory to capture the expert and tribal knowledge that differentiates your company. When you capture this knowledge into Software Factory, you can build software from it and keep it as the north star that shapes behavior. This is what the best companies in the world do and now its available to everyone. Change the knowledge and the software and actions change automatically. Change the behavior and you get redlines to the knowledge so you can approve exceptions and understand why deviations are happening. This is one way how AI can be used productively for everyone. Learn more here: 8090.ai

@TheChiefNerd @Jason 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Chamath: Frontier AI Leaders “Created a Total F*cking Mess” Short-sighted fearmongering and immaturity from frontier AI leaders has created deep mistrust, threatening AI’s potential as an open engine of economic mobility. That mistrust gives hyperscalers the chance to position themselves as trusted gatekeepers, using KYC, audit trails, and compliance infrastructure to turn AI into an oligopoly. @chamath on the All-In Pod: “I think the leaders of the frontier labs leave a lot to be desired. I think what we're seeing is a consistent pattern of evasiveness and immaturity, and I think that does a huge disservice to the entire movement of AI. The key to a vibrant life is rooted in economic mobility, and I think AI is the grand leveler. It is the thing that can enable everyone to have unique amounts of economic mobility because they are unencumbered to figure out what their upper bound is. And against that backdrop, we have to live in this constant doomerism, hype cycle, naivety, and I think it holds us back. How does it hold us back? Tactically, number one, it creates mistrust. I think that Silicon Valley was already decaying in the prestige that it held in American society. We built important things. Then we veered away from that, and we started building less important things. And now we're at a point where we've potentially started to rebuild important things again, but we have this veneer of negativity and mistrust that are created in large part because we just cannot get our sh*t together. And the leaders of the frontier labs are public enemy number one. Number two, I think what it creates, which I think is bad, but what it creates is an incredible opportunity for the hyperscalers. And the very simple opportunity is to convince governments all around the world, not just America, that they should be the gatekeeper. A: You can't trust these guys. B: These models are all over the place. C: Let us be the ones that provision them to the world. We will wrap it in KYC. I've been now talking about KYC for a while, right? Who are these customers? Do they have identification? Why are they allowed to run these models? What are they prompting? Let's keep them so that there's an audit trail. All of these things are going to become issues. The Frontier Lab folks made it an issue because of how they've handled all of this up until now. And what does that create? Now that creates an oligopoly for AI, the most powerful economically leveling instrument we've ever seen in the hands of maybe a handful of hyperscalers, who by the way, would make an incredibly compelling argument, and they would be right. And the only counterfactual to it would be, ‘Well, trust us, guys, it should actually be much more open and in a far more distributed environment.’ Can you imagine the cost and the complexity if you ask the neoscaler to build the same robust KYC or the same VPC infrastructure that Amazon and Microsoft and Google have spent decades investing trillions of dollars in? It's an impossibility, Jason. So you can take all of those datacenters off the map. You can take all of the neoscaler market off the map. All of this was preventable. So instead of a diverse, robust, open ecosystem giving a tool that is the fundamental unlock for humans, we are now going to debate gatekeeping and duopoly versus oligopoly. They have created a total f*cking mess, and it's a shame.”

From 2011-2018, I was an institutional investor, managing my own capital alongside capital from some exceptional Limited Partners. Even though I don’t manage outside capital any more, every quarter I still get on the phone with these LPs and update them. I had the tremendous honor of working on behalf of some amazing institutions like Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering. It’s great to keep making money for people like that. PS - only DPI matters. Everything else is bullshit.

Do you think vibing the UI of Google search would even scratch the surface of helping you understand the complexity that sits beneath it?? For what important app would vibe coding a simulation help? Just seems like yet another case of busy work masquerading as tokenmaxxing.

#11 yesterday.

All In #14 in America, All Categories.

Doomers have been wrong betting against human progress, productivity growth and screaming of job apocalypses of all kinds since time immemorial. This time is no different. Well, actually the only difference this time around is that a portion of the Doomers are also some of the people making the progress in the first place which is very odd.

@ikirigin @TheFlowHorse Starting 8090.

@chamath @TheFlowHorse Sincere question: this seems like a big change in you, from focusing on high-end fashion to saying it doesn't matter. What do you think changed in you? What caused it?

Chamath telling you this while wearing a $2400 Loro Piana Breia sweatshirt is pure comedy.

The new status is no symbol.

@brandoclicks @DavidSacks It was a new chat.

@DavidSacks Unsurprisingly, I am unable to replicate this analysis.. perhaps people who don’t understand how AI Memory work will be fooled — like Sacks and @chamath. I also wonder what Chamath discussed in that session before typing the prompt he screenshot.

Claude psychoanalyzing Dario is the AI slop I didn’t know I needed.

it’s makers vs takers

POD UP! 🚨 Besties are back to discuss: -- SpaceX's record IPO, Cursor deal, and the first trillionaire -- The modern politburo and the new oligarchy (@friedberg cooks) -- Behind the scenes of the Anthropic Fable ban -- Iran War peace deal (0:00) Bestie intros! (2:41) The New Oligarchs, America's incoming politburo, and learned helplessness (14:18) SpaceX's record breaking IPO, $60B Cursor acquisition, and the trillionaire reactions (33:34) Behind the scenes of the Anthropic Fable ban (1:01:18) Claude psychoanalyzes its creator, Dario Amodei (1:14:31) Iran War MOU and the market impact

There are many “simple” features that are more complicated than they look on the surface because of a cascade of dependencies. For complex, enterprise systems, this is true of most features. 8090’s Software Factory is built to handle this flawlessly. We first help write requirements, expand and frame dependencies and then execute with a more global knowledge of the problem. You can learn more here: 8090.ai Also, I’m completely in love with our visual system. 😍