The $140B Week
$40B to OpenAI. $60B to Anthropic. In one week. Investors just wagered more on AI than the entire US venture market deployed in 2019. The question nobody can answer yet: is this conviction or FOMO?
Key Developments
OpenAI raises the largest private round in history: $40B
SoftBank led with $30B of the $40B round. OpenAI's revenue has nearly 4x'd in a year to $13B — and the $340B valuation says investors think it'll 5-10x again from here. That's a bet on $65-130B in annual revenue within a few years, from a company that has never been profitable.
The last time investors paid 26x revenue for a company burning cash at this rate, it was 1999 and the company was selling pet food online. OpenAI is not Pets.com — but $340B pre-profit is a price that requires everything to go right.
Gemini 2.5 Pro narrows the gap with Claude — but doesn't close it
Google's new model beats Opus 4.5 on coding and math benchmarks — the first time a Gemini model has topped Claude on SWE-bench. But Opus 4.6, released weeks earlier, still leads. The pattern is clear: each lab's latest model beats the other's second-latest. Nobody holds the lead for more than a quarter.
Leapfrogging benchmarks every quarter doesn't mean the models are actually getting more useful at the same rate. SWE-bench scores improve faster than real-world developer productivity. The benchmark arms race may be measuring the wrong thing.
What the Evidence Moved
Company Impact
Sources
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