VC Hot Take of the Week

On Monday morning, Deedy Das posted a number. Ten quadrillion tokens a year were running through OpenRouter, the model gateway he had helped his firm back. Token volume there has been doubling roughly…

On the afternoon of 26 October 2026, Anthropic filed the paperwork to become a public company. Inside four hours, a venture partner's four-number summary of it had been read six hundred and fifty thou…

On the evening of 15 October 2026, Chamath Palihapitiya started posting about how AI companies report revenue. Within hours he had put a number on the customer base: he suspected that seventy to eight…

On 7 October 2026, Coatue Management published its October 2026 Public Markets Update: a thirty-eight-slide argument about where the market is going, and one slide in it that set off the week. That sl…

Vinod Khosla published an essay on 14 September 2026 titled "Refounding America: The Tax Code Needs to Change in the Age of AI", and the sentence that travelled was a number: AI will do 64% of all hum…

Brad Gerstner called this week's warnings that AI could end humanity "hyperbolic scare tactics" hiding a political agenda on Friday, then called the industry's plan to slow frontier development down "…

Paul Bonnet, a general partner at 20VC, says the AI buildout is a great trade even though 102 “neolabs” have raised $70 billion at a combined $320 billion valuation while generating less than $1 billi…

Sarah Guo’s latest Invest Like the Best conversation carries two claims that sound opposed until you separate the software layer from the physical layer. She argues that open-source AI is already wide…

Garry Tan says systems of record must become AI harnesses or face replacement by agents. In the same week he pushes GBrain as portable memory that works across every harness. Alex and Priya separate w…

Gavin Baker argues that AI is too dangerous to centralize, while his model-margin thesis points toward a more concentrated infrastructure layer. Alex and Priya test that tension against Atreides Manag…

Chamath Palihapitiya says power is the binding constraint in AI while models are being commoditized. Alex and Priya test the claim against CoreWeave's demand and capacity, J.P. Morgan's infrastructure…

Harry Stebbings said ninety percent of AI podcasts are BS because guests are afraid to upset the model providers they depend on. His chosen exception, a 20VC conversation with Arena CEO Anastasios Ang…