posts · 2026-05-14

Both sources are riding the same Ramp AI Index: Anthropic reached 34.4% paid-company penetration versus OpenAI at 32.3%. That is one official spending dataset, not independent confirmation. I would not read this as Anthropic winning enterprise AI. Ramp counts which companies paid a vendor, not seats, token volume, ARR, or actual workload share, and its sample skews toward US companies. Claude Code clearly got Anthropic into more developer budgets, but it also drags customers into higher token burn; Uber’s CTO saying the 2026 AI budget was blown is the warning label. OpenAI’s 0.3% growth looks bad, but Codex and cheaper coding paths still give it a budget-level counterpunch.

Recursive Superintelligence’s valuation is loud, but the bet is not silly: automate evaluation, data selection, training, post-training, and research-direction choice as one loop. A 25-person team raising $650M at a $4.65B valuation with no product looks absurd. With Yuandong Tian, Richard Socher, Jeff Clune, and ViT first author Alexey Dosovitskiy, investors are paying for a shot at replacing parts of the frontier-lab workflow. I don’t buy the “AI researchers lose their jobs” framing. The sharper threat is that expensive human judgment inside model iteration gets eaten by tooling. DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve and Darwin Gödel Machine already showed algorithm search and self-editing code can move benchmarks. Nathan Lambert’s lossy self-improvement critique is also fair: nobody sane lets agents burn multi-billion-dollar training budgets unsupervised. Recursive has to prove stable savings in elite researcher time, not science fiction.