All-In Podcast co-host David Sacks has offered a sharply contrarian read of OpenAI's much-discussed Wall Street Journal target miss, telling co-hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg and Jason Calacanis that the company is actually 'feeling pretty optimistic' as GPT 5.5 takes share from Anthropic in the all-important coding market.
The report, published on Tuesday, said OpenAI had expected to hit 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT before the end of 2025 but is still short four months into 2026, and missed an unspecified 2025 revenue target. The company is now running at a $20 to $30 billion run rate against $600 billion in compute spending commitments — roughly its entire enterprise value on secondary markets — and CFO Sarah Friar is reportedly worried that revenue is not growing fast enough to keep pace.
Sacks did not dispute the headline numbers but said the broader picture had been mis-framed. "I have a contrarian take on this, which is I think that over the past week or two, if you look at kind of what's happening at the product level, it's been a pretty good couple of weeks for them. They released ChatGPT 5.5 and the reviews from people I talked to in Silicon Valley have been really strong. You talk to developers, coders, they're very happy with it," Sacks said.
At the same time, Sacks argued, Anthropic's latest release has badly underperformed. "Opus 4.7, which is the latest Anthropic release, appears to be a bust. People are complaining about it. They're in a lot of cases rolling back to 4.6. They're saying that Opus 4.7 is rationing compute. It's reducing thinking time, not as good. There were some bugs in Claude."
The upshot, Sacks said, is that OpenAI is winning the matchup that matters most for revenue. "If you just compare ChatGPT 5.5 to Opus 4.7, it does appear that OpenAI has had a better couple of weeks on a product level. And I think there's reason to believe that the product improvements will continue. GPT 5.5 is based on a new base model called Spud, which is the first base model upgrade they've done in over a year. Having a new base model will pave the way for future improvements as well."
The argument doubles as a defence of Sam Altman's much-criticised data centre commitments. Sacks said Altman 'may end up being right but for the wrong reason' — namely that consumer demand has come in weaker than expected but enterprise coding has exploded into the dominant revenue line, and OpenAI is one of the few players with enough compute already plumbed in to serve it.
"In the meantime, coding has become the all-important sector of AI," Sacks said. "And because they made all these compute commitments and they built out these data centers, they have more compute than Anthropic right now. Anthropic is token constrained. It's reducing their ability to serve mythos for example. It's causing them to engage in compute gating with Opus 4.7. I understand why Dario made that decision. It was a prudent business decision, I'm not criticising him for it. But I think Sam may end up being right here for the wrong reason, which is he missed on consumer, but enterprise is going gangbusters and is giving him the ability now to catch up on code."
The market appears to be repricing the IPO timing accordingly. Polymarket now puts the chance OpenAI goes public by the end of 2026 at 32%, down from 60% in December. With SpaceX's IPO almost certain to come first and Anthropic still circling its own listing window, Sacks framed the AI capital race as more about who has the compute to grow into their commitments than who has the user base.
Friedberg used a Boston Consulting Group framework — the 'rule of three' that suggests mature markets settle into a 4:2:1 share ratio — to map the eventual landscape. He sees the consumer side as 'a ChatGPT/Google fight for first place and second place and then probably Anthropic in third place', with Elon Musk's xAI as a possible disruptor enabled by SpaceX-class compute capacity. On the enterprise side, Friedberg argued, Google may already lead, citing the company's claim that 75% of Google Cloud customers are active users of Vertex.
"This is also probably why Google stock has absolutely ripped over the last couple of months," Friedberg said. "They're literally in first place or fighting for first place in enterprise and consumer."
Sacks closed his case on a developer-mojo data point. "I think OpenAI is feeling pretty optimistic about their product right now and you're starting to see on X some of the developer mojo is shifting," he said. "I'm seeing a lot of people saying that they are shifting their coding usage from Opus to GPT 5.5."