Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should IPO now, before rising token costs and vanishing marginal returns on model improvements become visible to the market — because within a few years every AI company will face this reckoning.
Chamath recounts his CTO telling him token costs are doubling every 45 days while productivity gains are flat, and argues this coming 'reckoning' is exactly why AI labs should IPO now while the numbers still look great. ✦ AI generated
Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In Podcast · 2026-07-11 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 5:19
“What are the chances here, Chimoth, that these other two get out this year or maybe in like, you know, say 9 months in the in the first quarter of next year?”
Right now, our token costs are doubling every 45 days... my costs are doubling every 45 days. My upside is essentially flat... I suspect that if you can get out now, you should get out now before all of that starts to seep into the water table because I think that's probably what allows you to get out at a huge price.
verbatim transcript · starts at 5:19
5:19today and I said, "How are we doing on token spend?" And he said the most incredible thing. He said, "Right now, our token costs are doubling every 45 days." >> Okay. >> And I was like, "Gh." And he said, "Yeah." And I said, 'Well, what is the downstream productivity? And he said, maybe 5% max. >> Okay. >> And I said, okay, so my costs are doubling every 45 days. My upside is
5:49essentially flat. And he said, basically, and I said, well, explain why that is. and he said, "Honestly, what we're finding out is that you need to use a lot more tokens to get to this next iteration of improvement because we've effectively already asmmptoted." And I said, "So, what should we do?" And he said, "Honestly, we have we have to figure this out." And so, we're going to
6:13take a step back and try to figure out what to do. I don't know how many other companies will actually go through this reckoning now, but the point is everybody in the next three or four years will for sure go through it. So, I suspect that if you can get out now, you should get out now before all of that starts to seep into the water table
6:33because I think that's probably what allows you to get out at a huge price and and raise a huge amount of money. >> All right, Brad, you are uh well invested and well known for being invested in these two uh next IPOs, so you probably have some good insights since you talk to them on a regular basis. chances they get out in the next six to nine months. Both of them, you'd
6:55say 100% chance, unless there's some outside event, you know, blockade of Taiwan, some black swan event that we're not anticipating. What do you think the chances are they're public when we're sitting here and I'm skiing in Hokkaido? >> Yeah, I think I think it's very high. But let me let me first say, you know, the SpaceX IPO where we were also investors and we also bought in the IPO.
7:17I mean, it was textbook. It was a hugely successful IPO. They raised $75 billion at 1.75 trillion. Okay, so it went out below where we are today. It's up 25%. You know, and let's call it on 35 billion of forward revenue. So if you think about that revenue multiple, it's trading at 2 trillion on roughly 35 billion of of forward revenue. It's an incredible achievement. I think it was
- ·Token costs doubling every 45 days
- ·Productivity gains from models are flat
- ·Get out before this becomes visible to market
- ·Early exit likely means a much higher price
- ·Chamath's own CTO reported the cost trend
- ·Rising costs vs. flat upside is the core problem
- ·Within a few years, all labs hit this wall
- ·Get out now, while numbers look great
- ·Waiting lets the reckoning become visible
- ·Timing the exit beats waiting for proof