The head of one of the largest US endowments says OpenAI and Anthropic are in big trouble
The head of a major endowment says frontier labs won't be able to withstand competition from cheaper Chinese open-weight models.
Scott Wilson, the CIO of Washington University's endowment, has declared OpenAI and Anthropic to be in serious trouble, asserting they are overpaying for their infrastructure investments. A former investor in SpaceX and a successful early backer of Washington University's AI investments, Wilson sees the frontier AI race as a Wild West of unsustainable spending.
He argues that Chinese AI model makers are rapidly catching up with U.S. frontier labs in performance while offering significant cost savings. This has sparked debate among investors about whether OpenAI and Anthropic can sustain their spending if customers can switch to cheaper alternatives. Khosla, a billionaire venture investor and early backer of OpenAI, disagrees with Wilson, arguing that the real advantage lies in controlling expensive infrastructure and that closed-source models will have lower costs.
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