SpaceX Projects AI Market to Reach $26.5T

0:00On the podcast today, OpenAI is hiring a Clinton crisis veteran to rebuild AI's public image. We want to talk about what that means, why I think we have this bad public image and what we can do about it, what the truth to it is and what some of the overblown areas of it are. Trump is also canceling the AI testing executive order. A bunch of CEOs declined to come to an Oval Office event. There's a bunch of drama there, but this is something we are reporting on that he delayed it. Now it feels like it's actually canceled. SpaceX is saying that there is a twenty six point five trillion dollar AI market.

0:35And this is all happening as Grok is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic in usage. Google is now shifting their AI science strategy, moving it more towards agentic research systems. We'll talk about what that means for science. And the literary world has been pretty much unprepared for AI-generated fiction. There was a huge prize scandal, and it exposed a bunch of the kind of AI-generated detection gaps. I actually have probably a contrarian take on all of that, but let's get into the podcast today. The first thing I want to cover is the open AI kind of AI crisis, public image scandal thing that's going on right now, where essentially they've hired Chris Lane, who is a Clinton era.

1:17He's called the crisis fixer. But basically what he does is he leads their global affairs and their communications. Right now, the company is fighting with a whole bunch of different organizations and there's lawsuits. There's a lot going on, especially in the fact that they're kind of fighting with this negative public sentiment towards AI. I think it's something like 60 % or 70 % of people have a negative view of AI when they poll the general public. So Lihan, his goal right now is to basically rebuild trust. He also has to lobby the states to pass AI laws that aren't going to constrain OpenAI's growth.

1:50And this is a balancing act that is pretty complicated for OpenAI, but honestly for anyone. and he has a lot of work on messaging and he's got to talk about job loss and AI safety. There's a lot going on there. So the thing that I do think is really important is that he actually helped launch Leading the Future Super PAC last summer that secured over$100 million in funding commitments from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and a bunch of other tech figures. OpenAI also recently backed an Illinois liability shield bill for AI labs causing catastrophic harm. They then kind of distanced themselves after there was a lot of criticism from that, but that was what they recently were lobbying for.

2:29So that's another crisis that he's going to have to try and talk to. And also another crisis he's going to be dealing with is that a bunch of former members of OpenAI's economic research unit, they quit and they all said that they were quitting because that particular team became an advocacy arm. And they were saying that it was basically downplaying a lot of OpenAI's negative economic impacts. And, you know, like if it was kind of inconvenient to the leadership, then they would just say, like, look, everything about AI is good. Trump is officially canceling the AI testing executive order. A whole bunch of CEOs declined to come to an office or kind of an Oval Office event.

3:04This is getting scrapped before it was going to be, you know, AI models had up to 90 days that they had to give, you know, their model to the government to go test, make sure it was safe before public release. A lot of the top labs, AI CEOs declined this kind of last minute Oval Office event about this and the order essentially they were saying was going to slow down AI launches in the US. China obviously is accelerating its own AI governance framework. And a lot of people were saying, look, China might be 30 to 60 days behind us with a lot of their models. If we're going to have to, you know, delay all of our model releases by 90 days for the government to do a review, which honestly probably isn't going to come up with a verdict that's any different than the red teaming offices at all of the AI labs.

3:46I mean, I think we saw Anthropic pretty responsibly say, look, our Mythos model has a lot of issues. They gave it to a lot of big organizations to go fix bugs. They gave it to the government to fix code vulnerabilities and other things. And so it feels like these, you know, the top labs are doing a good job of trying to get all of the testing done, all the safety stuff done. And so added another 90 days on top of that felt like it might basically push us so China could perhaps accelerate and have their models be better than us. That was kind of the reason for why a lot of this was canceled. OpenAI supported this particular order that Trump was working on.

4:23Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, both were telling Trump to cancel it. Something that's interesting is there was this whole event where all of these CEOs were supposed to talk about it. A bunch of them weren't going to be able to make it. And ultimately, Trump decided to cancel it and just say, look, I'm canceling this whole executive order. But apparently, there's a bunch of executives that were in the air flying to the White House when the event got canceled to turn around. So a bunch of the AI labs were trying to say, hey, look, give us like a 14 day testing window instead of the original proposed 90 day testing window.

4:52And that was just going to be more competitive against China. So people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are both saying this is a big win for the AI industry. But this isn't the only news we're getting from Elon Musk and his companies. SpaceX right now is currently pitching that there is going to be a $26.5 trillion AI market opportunity. They're saying this in their IPO filing. They're saying this is nearly as large as the US GDP. Now, all of this is also happening while their own Grok chatbot has a relatively small portion of the corporate AI user kind of user base. So there was a research done by enterprise technology research.

5:28And what they found is that Claude among companies jumped from about 21 % in 2025 to 48 % in 2026 of, you know, people using Claude inside the organization. Gemini rose from 27 % to 40%. And I mean, honestly, almost everyone in the world that's going to be using Google is using Gemini at this point. So there is a massive percentage of the population that Gemini is going to see. Grok, on the other hand, their corporate usage grew from 4 % to 7 % in a year. This is definitely a smaller absolute gain. And the paid consumer usage of Grok is also really small. So of that, you know, let's say 7 % of the overall AI market that's using Grok, only 0.2 % in the second quarter of this year, according to AppMagic's survey of 260 ,000 US consumers are actually paying for it.

6:18So SpaceX is making a big pitch that the market is huge, but Grok is not the biggest one. There's also another report that came out that said of the government's like 400 deployments of different AI systems, a vast majority of those were clawed in open AI and Grok was only deployed four times in government systems for things that are actually happening. So, you know, I think it's an important thing to note as we go into this big SpaceX IPO is that I think there's a ton of opportunity. We know that Anthropics paying$1.5 billion, I think a month to open AI or sorry, not to open it to SpaceX to lease their Colossus one data center.

6:51So they're making a lot of money from kind of from that, but there's not an insane amount of money being made from the actual Grok AI model. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Google. They're shifting their AI science strategy from building specialized tools like AlphaFold towards general purpose agentic systems that can autonomously conduct research. Kind of sounds like a mouthful. And some people are saying this is a pivot, but the Nobel laureate John Jumper, who co-created AlphaFold, he actually just moved to coding work. This is kind of big because I think it's kind of showing that Google is betting that general reasoning models can actually outpace domain-specific tools.

7:27So, you know, if we're really making a model that's super good at doing science, well, it turns out maybe just making the general Gemini model better, better, or the code model better. And that's actually how we're going to accelerate science, not a domain specific model. This is a big shift, especially for a frontier model like Google and Gemini. Now, what makes this pretty striking is the fact that AlphaFold is still the most popular tool for researchers worldwide. There's about 3 million researchers that are using it. Isomorphic Labs, which is Google's drug development unit, they actually raised$2 billion in a Series B funding for agentic drug discovery.

8:03I'll also say that Google isn't the only one really chasing this. OpenAI had their general purpose GPT 5.5 model and it recently disproved a mathematics conjecture without any sort of specialized training. So I think there's a lot of these frontier models that are doing some really incredible work in science, math, and other areas as the models get better, we're able to just get better results out of them. But yeah, Google isn't the only one that's really going hard here. OpenAI is also trying to push this. Next up, I want to talk about the scandal in the literary world. Apparently, there was a big contest and they were not prepared for AI generated fiction.

8:38What happened is that Granta actually published one of the Commonwealth Prize winning short stories and then a software run called Pengram detected that there was about 100 % chance of that short story being AI generated. The Prize Foundation, which is a Commonwealth Prize, said that they rely 100 % on writers' words that they didn't use AI. It kind of disqualifies you if you use AI for this. There's no technical verification process. So people just submit their stories. They publish them if they like them. And then because of this whole scandal, a lot of people are just asking, like, how do these literary institutes reliably catch AI submissions?

9:16Of course, you can ask the writers, like, did you use AI? But people are also pointing out that it's sort of ironic that right now in order to detect AI, Granta, for example, they use Claude to detect AI and then it's like AI detects AI. Anyways, it's kind of funny. In my opinion, I actually don't think this is a big deal. I think you should be allowed to use AI to write work and win prizes for it. I think you can be an incredibly creative person. You could still ask AI to help you tighten up a sentence or think of a new adjective or et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of ways you can use AI in creativity.

9:49So it's really hard to know when using AI is too much AI. It's like using CGI in a movie. And, you know, because the Grammys and Oscars are saying, like, if you use AI, it disqualifies your film for certain things. And so it's, you know, like, what is AI? What is computer generated? Where is the line that a lot of these art institutions are trying to draw? And I think personally, if you make something beautiful that resonates with a lot of people, it should still qualify. It's actually interesting how they caught this in particular, though. So apparently Jameer Nazir's essay or article, which was called The Serpent in the Grove, it used the word stubborn six times more than human writers.

10:27And it also used the phrase as if it had. That's something that AI uses a lot. And it had said that five times more, which statistically tells that cluster in the LLL that this is an output from an LLM model. But it also appears in weak human writing. So it's really hard because, and quote unquote, weak human writing, this is how they grade it anyways, right? Because AI detection is so hard. And someone could write something that technically, like someone could just, you know, say as if it had, they could say that a lot, or they could just love the word stubborn and put it in all the time. And, you know, this AI detection is like, oh, look, statistically speaking, they're not writing like normal people.

11:06Well, maybe it's not an AI model. Maybe that's just how that person writes. So it's kind of hard to pull that. but pangram actually scanned all of the commonwealth prize winners they found two of the 2026 awardees and the 2025 winner they say all of them appear to use ai generated content and the the director of the foundation confirmed that um any writers that were submitting said that they didn't use ai there was no way they verified this with all of this going on um olga tokatskak who is a normal nobel laureate she also admitted she posted online said that she uses ai she uses prompts like she says quote darling how could we beautifully elaborate this for developing ideas that apparently triggered a ton of backlash and she had to make this big huge three-point public clarification about her creative process which I just think it's so I don't know it's so funny like no one I guess wants to have one shot AI slop being written for stuff but at the same time there's so many great ways to use AI to help in your creative process so I think it's it can be a little bit ridiculous sometimes.

12:10If you want to get access to over 80 different AI models for $8.99 a month, go check out AIbox.ai. That's my own startup, and I give you access to all of the top text, image, audio, and video models in one place, in one chat thread. You're going to get access to everything. I built this so that it could save people money, but also so you can consolidate all of your logins into one place. If you want to check that out, there's a link in the description to AIbox.ai and also go check out AIChatDaily.com. That's my website that is kind of partnered or like aligned with this podcast. It generates deep dive articles on everything I cover in the show and it also has a newsletter where I'll send you all of this into your inbox every day.

12:49So you can go check that out. There's also a link in the description. Thanks so much everyone for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next episode.