ICYMI: AMD, Coatue, Starcloud, Liquid AI.. 10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI
Open vs Closed Source?? SpaceX IPO undervalued..
RAISE in Paris was HOT AF
Day 1 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the most high-profile AI summit in Europe. We pulled 10 of the biggest names in AI, CEOs, CTOs, & Investors aside for their hottest takes on the debates defining AI right now.
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Open source vs closed models dominated the room, alongside agents rewriting how work gets done, the death of the keyboard and mouse, the economics of inference, and physical AI moving from data centers into cars, devices, and even orbit. Real numbers, real disagreements, and a few pieces of breaking news, straight from the people building it.
"The keyboard and mouse are slowly dying." - Max Cook, Coatue
"In the next 12 months, 90% of tokens will be going to open models." - Matan Grinberg, Factory
"Most of AI is just glorified data science." - Pim de Witte, General Intuition
"The SpaceX IPO is going to be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time." - Philip Johnston, Starcloud
"People don't even understand how transformational agentic AI is." - Mark Papermaster, AMD
Guest lineup:
Max Cook, Sector Head, Coatue
Matan Grinberg, CEO, Factory
Rodrigo Liang, CEO, SambaNova
Philip Johnston, CEO, Starcloud
Mark Papermaster, CTO, AMD
Pim de Witte, CEO, General Intuition
Ramin Hasani, CEO, Liquid AI
Robin Rombach, CEO, Black Forest Labs
Chris Madden, CEO, Good Future Media
Henri Delahaye, CEO, RAISE Summit
Special thank you to Brex, MongoDB, & AssemblyAI for helping make this RAISE AI Summit mini-series in Paris, France happen.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
00:00 RAISE in Paris
00:16 Max Cook (Coatue)
01:01 Keyboard and Mouse Dying
03:42 Future Interaction Models
06:32 Open Source vs Closed
12:20 Henri Delahaye Hosts the Night
13:21 Pim de Witte (General Intuition)
14:46 Mark Papermaster (AMD) on Agentic Workflows
16:38 Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs)
20:31 Matan Grinberg (Factory): Droids in Europe
21:03 Open Models Token Shift
23:17 Philip Johnston (StarCloud): Space Bets
24:01 SpaceX IPO Bull Case
25:13 Chips for Space Compute
26:58 Chris Madden (Good Future Media): Clipping
28:23 Viral Clip Hook Secrets
32:03 Ramin Hasani (Liquid AI): Physical Models
34:50 Three-Axis Foundation Models
38:43 Rodrigo Liang (SambaNova): $1B Raise
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The 10 Hottest Takes, RAISE Day 1:
At the RAISE Summit in Paris, we pulled 10 of the biggest names in AI, CEOs, CTOs, Investors aside for their hottest takes on where AI is heading.
Open Source vs Closed Models
Matan Grinberg, CEO, Factory
Grinberg tracks open vs closed usage across Factory’s enterprise customers and reports open-model token share moving from under 1% in January to 10% in May.
“My hottest take is that in the next 12 months, 90% of tokens will be going to open models. Now, not all the tokens, and maybe not the most important tokens, but these open models are incredibly performant, incredibly cheap, incredibly fast, and there is gonna be an important use for them in the portfolio of models.”
“At the beginning of the year, we saw enterprises were using less than 1% of their tokens were going to open models. Then in around March, it crossed that 1% threshold, and then in May, it crossed the 10% threshold.”
“By the end of the year, at least in the enterprise, we’ll probably cross the 50% threshold by the end of this calendar year. Not every task you need Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.6 Ultra High, and many tasks day-to-day you do are very simple.”
Robin Rombach, CEO, Black Forest Labs
Rombach makes the case for accessibility as the deciding factor, not the open weights vs open source distinction.
“Open innovation is good for the world. And fear-mongering around AI models is only going to lead to them being more closed, and that’s ultimately going to lead to a slowdown of all AI progress.”
“It’s super important that AI is actually an accessible technology. It’s also gonna make it more safe in the end. I think that’s something that is a pretty fundamental principle.”
“Is it open weights? Is this open source? It doesn’t really matter in the end, but having accessible AI models is key.”
Max Cook, Sector Head, Coatue
Cook reframes the debate around workload type, & flags an unasked question about the frontier labs offering open source alternatives themselves.
“A lot of the discussion I see is sort of there’s either one is a winner and one is a loser, or the other’s a winner and the other’s a loser. I think that’s totally the wrong way to think about this.”
“Open source is good for production scale workflows, yet we’re so early in this AI journey that there’s not that many production grade workflows. And so if you are trying to discover a new use case, you want the smartest model you can possibly get, you use the frontier.”
“I don’t think anyone’s asking the question of what happens when Anthropic & OpenAI decide we can offer that as a product. It seems plausible that they would see this opportunity to take their older, cheaper, more efficient, smaller models & sell that as a product.”
Agents & the End of Apps
Max Cook, Sector Head, Coatue
Cook argues the shift from dozens of apps to a handful of agentic interfaces changes how people interact with compute.
“Hottest take might be that the keyboard and mouse are slowly dying. We talk about big tech waves. You went from mainframe to PCs to networking PCs to desktop internet, which is where you get a mouse and keyboard, to mobile internet, which is where the iPhone supremacy began.”
“We’re going from a world in which you have 60 to 80 apps to an agentic AI world where you’ve got a lot fewer than that, two, three, four apps, where everything else plugs in as an API or an MCP. And in that world, it would only make sense that we reinvent how we interact with compute. It’s not the keyboard and the mouse. It’s probably natural language.”
“We’re gonna look back in five years and say, of course we’re not using keyboards and mice anymore. We’ve come up with a better way to interact with intelligence.”
Agentic AI in the Enterprise
Mark Papermaster, CTO, AMD
Papermaster describes agentic workflows reshaping both enterprise work and AMD’s own chip design, with the CPU-to-GPU ratio moving toward parity.
“Hottest take is people don’t even understand how transformational agentic AI is. It’s just transforming how work gets done, and entire end-to-end workflows are being reimagined.”
“AMD, we got ahead of it. We’ve worked to getting our CPUs and GPUs ready for this, and now with these agentic workflows, you actually need both. In fact, the ratio of CPU to GPU is becoming one to one.”
“Every day I start with agents. They run my day, look at what’s coming up. But what’s really cool is how we do our chip design. We have thousands of sub-agents just doing incredibly complex chip design, speeding how fast we can get the next generation to market.”
Economics of Inference & Chips
Rodrigo Liang, CEO, SambaNova
Liang announced a $1 billion Series F at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic, alongside the new SN50 chip for premium inference.
“We’re announcing the first close. Our series F is a $1 billion raise at 11 billion valuation. The round was led by General Atlantic, and significant investment from Seligman Ventures, from T. Rowe Price, and Capital Group.”
“The world of inference is running into an economics problem. And what we’re able to do with premium inference is drive the performance of the largest models up so you can actually deliver high-quality models, these trillion parameter models, at their full precision at incredible speeds.”
“When you’re running faster with the high accuracy models, you can charge more at a lower cost, allowing their service providers to generate more margins for their services.”
Efficiency & Physical AI
Ramin Hasani, CEO, Liquid AI
Hasani frames efficiency and deployment substrate as first-class design constraints, not afterthoughts. i.e. Liquid AI powers in-car intelligence for Mercedes-Benz.
“Efficiency is not an afterthought. Energy is not abundant. There’s not that many chips available in the world right now, & supply chains are getting disrupted on the memory side of things.”
“We’re bringing the cost of tokens to zero.
& we are just bringing the value of the AI for enterprises. We’re building foundation models that are so cheap that you can bring them on Raspberry Pis. So you can host them on any kind of device that is on the planet.”
“The third axis I would say is substrate. Where does this intelligence system go? AI is majorly getting hosted in data centers, but you could also bring intelligence on phones, on laptops, on airplanes, on cars.”
AI, Public Markets, & Space
Philip Johnston, CEO, Starcloud
Johnston builds orbital data centers and ties his bull case to SpaceX’s launch cost advantage.
“My hottest take right now is that the SpaceX IPO is gonna be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time. I think they will tear through 10 trillion within the next couple of years, and then have almost unlimited time for what they’re building.”
“They own what will be by far the most cost-effective launch vehicle, and that opens up every industry in space that will be possible beyond that. So that’s all of asteroid mining, lunar resource mining, all of the comms businesses that are gonna be built. Everything else is gonna have to go through SpaceX.”
“I’m not regulated by anybody, so I can tell people, just buy the SpaceX stock. I think it’s a great stock to buy.”
Data as the Foundation
Pim de Witte, CEO, General Intuition
De Witte trains models that predict a range of actions beyond text, and puts data quality ahead of model complexity.
“As humans, we can talk, or choose to output text as one of the actions we can take, whereas an LLM’s kind of the only thing they can do. So we train models that can predict lots of different actions, where text is just a subset, which is a much more general approach than LLMs.”
“Most of AI is just glorified data science.”
“Good models mostly are downstream from good data and simple things.”
Media & Distribution
Chris Madden, CEO, Good Future Media
Madden runs a clipping agency producing thousands of clips a month and puts the value on the opening seconds.
“Clipping is the new ad. Whatever the long form is, whatever message you have, whatever idea or thing you’re trying to sell, you need to get it into a short amount of time to be able to grab somebody’s attention.”
“It’s really the first three seconds. The three seconds need to grab the viewer in. If the spoken line isn’t catching you, you need to have a visual hook on the screen that will tell the viewer what is the payoff for them.”
“200 bucks a clip is pretty standard in our agency. Minimum, and then you wanna go clips daily, so a clip a day at least. If you can do two or three a day, that’s even better.”
The View from Europe
Henri Delahaye, CEO, RAISE Summit
Delahaye hosts the summit & frames the event around pairing AI with history.
“We are all in our tech bubble, token maxing on a daily basis, but it’s good to have a bit of a history in our sight.”
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Love this lineup, Molly. you consistently catch the names before they're obvious. AMD's real opening was always inference over training, and that's the shift I find most interesting: inference is where AI stops being a lab demo and starts making actual operational calls inside companies. Which raises the question these names all dance around — once inference is cheap and everywhere, the scarce thing isn't compute anymore, it's judgment about when to trust the output. Feels like a market nobody's named yet. Really enjoying your takes on this.