Research / Weekly Pre-IPO Stock Secondary Market Update
Weekly Pre-IPO Stock Secondary Market Update | June 24, 2026
AI optimization, tokenmaxing, and the future of open-sourced AI large language models
Companies covered: OpenAI, Anthropic
The AI industry is undergoing a real-time capital efficiency reckoning, and the numbers define the pressure. OpenAI is burning through approximately $3.7 billion per quarter, a run rate that becomes unsustainable the moment the company pursues public markets. The market response is already visible: enterprise customers are hitting budge and compute caps with closed frontier providers, forcing a rapid evolution toward multi-model strategies, fallback architectures, and cost-optimized routing. Businesses that have successfully dialed in AI automation now face a second-order problem: the model that powers their profitable workflow may no longer be available at scale, or the unit economics may deteriorate faster than the revenue justifies. This is the dynamic creating durable demand for AI infrastructure intermediaries, the Basetens, Together AIs, Fireworks AIs, and Lambda Labs of the world, companies that help enterprises find and allocate cheaper compute across providers. The sophistication of the enterprise buyer is rising fast, and that sophistication is the engine behind the ecosystem buildout now underway.
The dominance of Chinese open-source models is less a geopolitical story than a market structure story, and the distinction matters for investors. Enterprises are not choosing DeepSeek because it is Chinese; they are choosing open-source because self-hosted inference costs a fraction of what closed frontier APIs charge, and DeepSeek happens to be the highest-quality model available under an open-source license. Crucially, deploying an open-source model on enterprise infrastructure does not route data back to China; the model weights are downloaded, security-checked by providers, and run entirely within the customer's environment, the same way one edits a local copy of a Word document with no connection back to the original author. The more important trend is what comes next: AI application companies with two-plus years of deployment data are now training open-source models on proprietary vertical datasets and outperforming frontier models on domain-specific tasks. Salesforce's acquisition of a sales-AI company for $3.6 billion and Harvey's legal model, trained on workflows from 150 top-tier law firms, illustrate the structural shift. The backbone of these vertical champions will be open-source models, and the winners in the US will be determined by which providers offer the best combination of model quality, support infrastructure, and trust.
The investment opportunity in AI is not concentrated in OpenAI and Anthropic; it is distributed across three concentric rings of the ecosystem, and most retail investors are looking at the wrong ring. The first ring is infrastructure: chips, data centers, and the meta-layer platforms that sit between raw compute and enterprise workloads. The second ring is AI application companies, vertically specialized businesses that are accumulating proprietary data and translating it into defensible model advantages. The third ring, opportunistic but high-conviction, is physical world AI: world models and robotics, where the hardware constraint is already solved and the binding variable is the AI that controls the physical system. Nuclear energy sits in the infrastructure ring as an enabling asset, specifically small modular fission reactors (proven submarine-grade technology now awaiting regulatory clearance rather than engineering breakthroughs) that can deliver dedicated power to remote data centers. The risk-adjusted entry point for nuclear is not today's seed-stage bets but rather the moment a company has cleared regulatory approval, built its first production facility, and is raising capital to replicate that factory at scale. That inflection mirrors the SpaceX analogy: the window after the first successful rocket landing, not before the first successful orbit.
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