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I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer’s Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, which is now in its third year. I’ve attended this event for three years in a row because Eric does a great job curating the speakers and the audience, and the conversations are more substantive than a typical industry event.

This year was no exception; however, I found the most interesting part of the day to be when the results of an anonymous audience survey were shared onstage. The more than 300 attendees who participated in the survey primarily consisted of AI company founders, followed by investors, other industry professionals (including product leaders and engineers), and members of the media.

Here are the results of the survey in order of how they were shared onstage:

1. What will be OpenAI’s annualized revenue be at the end of 2026?

Median answer: $30 billion.

2. What will Nvidia be worth at the end of 2026?

Median answer: $6 trillion.

3. What year will an independent committee of experts, as dictated by the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, declare that we have reached AGI?

Top answer: 2030

4. Which venture capital firm’s AI portfolio are you the most jealous of?

The top three most voted for, from first to last: Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia.

5. If you could put money in any private technology companies today, what would they be?

Top five companies in order from first to last: Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenEvidence.

6. What global company’s model will top the LMArena web development leaderboard at the end of 2026?

In order from first to last: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Qwen.

7. If you could short a $1 billion-plus valuation startup, which would it be?

First place was Perplexity. Second place went to OpenAI. Other names shown onstage: Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral, and Thinking Machines.

What stood out to me from these results (Newcomer has published the slides for his paying subscribers):

A softening on OpenAI: Given that Sam Altman has said OpenAI plans to end this year with $20 billion of annualized revenue, this group of AI insiders doesn’t expect next year to be as exponential for the business as the leap from 2024 to 2025. The prediction that AGI won’t be declared until 2030 suggests a lack of faith in model progress meaningfully improving in the near term, although that answer could also be clouded by the complexity of how OpenAI and Microsoft must settle on how it’s decided. (I’m still waiting for either company to share information on who its “independent committee of experts” will be and how they’ll decide.) It was also notable that more attendees wanted to buy Anthropic stock than OpenAI’s, despite the consensus being that OpenAI would lead LMArena next year.
Meta wasn’t in the conversation. It wasn’t named on the list of models likely to lead LMArena next year. The presence of a Chinese model (Alibaba’s Qwen) in the top five signals a shift that’s already underway, as many companies fine-tune open-source Chinese models rather than Llama. Meta has a lot to prove if it wants to re-enter the model race.
Perplexity is controversial. But everyone working in AI already knows that.

Other takeaways from Cerebral Valley:

What’s driving reverse acquihires? I attended a breakout session about AI acquihires, such as Meta’s deal with ScaleAI to hire Alexandr Wang and Google’s deals with Character and Windsurf. I’ve closely covered many of these deals over the past couple of years, but it was interesting to hear the group’s perspective on what drives them. Antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech certainly plays a factor, but some who have been involved in these kinds of transactions also made the point that bigger companies are racing each other to shore up talent and move faster than their competition. They have seemingly “infinite money,” as one member of the group put it, and see it as a game of placing bets on a very finite pool of talent. One AI founder in the group, who fielded multiple offers of this kind, recalled a member of a Big Tech company’s corporate development team asking him how much he wanted his startup to be valued for a deal.

No one cares about AGI anymore. At the first Cerebral Valley conference, the topic of AGI was a major throughline. A startup founder onstage said that “we’re going to be dead” by the time OpenAI releases GPT-10. This year, multiple onstage conversations noted how AGI barely registered as a discussion topic. Instead, most of the interviews focused on the business applications of AI. Multiple companies represented onstage at the first Cerebral Valley event didn’t exist and are now worth billions of dollars. There was a strain of AI bubble fear throughout the day, but mostly, everyone seemed dialed in on how they could win market share and provide products that people want to pay for.

Standout quotes from onstage interviews:

Replit CEO Amjad Masad: “If you are competing on price, then maybe you don’t have a business.”
Elad Gill: “Most companies should sell at some point. There’s often a market-maximizing moment where you’re going to get the best deal you can. A very small number of companies should never ever sell.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: “People are starting to complain about traffic. Thank goodness. I want those complaints. We still have a lot of empty office space.”
Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: “Time spent is, I can tell you, not on any of the dashboards that I look at. It’s just not a main consideration.”
xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba: “Knowledge is just crystalized computation from the past.”

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Alex Heath Alex Heath

The stock market has reacted quickly to policy uncertainty and tariffs, impacting Nasdaq stocks.
Technical analyst Helene Meisler sees a bearish, oversold market, hinting at potential rally.
Market sentiment charts show selling pressure subsiding, but panic could trigger a bullish turn.

The stock market's constant reaction to policy uncertainty and tariffs has dominated the news over the past few weeks.

But using headlines to guess where markets go next is a bad idea. Once information is widely known, it's already priced into the market and probably too late to react.

A close look at data demonstrates how quickly markets can react to a headline. For example, on March 3, President Donald Trump preemptively announced that tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect the following day after he delayed them. Instantly, stocks making new lows on the Nasdaq spiked.

However, the same data can be used to gauge real-time market sentiment and find clues for where markets go next. Helene Meisler, a technical analyst who sifts through data and publishes charts weekly, says signals indicate that the market is in bearish and oversold territory — a sign that we could see an oversold rally in the near term. But if we don't, then panic can set in, she added.

"If we chop around here for a couple of days and then we rally again, maybe people get a little more excited, and they ease off a little bit on the bearishness," she said. "But ultimately, I think we're going down again."

The bottom isn't in yet since she doesn't see panic, something she uses the International Securities Exchange put-call ratio to determine. Once there are more options to sell (puts) than to buy (calls) for numerous days, it'll suggest panic. And once we get there, Meisler will turn bullish.

In mid-December, Meisler called for a correction in the first quarter. While she couldn't gauge the depth or reason for it, she advised taking profits ahead of the event, citing that the overbought/oversold oscillator was making lower highs, a sign that buying pressure was weakening.

"If you asked me back then what I thought would take the market down, I'm certain my answer was that, if we knew then it's already priced in," Meisler said. "So the answer is, I never know. It's always going to be something from left field."

Below are five charts Meisler is focusing on this week to gauge market sentiment and the stock market's near-term outlook. Market charts

The chart below shows the number of stocks making new 52-week lows traded on the Nasdaq Composite Index. It shows that over the past week, fewer stocks have made new lows, indicating that selling is drying up and bearish sentiment is slowing down. Meisler focused on the Nasdaq this week since the index saw the steepest pullback of the three major indexes. Nasdaq Composite New Lows StockCharts. com

The chart below shows overall market breadth, which tracks most stocks. It recently made a higher low, suggesting that selling pressure is subsiding.

In contrast, the lower chart for the S&P 500 shows the index continued to make a lower low, indicating a divergence as investors continued to shed off riskier, rich technology stocks. Still, it's a good sign because only a handful of stocks had been the mover of the major index.

"So, it tells you that the index movers are pulling the index down, but for the majority of stocks, the selling has stopped," Meisler said. NYSE Breadth (top) and S&P 500 (bottom) Helene Meisler

Below is a chart that shows stocks trading on the NYSE were in overbought territory in the final quarter of 2024. As we neared 2025, overbought peaks were making lower highs, indicating that buying pressure was drying up. However, March's oversold trough remained higher than December's oversold trough, suggesting there's now less momentum on the downside, Meisler said.

While stocks remain in oversold territory, they are beginning to recover as the oscillator approaches the zero or neutral mark.

The chart below is from StockCharts.com. NYSE overbought/oversold Oscillator StockCharts.com

Since 2024, the S&P 500's highs were accompanied by bulls at 60% based on data from the Investors Intelligence Survey, a sentiment survey for attitudes of US advisors.

"Over 60% is typically too many bulls, Meisler said. "I can't think of in my career, and I've been doing this since 1982, I can't think of one time we went over 70%."

Data from the previous week shows the bears are only at 27%. Bullish sentiment versus the S&P 500. Data investors Intelligence, chart by Meisler.

It's up to investors to decide what side of the market they'd rather be on.

"I have an old trader friend who always says, sometimes you want to be on the outside looking in, rather than on the inside wishing you were out," Meisler said. "And to me the market has that feeling to it right now. But if we got panic, I'd be bullish."

Wtf

waiting for the us dollar to collapse 🤗🤗