OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google Gains Ground

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14,000. That's how many dollars Chinese influencers will now be fined if they discuss serious topics in which they have no actual knowledge.
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If money is evil, then that building is hell.

Welcome to Trophy Markets. I'm Ed Elson.
It is December 3rd. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

The major indices rose as Bitcoin staged a rebound, climbing back above $92,000. Intel jumped 9% on news that it will supply chips for Apple.

Meanwhile, Apple hit an all-time high after the company named its new AI chief. And finally, shares of Warner Brothers Discovery rose 3% as details on bids for the company were revealed.

Comcast reportedly wants to merge Warner Brothers Discovery with its NBC Universal division. Meanwhile, Netflix and Paramount have submitted revised cash offers.

Okay, what else is happening? OpenAI has declared code red. Those were the words that Sam Altman used in an internal memo following the meteoric rise of Google's Gemini.

According to the memo, OpenAI is refocusing its resources on improving the quality of ChatGBT. That also means delaying work on other initiatives, including advertising.

Google's Gemini 3 release has outperformed OpenAI on several metrics, but most importantly, its market share has surged this year from 6% to 15%.

Okay,

here to help us break down what this code red means for OpenAI and for the AI race at large, we are speaking with Alex Kantrowitz, host of the Big Technology Podcast. Alex.
Very good to see you.

Thank you for joining us on Profit Markets. Great to see you, Ed.
It's awesome to be here. So we want to get into this code red from OpenAI.

I just love that term code red. It all sounds very dramatic.
What do we know about what this means? Why is Sam Altman saying or declaring code red at OpenAI?

And what does it say about the AI race right now?

Well, it's very funny because if you think back, actually, Google declared a code red not long ago when it saw OpenAI encouragement, like taking some of its search territory.

And at Google, that code read worked. And they built a great model in Gemini.

And now all of a sudden, Sam Altman internally has been admitting that in some areas, Gemini is better than the GPT models that OpenAI has.

So he sees, I think, for the first time, a real threat coming to take market share from ChatGPT. And it's code read inside OpenAI now.

And basically what Altman is doing is focusing the company on making ChatGPT better.

I think what they're really going to do is try to make the bot more personable, try to make it remember you better, and do whatever they can to sideline other initiatives within the company to focus on ChatGPT and make sure that it maintains its lead against the others, even as the technology isn't as differentiated as it once was.

Is it just Google? I mean, it seems based on what we've been reading that it's Google that OpenAI is worried about, specifically Gemini. Obviously, Gemini 3 recently released.

So is it just Google or is Sam Altman also worried about all the other ones as well? What is this really about? I think it's primarily Google.

Beforehand, the models that rivaled ChatGPT or the GPT models within OpenAI, you could probably list some of the open source models, which are a threat for their own reasons, and Anthropic, which had been focused on enterprise.

But with Google, what you have is really this potential to eat into OpenAI's market share in the consumer front. Like Google makes consumer products.

They're not great at social products, but lots of people use their products. They're not just an enterprise company.

And so what you can see now is basically you've got a whole constellation of companies coming for OpenAI. You could have some of the open source models taking some of their enterprise work.

You could see Anthropic taking some of their coding work and now Google is a threat on the consumer front.

And if you think about what OpenAI has done, it's built this amazing product, ChatGPT, with 800 million weekly active users.

That is the bread and butter of that company right now. They had ceded effectively some of the enterprise stuff to Anthropic.
And so that's why it's code read within Google.

A, you see all these different companies picking apart the company's lead. But on the other hand, the company had hung its hat on being the best consumer application.
for generative AI.

And now Google has entered the ring in a very big way. I think one of the most interesting things that we learned as well is, I mean,

they've decided that they need to focus on the quality of the product, and that is going to be at the expense of building out the ad model.

And, you know, we've been saying on this podcast for a while that they need to build out that business because how are they going to monetize this thing?

And it appears that they've again taken a step back and said, no, we need to spend more on basically market share, basically growing our users, which seems as though they're going to kick the can of monetization even further down the road, which seems to me kind of concerning.

What do you make of this fact that code red basically means less money and less time and less effort spent on building out the ad business?

Yeah, look, I hear you that it makes a lot of sense for a company like OpenAI to show that it can make money because it's effectively building out this new category, right?

We didn't have generative AI as a category up until recently. Now we do.
We have OpenAI on the hook for $1.4 trillion in infrastructure build out in the coming years.

So if it can't show that it can build the revenue side of that category, why should companies fund it? But the other side of this is really important.

It's going to get this money because its funders believe that it can be better than anybody else.

Once OpenAI isn't also ran, once OpenAI is just building the same thing Google is, then what is the rationale for a company to say, you know what, here's the billions of dollars that you need to keep running.

The company is expected, according to internal documents, to lose $74 billion in 2028, 74 billion.

So even if it shows that it can make some money with its advertising business, ultimately, the only way that it can keep this train running, keep the momentum going, is if the product is better.

And that's why you're seeing them say, you know, monetization can wait.

That's secondary because the only thing that matters to be able to keep running OpenAI the way that OpenAI has been running is to be the best. And without that, everything falls away.

Yeah, it's really, it's really all or nothing in a lot of ways, which is exciting and also pretty concerning if you are an investor in OpenAI.

I also want to get your reactions to this other news that we got earlier, which is that

Thrive, which is one of the largest investors in OpenAI, and they have this.

this Thrive Holdings, this company they've created.

So we learned that OpenAI is taking a stake in Thrive Holdings, which was another development in the circular transaction story that we all know about at this point, where a lot of these AI investors are investing in the AI startups and then the startups are going back and spending money on the investors.

We saw it with Nvidia and OpenAI. We saw it with Oracle.
Now we're seeing it again with another investor in OpenAI.

I mean, in a lot of ways, OpenAI is taking the money that Thrive invested in them and they're going back and buying a stake in thrive

i'm amazed that this continues to happen in ai and despite the fact that we're all talking about it and saying this is probably looks a little shady it looks indicative of a bubble it continues to happen your reactions you know ed i came to this one and i was prepared to say what the hell the way that i've been saying what the hell to all these other circular financing deals

It wasn't my reaction, actually, when I looked into the details of this. So here's what OpenAI is going to do.
So Thrive Holdings has a bunch of companies underneath it.

And so OpenAI is going to take a stake in Thrive Holdings and then work with the companies within it to make them effectively AI native, to integrate the GPT models as deep as they possibly can into the fabric of these companies.

And now it makes sense for a couple of reasons. Number one, if they are able to be successful, these are going to be very valuable companies.

And so it sort of provides some incentive for OpenAI to basically show that this can work. And the other side of it is just that.

It demonstrates, it would demonstrate that the GPT models that they've built are commercializable, are something that enterprise can take out and say, you know what, we are going to get an ROI on this.

Everybody in the AI world today is talking about, is there an ROI? from artificial intelligence. There was this MIT study that said 95% of businesses aren't getting an ROI on their AI efforts.

I think that's a flawed study from multiple perspectives, but it resonated because people are like, well, what the hell do I do with this technology?

So, with this partnership with Thrive, what OpenAI is basically saying is we have some ideas about how to implement it within real companies for return on investment.

We're going to work deeply with them. And for that, we're going to take an equity stake.

It's not as bad as some of these others, like NVIDIA invests a billion dollars in Company X, and then Company X buys a billion dollars of NVIDIA GPUs. I actually think this one is better.
Okay.

Final question for me, and then we'll let you go.

Just from an internal comms perspective, or really from a public relations perspective, I'm fascinated by the idea of Sam Altman sending an email to the whole company saying code red.

He must know that gets leaked. And I would say the same thing about Google.
sending a memo to the company saying code red. I mean, it just, it's the kind of thing that everyone's going to talk about.

And it's a very sort of plainly bearish signal to most investors.

I'm wondering if you think there's any strategy behind that. Why would Sam Altman, instead of dressing it up in other language, why would he just flat out say code red?

I would say the code red is even better than the worst thing that Altman said within the company, which has been unearthed by some reporters, which is that he admitted effectively that Gemini and Google had outpaced them in some areas.

To me, and that got leaked. To me, that's even more concerning than having declare, the declare code red.

On the internal side, I think he just has to show that there's urgency, new urgency within OpenAI to be able to maintain the lead.

That is something that you can't hide. And it seems to me that this was something that was always coming.
I mean, the foundation for the GPT models, this paper about attention is all you need.

It was... put on the internet by people within Google.
OpenAI was the first to take that and really turn it into something, into an amazing amazing product, which was ChatGPT.

That was three years ago. And people saw how economically valuable that was.
And all of a sudden, everybody got in the game.

You talk about OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, even Elon Musk said, hey, I know how to build this because the instructions are on the internet. So I'm going to go ahead and do it.

Everybody was going to catch up in some way to OpenAI at some point.

They've shown, OpenAI has shown that they're the best at product when it comes to building within generative AI. And I think it's code read from here on in.

And Altman might have known that that was going to leak, but you got to show that there's a newfound urgency in this world as it exists today. And, you know, I think that's exactly what he was doing.

All right. Alex Cantrowitz, host of the Big Technology Podcast.
Alex, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate your time.
Thank you, Ed.

After the break, a reconsideration of the federal poverty line. If you're enjoying the show, give Markets a follow.

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We're back with Profitty Markets. Investor Michael Green has gone viral after making a provocative claim that the U.S.
has made a serious math error.

In a Substack essay last week, he argued that the federal poverty line, which is around $32,000 for a family of four, wildly understates what it takes to stay out of poverty today.

His budget for healthcare, housing, childcare, and other necessities puts the real threshold at $140,000, four times the official figure.

This essay has inspired a lot of attention, both praise and criticism.

Economists at at think tanks like AEI and Cato have dismissed his claims, but even critics recognize that Michael Green is raising a crucial question, and that is how much income does a family really need to feel secure in America today?

And how should we measure that? Well, to answer these questions, we are actually speaking with the author himself, Michael Green.

Michael is the author of the Yes, I Give a Fig Substack and also chief strategist and portfolio manager for simplify asset management. Michael, thank you very much for joining us on Profit Markets.

Thank you for having me. So we want to get right into it.
It's been a pretty busy week for you. You wrote this essay on Substack.
It went viral. Everyone's been talking about it.
Some people love it.

Some people hate it.

I think let's just start with kind of the basics. What do you say? in the article what is your argument and what is the issue with this poverty line which is roughly $32,000 as of today?

Well, it's $32,000 for a family of four with two earners and two children. That's the official level.

There's multiple poverty levels that move all the way, I believe, from a low end of about 12,000 to 32,000 is about the upper limit.

The reason why those levels matter is because they are used in the calculation of benefits for things like SNAP, for things like child care assistance, for things like healthcare subsidies, et cetera.

And the point that I was raising in the article was that the withdrawal of those benefits is happening at a level that reduces the cash income for people below about $100,000, making it roughly equivalent to those who are only making $40,000.

That high level of effective marginal tax rates, what's referred to as the benefits cliff, creates the phenomenon that I call the valley of death, where a family is expected to work harder and harder with no material improvement in their life as the state removes benefits, even as they are ostensibly adding income.

And part of this is a problem that goes back to the 60s. I mean, one of the things that you lay out is that this

metric, this line was created actually in 1963.

when the poverty line was actually introduced. And one of the things you point out is that things have changed a lot since then.
So perhaps this doesn't really work anymore.

Tell us a little bit about how the poverty line was created.

What were the metrics that went into it? And in what sense has it changed or not changed since then?

Well, in 1963, an economist with the Department of Health and Human Services named Molly Orshansky created the poverty line analysis.

She observed that for a typical family, they spent about one-third of their income on food.

And so by taking the USDA minimum food budget and tripling it, she created a level that she described as the point of crisis.

She explicitly declared: it's impossible to know how much is too much, but we can perhaps define what is too little.

And so, the poverty line was established at that point because, at a level of three times the minimum food budget, you would expect that people would be barely able to cover their housing costs, barely able to cover their other lifestyle choices, clothing,

food, et cetera. The problem with that analysis is that food has fallen very rapidly in the budget today.

And so as a global agricultural superpower who went further and opened up our food markets to the world on a free trade platform, that's led to food appreciating significantly less.

Now, in 1969, they actually formalized it at that level and began inflating it by the CPI index, which is the index that we usually think of as representing the cost of living.

The problem with that is that there are, first of all, just like the poverty line, there are multiple CPIs that are used for different purposes.

And the reason why the CPI, as it's currently constructed, is not appropriate for a poverty-level budget, for basically using as a discount factor for the poverty-level budget, is because the CPI includes many luxuries that are falling in price and becoming standard fare when they weren't historically.

That means things like air conditioning, et cetera, you show in CPI a continuous benefit associated with it in the form of lower and lower prices for air conditioning that's captured in the CPI through the housing adjustment.

It means effectively that housing in CPI doesn't go up as fast as the actual cash outlay for housing.

That's actually an accurate representation of improving quality. It's not that there's a giant conspiracy theory to deprive Americans of their appropriate cost of living allowances.

But if you're at that level at which you're basically deciding, I just need housing, I don't really care whether it has air conditioning or not, that's a false choice.

You're not actually expressing what's called in economics, a revealed preference for air conditioning.

What you're really saying is today there's almost no non-air conditioned units available, but the government claims I'm paying less for the apartment because I now have the benefit of air conditioning.

That's just not correct when you think about a budget that is limited at the very low level. And as a result, the poverty line has fallen significantly.

This leads to claim statistics that poverty has largely evaporated in the United States. And unfortunately, it's how we calculate it that is really driving that analysis.

More and more families are finding themselves at that $100,000 to $140,000 level in which they're incurring all of the costs associated with raising children, with raising those future taxpayers, raising those future contributors to our economy.

And the government is basically saying, yeah, that's a negative value activity.

So we're seeing less household formation, we're seeing less family formation, we're seeing less children because people are being forced to make these choices for purely economic reasons.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So you do the analysis and you kind of adjust for all of the points you're making here, and you land on roughly $140,000 as what should be the real poverty line.

I think that's the part that has gotten or raised a lot of controversy because people said, no, it's not $140,000. It's this number.
It's that number. How did you reach that number, $140,000?

And then we'll maybe discuss in a moment the backlash that you've been receiving. Sure.
So the level was actually created using the MIT Living Wage Index.

I had written a prior article called Are You an American

that exposed behaviors that were being

generated on Twitter to create a mocking around the claim that in the 1950s, a single income could afford this house.

The piece that I wrote prior to the one that went viral called Are You an American?

really identified this process, what I call the mockery machine, that's designed to effectively remove the validity of the concern, right? Housing is unaffordable, the cost of living is too high.

That's a very legitimate concern.

The reaction to that was, well, in the 1950s, people could own castles. A single janitor could own a castle or a peanut farmer could get the White House sort of thing.

And I recognized that that did actually happen.

What I identified in that was a town,

Caldwell, New Jersey, in which there were ostensibly affordable homes based on a very extensive and thoughtful piece that was written by another commentator. I evaluated that.

The 136,500, which is the actual number that I arrived at in the piece, was built using the MIT living wage.

to identify what were the expenses you would expect to incur as a family with two earners and two children. Huge expenses that most people don't think about.

Childcare in that area is about $32,000 a year. The mortgage or the payment for rent was estimated at about $2,000 per month.
When I looked to find

units available to rent in the Caldwell, New Jersey area, I couldn't find anything less than $2,750.

So in many ways, it was a conservative reflection of building up the cost to simply say, what would it cost somebody to live in this area and not save any money?

What's the level of what I described as the participation level or the precarity line where people begin to escape from that feeling that you're just barely holding on by your fingernails. Yes.

So that's where the new work came from. It was built up using the MIT living wage.
So

you put the post out there

and then it begins to get a lot of traction. It begins to be viral.
And then you start getting a lot of pushback from people,

many, you know, other StubStack writers,

many other economic commentators saying, no, 140,000 doesn't make sense.

And I think one of the arguments has been that

I think that's roughly median in America, which would kind of imply,

well, that means that, you know, somewhere near to a majority of Americans are barely hanging on and therefore not possible. What was your reaction to the pushback?

So unfortunately, that's a somewhat uncharitable read of what I actually said. So again, I isolated to a two-earner, two-child family.
Yes.

The median household income for the nation at that level is about $150,000. So, really, we're talking about those who are below the median who would hit that

threshold.

What I really highlighted, though, was the people who are choosing to make that transition, those who are at the median at the $80,000 level, which is the national median.

When confronted with the next life choice of do I get married, do I have children? Do I make these choices? They're now suddenly facing an extraordinary increase in expense that raises that level.

Yes. The criticism basically boils down to, well, that's silly, right?

There are some more technical

criticisms that are tied to things like, well, we're actually taking that food budget from 1969 and adjusting it for the CPI, which in the language of the commentators captures all of the budgetary changes.

It unfortunately understates the cost of participation, the cost of being very poor. I gave a few examples.
For example, if you use an inflation-adjusted cost of telecommunications services in 1963

to participate in the economy, you would have needed a landline. Nobody expected you to be in constant contact with your telephone.

Nobody used their telephone for complex banking or for checking their child's school portal, et cetera. So the reality is the inflation-adjusted telecommunications cost for that family would be $58.

The reality is when you shoo factor in internet broadband and cell phone plans, you're looking at something closer to $200.

So that would be a really good example of where the CPI simply does not capture the actual cost of living increase for a family that needs to participate in the modern economy. Yeah.

You wrote a line that we really loved in the follow-up. You said, quote, the most common layman's critique is that the middle class has always complained about how hard it is to get ahead.

They say every generation struggles, but the distinction today is not the presence of the struggle, but its nature.

I love that statement. I think it's very true, but I want to hear more about it.
What exactly do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by it is exactly what I said. I think that is true.

And this, unfortunately, is the conversation that people are not having. We have an older population that correctly is looking back and saying, well, we complained about it too.

We had to deal with it. You guys just need to toughen up.
They're not doing the math because they haven't been presented with the math. They don't have a reason to do the math.

And really part of the reason that my article, I believe, went viral and resonated with so many people is it gave them the tools to have that conversation. Yes.

The number of messages I received from people saying, I printed this out.

I shared it with all members of my family, from grandparents to my teenage children, and we talked about it at Thanksgiving dinner table.

And we really had understanding and breakthroughs in a way that we haven't had in years to try to explain what's ultimately happening is really what makes it worthwhile, right?

I don't care about the sub stack. I give it for free to anyone who asks.
It's not my day job.

It's what I do to keep myself intellectually stimulated and treat it basically as an exploration of things that are interesting to me.

For me to have had that ability to let people sit down and talk about what they're experiencing in their lives with their families and to understand, man, that's pretty cool. Yeah.

Well, I think we could have a longer conversation about this at another time.

We're going to let you go. But I'll just say, I loved the article.

And, you know, a lot of the topics you bring up are topics that we discuss on the podcast frequently, but we hadn't thought of investigating the poverty line.

And when I read your article, I was like, wow, we should have.

So we really appreciate it. So thank you for joining us.
Well, I'm really glad. And like I said,

you know, anyone that wants to read it, reach out and ask. I give it for free.
You know, if you can pay, it's always nice to have people value the stuff that's put in front of them.

But the real point was to get the conversation started. We've succeeded on that, and let's continue.
Absolutely. Thank you, Michael Breen.
Thank you.

Well, regardless of whether you agree with Michael's findings, what is obvious to all of us is that this article struck a nerve.

It was debated on CNN and in the Washington Post and in many other outlets. It received many passionate rebuttals from various think tanks and commentators.

And the article itself has been viewed millions of times. And this isn't to be used as...

hard evidence, but generally what I have found is that when economic arguments like this trigger people in the way it has done, it usually signals that at the very least, there is an important kernel of truth within the argument.

It doesn't mean that the whole argument is bulletproof, but it means that there is something in there that is certainly worth paying attention to. And this article is the perfect example.

Because yes, maybe $140,000 isn't the perfect or the right number. Maybe the real poverty line is something else, something something slightly lower than that.

But beneath these numbers lies a truth that actually no one seems to disagree with.

And that is many of the economic tools that we use to measure how Americans are doing are at best outdated and at worst, completely and utterly flawed. And the poverty line is ground zero.

for that problem. Michael's core insight isn't this $140,000 number.

His core insight is simply a a recognition that the federal poverty line, as we understand it today, this universal metric that we all kind of mindlessly accept as the number, the legitimate number, that metric was created in 1963

and it hasn't been meaningfully updated since then and we still use it. In fact, I used it in an analysis on this show just a few weeks ago and I had no idea that the metric was created in 1963.

And let's be clear, a lot has happened since then, not just technologically, but also economically. The cost of housing has risen twice as fast as inflation.

The cost of college has risen four times as fast. The cost of healthcare, 14 times.

We live in a fundamentally different economy today, which means that we need different measurements, different ways to take our temperature.

And so even if Michael's math isn't 100% perfect, perhaps this is the kick in the ass that we needed to start measuring things differently.

Perhaps we'll start to wean ourselves off of these generally arbitrary and oftentimes not very useful metrics, not just the poverty line, but also GDP and also GNP and even the S ⁇ P.

Perhaps we'll start to look more closely. at the data that tell us the story of what is actually happening in people's lives.

The fact, for example, that more than half of Americans under 50 don't want to have children. That's a stat that is not talked about that much, but it seems to be a pretty big deal.

Or the fact that more than a third of young Americans still live with their parents, or the fact that deaths of despair in America are now hitting all-time highs.

These are the kinds of numbers that tell us a story. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us something about what is actually going on in a person's life.

Because yes, economics can be a fun intellectual exercise, but that isn't really the point of economics. The point of economics is to understand

people and more specifically, the lives that people lead. And too often, but perhaps now less often, it fails to accomplish that.

Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.
Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.

Our research team is Dan Shallan, Isabelle Kinsel, Christian O'Donoghue and Mia Silverio. And our technical director is Drew Burrows.
Thank you for listening to Profit G Markets from Profit G Media.

If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson.
I will see you tomorrow.

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We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10% chance of rain.

Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte.

Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call stainxiety.

But now you can break free from your stainsiety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains so you can live in the moment and clean up later.

Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at shoutitout.com.

300 sensors, over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how.

From fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit.

It's not just racing, it's data-driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

Support for the show comes from Train Dreams, the new film from Netflix.

Based on Dennis Johnson's novella, Train Dreams is the moving portrait of a man who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty during a rapidly changing time in America.

Set in the early 20th century, it's an ode to a vanishing way of life and to the extraordinary possibilities that exist within even the simplest of existences.

In a time when we are all searching for purpose, Train Dreams feels timeless because the frontier isn't just a place, it's a state of being. Train Dreams, now playing only on Netflix.