Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedBen Thompson: belief
12 Feb 2026 Cheeky Pint Ben Thompson from Stratechery on AI ads, the end of SaaS, and the future of media
“I think OpenAI might be a bigger threat to Facebook than Google, something worth considering, but Facebook is obviously clearly spending to meet it.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ben Thompson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 12 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…They're really on it, yeah. That's always been very impressive to me. I think their ad model is underrated. The trick with them is keeping engagement. That's what makes the whole thing go. They've done a decent job of that. Hours spent in ChatGPT are hours not spent on Instagram or not spent…And I think that that's an underrated area. And I think they're kind of betting that, look, that's all fine and well today, but in the long run, this is an infrastructure game. We have cashflow to fund it and OpenAI doesn’t. I think OpenAI might be a bigger threat to Facebook than Google, something worth considering, but Facebook is obviously clearly spending to meet it. So Amazon. Amazon, there's a lot of fab capacity and power being spent on Trainium that one wonders could be better spent on other chips, but we'll see what happens. Aren't people happy with the Trainium chips?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.