Promise 17.5% risk-free annualization in exchange for 4 billion ammunition! Understanding OpenAI's capital strategy, the AI industry has officially entered a period of ruthless harvesting! In the past two years, everyone has been watching OpenAI and Anthropic compete for computing power and top rankings. But now, the big companies are quietly turning around internally. According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is preparing for a super joint venture project with an internal code name of Deploy Co, with a valuation of up to $10 billion. OpenAI is prepared to contribute up to $1.5 billion for this game. This sends a clear signal that selling APIs alone cannot make big money. The next stop of the big model is to directly enter the business line of traditional enterprises with capital and on-site engineers. 1. A bottleneck in reality: model capability is' surplus' This year, OpenAI's management has coined a very practical term: 'Capability Overhang'. Simply put, the intelligence of GPT-4 and even future models has surpassed the actual absorption capacity of the vast majority of traditional enterprises. It's not that companies don't want to use AI, but they simply don't know how to integrate AI into their outdated processes. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser bluntly stated internally that the biggest obstacle to AI commercialization now is not technological breakthroughs, but "deployment". Selling models is like selling engines for top tier sports cars, but customers don't even have a driver's license. Since the client doesn't know how to use it, OpenAI has decided to personally teach and even use it for them. 2. Attracting PE giants: a clever strategy to bring capital into the team How to play Deploy Co? OpenAI has brought in top global private equity (PE) giants such as TPG and Bain Capital. This abacus is playing very loudly. From a funding perspective, PE giants have pulled out $4 billion and locked it in for 5 years. In order to reassure these capital giants, OpenAI even offered a guaranteed annualized return of 17.5%. Daring to provide such a high risk-free guarantee indicates that OpenAI has absolute confidence in the commercialization and monetization of the future. From the perspective of assets, why should we look for PE? Because these institutions hold controlling stakes in thousands of traditional enterprises. After the establishment of Deploy Co, OpenAI no longer needed to relentlessly target customers one by one. Instead, it directly followed PE's capital network and forcefully inserted AI into the systems of these invested companies. 3. Copy Palantir's homework: Frontline deployment engineer With technology and customers, how can we implement it specifically? OpenAI is crossing the river by tapping into Palantir, another hardcore giant in Silicon Valley. Deploy Co is frantically recruiting for a special position: Forward Deploy Engineers. These people are not sitting in Silicon Valley offices writing low-level algorithms, but directly carrying bags and sitting in clients' office areas to follow up on projects. They need to read the customer's code line by line, sort out business flows that are even more chaotic than garbled code, and then personally embed OpenAI's technology to achieve true cost reduction and efficiency improvement. This is not selling software, but conducting a deep genetic transformation of the enterprise. 4. The opponent is also rushing: the second half of the battle begins OpenAI is in such a hurry because its opponents are pushing too hard. Anthropic's annualized revenue has more than tripled this year thanks to enterprise level products such as Claude Code. And they are also secretly contacting giants such as Blackstone, attempting to replicate the same "capital+landing" model. The battle for enterprise competition has already begun comprehensively. Summary: Don't treat OpenAI as a pure technology company that only distributes and sells tokens in the background anymore. The emergence of Deploy Co signifies a shift in the valuation logic of the AI industry. The past winners were laboratories that could stack the smartest models with massive computing power; And the future winner is who can bring the most knowledgeable engineers to forcefully invest this intelligent computing power into the production lines of finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, saving bosses real labor costs. The AI industry has officially entered the harvest period of hand to hand combat after joining the WTO.