“You just spent a trillion dollars to be an app.”

Mark Cuban
… on what could come out of the race to build foundational AI models—where only a few winners may emerge—at the Dallas Regional Chamber’s Convergence AI Dallas event.

“We haven’t seen the best of AI, in my opinion,” Cuban said, “and it’s going to just get crazier and crazier and crazier.”

Speaking at Convergence AI Dallas in Irving last week, the billionaire entrepreneur said he already sees a shift beyond today’s large language models. He expects a move toward what he called a “world view” approach: AI that understands the physical world through video, materials, and real-world data. Cuban pointed to a company he’s invested in that’s launching satellites capable of identifying the composition of natural materials from orbit, “like a spectrograph,” determining whether something is wood, rock, or something else.

We covered Cuban’s onstage conversation with Alex Kantrowitz. Here are six more things we learned.

1. He drives around talking to AI in his car—and admits it’s weird.

“I have it hooked up in my car, and I’ll be driving and talking to it, and I’ll catch myself. This is strange,” Cuban told the audience. But get over the hesitancy, he said. “Some of the answers … they’re good answers. You’re like, that shit is good.” If you’re a CEO, manager, or employee hesitant to have what he called “a heart-to-heart conversation with your AI,” you’re going to fall behind.

2. His daughter is about to join a consulting firm. He blessed it—and here’s why.

Kantrowitz asked whether consulting is dead in an AI world where a single prompt can generate a business analysis. Cuban said the opposite. His daughter is about to graduate and join a consulting firm, and he supports the move. Someone still has to help companies rebuild around AI, he said—and that’s gut-wrenching work. “The hardest challenge for those CEOs is, am I willing to blow up my business knowing that my stock price could collapse in the meantime, and then I have to build it up,” he said. Consulting firms with proprietary knowledge, he added, will be the ones guiding that process.

3. Of AI’s two biggest leaders, he sees a bit of himself in Dario Amodei.

Cuban said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s provocative public messaging reminds him of his own Broadcast.com playbook. “That’s part of raising money,” he said. He recalled telling people that streaming would replace cable and satellite. “It didn’t,” he said, “but I kept on saying it. And here we are 30 years later, and we’ve kind of gotten there.” Cuban praised Anthropic’s focus on programming and agents, saying “their niche is going to hold for them.” He called OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s accomplishments ‘amazing’ but said he’s been harder to read on long-term strategy.

4. His advice to hospitals and researchers: “Do not publish. Sell.”

Cuban noted that the patent system may be working against innovators in the AI era. Once research is published or a patent is filed, he said, it quickly becomes training data. “All of a sudden every model has been trained on it, and you’ve given away your advantage,” he said. It’s advice he shares directly with hospitals and research campuses through his work at Cost Plus Drugs.

5. He thinks AI is splitting people into two camps—and one of them is in trouble.

“People who use AI so they don’t have to learn anything, and people who use AI so they can learn everything,” Cuban said. He pointed to his own experience. “When I was younger, I used to go into bookstores and sit in the aisles and look at the books I couldn’t afford to buy.” Now, he said, even a child anywhere in the world can access “every library, pretty much every professor, every consultant” from a smartphone. But if you’re only using AI as a shortcut? “You’re going to struggle.”

6. The “operative word” for surviving the AI era? Iterate.

“The key word in an AI world is iterate,” Cuban said. As tools evolve quickly, companies that pause after hitting a milestone risk getting passed by competitors who keep improving. “You have to continuously iterate”—because in an AI environment, “anybody can come in and say they’re not improving—they don’t understand this tool—and so I’m going to go compete with them.”

Read next

For Cuban’s takes on the “SaaSpocalypse,” OpenAI’s historic raise, and how one Shark Tank company is saving $50K a month with an AI-powered shipping audit agent, go here.

Mark Cuban shares a laugh with interviewer Alex Kantrowitz, host of the Big Technology Podcast, during a candid conversation at Convergence AI Dallas on March 31. [Photo: Sandra Louz/DRC]

For more of who said what about all things North Texas, check out Every Last Word.

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