Robert Baldassarre

Partner in #Economic and #Valuation Services practice @KPMG. Serving clients from #startups to the #Fortune100. #Innovation. Tweets are my views. Proud #dad

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

https://t.co/B0J5dDfvFT

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

It’s well known at this point that the broader accounting industry continues to evolve, driven by private equity investment and AI acceleration. OpenAI’s latest investment, involving a partnership with Thrive Holdings, is a large-scale example of this dynamic and perhaps OpenAI’s first formal entry into the space.
Thrive (the operating holdco of Thrive Capital) currently owns Shield Technology Partners (an IT service provider) and Crete Professional Alliance (an accounting and tax platform made up of various partnerships). The strategy is to embed OpenAI engineers and data teams directly into these portfolio companies and automate high-volume, rules-based accounting, tax and IT workflows – with the goal of boosting speed, accuracy, and service quality and obviously scaling rapidly. This evolving investment + AI playbook is being used increasingly across the industry as PE firms continue to acquire smaller, regional firms.
While the Going Concern article below implies that this model is a problem for the entry level of the profession, I would argue that disruption is also moving up the ladder rapidly. Smaller AI models, that specialize in very complex areas of tax planning, M&A, sustainability and corporate finance are emerging quickly and attracting significant venture capital dollars. A very small example includes Blue J, Anrok, Aibidia, Caribou, Sphere, TaxGPT, Numeric, DataSnipper, Vena Solutions Muuvment and Fundamental Research Labs. These specialized software players are either selling directly to corporate tax and finance teams or are partnering with middle market firms, giving the firms the opportunity to offer more sophisticated services to their clients (something they could not do in the past without significant investment or partnerships). Disruption in these more specialized areas will require larger firms to continue to reevaluate even their senior ranks and assess their technology stacks from the buy or build perspective.

[Finance News @ftfinancenews]

OpenAI takes stake in Thrive Holdings in latest circular deal https://t.co/XLiNmKUBp5

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

@AmyMek This is awful.

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

It was great to attend both the AI 2030 Investment Roundtable hosted by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP and the AI 2030 Fall Summit in New York, hosted by Dino Cataldo Dell'Accio at United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund. Xiaochen Zhang, Anastasia "Tracy" Raissis and the teams at #AI2030 and #UNJSPF did a great job pulling together these leading events. It was great to hear from so many impressive panelists, see other AI 2030 Advisory Board members in person and meet so many innovative, early-stage companies in the AI space.

#ResponsibleAI #AI #AI2030 #AI2030SUMMITNYC #UNGA80 #ResponsibleInnovation #AI #Innovation

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

Wonderful weekend celebrating this great nation with family on Portland Harbor, Maine #happyfourthofjuly #maine #summer2025

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

Happy to share that I have been asked to join the Advisory Board and Venture Committee of AI 2030

Led by senior business executives, entrepreneurs,and government leaders, AI2030 is a global initiative aiming to promote new research and entrepreneurship, while ensuring that innovation stays grounded in transparency, accountability, privacy, sustainability, and security. I'm excited to be a part of this visionary community, and I look forward to
collaborating with an inspiring group of changemakers including @FT4GXiaochen and his entire team at AI 2030.

If you are interested in getting involved, apply to join AI 2030 as a member: https://t.co/iDOnatrG9P

#AI2030 #ResponsibleAI #AIforGood #Leadership #EthicalAI #AdvisoryBoard #Innovation #AI #AIdevelopment #ChicagoAIWeek

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

What an incredible night for Hope on the Harbor! I was truly honored to serve as Co-Chair of the event alongside Marty Donohue and Rich Linton - two inspiring leaders! We welcomed a sold-out crowd at the Boston Renaissance Hotel and raised an astounding $1,224,537 - exceeding our $1.2M goal by over $24K! See a list of our incredible corporate and individual donors at:

https://t.co/27amea2lYe

This marks one of the most successful charitable events in Boston this year, and it's all thanks to the extraordinary generosity of our community. The night was full of purpose and unity around this important cause and featured a moving video honoring Kerry Dennis and Leah Farley and a powerful performance by country star Jay Allen. A Huge thanks to the amazing team at the Alzheimer's Association, Massachusetts/New Hampshire Chapter, and the members of the Executive Leadership Committee, the Host Committee, and the Auction Committee - all who brought this vision to life. We’re deeply grateful to our corporate sponsors - some of the largest companies in the world - and our generous individual donors.
If you haven't had a chance to contribute yet, it’s not too late. Every dollar brings us closer to a world without Alzheimer’s.

Just go to the link above

#Boston #EndAlz #CommunityImpact #Alzheimers #HopeOnTheHarbor #Dementia, #Alzheimer'sAssociation

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

Incredible to see this!!

[Fox News @FoxNews]

Pope Leo XIV gives his first speech as pope from the Vatican balcony.

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

This is crazy. So well done! I am hoping that the script is at least human, because if the AI was able to also come up with the conversation then……ummm

[Min Choi @minchoi]

AI is getting out of hand 😂

Talking Baby Podcast

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

Blood Moon Eclipse. Stage 1 Penumbral taken at 1:30am. Stage 3 Totality at 3am.
@NewEnglandPhoto @121clicks @HuntsPhotoVideo #photography #bloodmoon #lunareclipse2025 #Eclipse @CameraTrickTips

[Min Choi @minchoi]

It's only been just 3 days since Claude 3.7 Sonnet dropped

And people can't stop building with it.

10 wild examples:

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

We actually had a Magnitude 4.1 earthquake this morning in New England!! So does Deep Seek signal a seismic shift in the AI landscape or an opportunity for US companies to rethink how we invest in and develop the infrastructure? $500 Billion vs $137 Billion!

With the release of R1, researchers have shown in recent days that the model is scoring at the same level or better in logic and reasoning across areas such as mathematics, biology, and coding than ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMa etc…

AND it has accomplished this at a training cost of only $5.5 million to train vs $600 million for ChatGPT 4.

And to run it? Only 2% of our leading models!! According to Deep Seek, R1 is just $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens, compared to OpenAI, which costs $15 and $60, respectively.

This development was barely mentioned in Davos and largely ignored by the stock market until today, even though Deep Seek released it’s first model on Christmas Day and R1 on January 20th.

So it would seem that China can do much more with a $137B committment and its “OPEN by default” ecosystem. We have to find a way to let our free market ingenuity prevail …but even at $500B the Stargate venture will face a serious challenges in the global battle for AI supremacy.

And let’s not forget the models waiting in the wings by Baidu, Tencent, SenseTime and other Chinese companies. #ai #innovation Generative AI #generativeai

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

Yes, and they did it after their Christmas release of the pre R1 model, only a few days after R1 on Jan 20th, and in the middle of a trading day that is already reacting to all of this. Seems pretty strategic in execution.

[Min Choi @minchoi]

Wow.

DeepSeek just dropped Janus-Pro-7B, an open-source multimodal AI that beats DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion.

The 🐋 is on fire. 👀

[Robert Baldassarre @RobBaldassarre]

It is perplexing to see the market reaction just today, especially since Deep Seek released its pre- R1 model on Christmas Day, which was largely ignored by investors (even though researchers were calling it revolutionary). It is also troubling to see that American consumers and companies have been downloading the new R1 at a geometric rate, eclipsing ChatGPT downloads. We should be very cautious about installing at this stage.

And now, in the middle of today’s market turmoil, Deep Seek releases Janus Pro -7B to compete with imaging models such as Dall-E 3 and Stable Diffusion. #ai #stockmarketcrash