Big Technology Podcast - Is Google's Gemini Winning?, Thinking Machines Drama, Claude Cowork’s Potential

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Gemini's case as undisputed AI leader 2) Google and Apple ink a deal for Gemini to fix Siri 3) Is all this AI going to hurt Google's business model? 4) Who will be better at AI ads: Google or OpenAI? 5) Google Gemini's Personal Intelligence 6) Exits at Thinking Machines Lab 7) Is Thinking Machines toast? 8) Claude work arrives! It's Claude Code for non-coders 9) Are we in the age of the empowered individual? 10) Harness Hive stand up! --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Google partners with Apple and unveils deeper personalization, is Gemini winning? Thinking Machine Labs, meanwhile, is falling apart. And Anthropic did it, releasing Claude Code for non-Coders. All that and more is coming up right after this. Can AI's most valuable use be in the industrial setting? I've been thinking about this question more and more after visiting IFS's Industrial X Unleashed event in New York City and getting a chance to speak with IFS CEO Mark Muffet. To give a clear example,

Muffet told me that IFS is sending Boston Dynamics spot robots out for inspection, bringing that data back to the IFS nerve center, which then, with the assistance of large language models, can assign the right technician to examine areas that need attending. It's a fascinating frontier of the technology, and I'm thankful to my partners at IFS for opening my eyes to it. To learn more, go to IFS.com. That's IFS.com. Hi, this is Alex Cantruitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a long time reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big

Technology, I host key actors from the company's building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going, places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast and your podcast app of choice. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format, we have a great show for you today because Google and Apple finally came to a deal. They're going to fix Siri and has that catapulted Google to the lead position in the AI race. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about thinking machine labs falling apart. We're also going to talk about Anthropic on the heels

of our conversation about Claude Code last week coming out with Claude Coat Co-work, the Claude version for non-coder's. It's a mouthful, but it's meaningful. And joining us, as always, on Friday to do it is Ranjan Roy of margins. Ron John, great to see you. Claude code, Claude co-work, the Claude code for non-clod coders. Was that it? I think I think we better right there. Put it in a harness. By the way, our conversation about harnesses last week generated a lot of intense feedback from our audience. People are really on Team harness. So I'll take the opportunity today. To stand here and tell all the haters, I still don't like the word, but I respect you for enjoying it. I'm glad Harness is going to imagine when Harness is the word of 2026.

But I'm just excited to talk about our first story because Siri has a shot. Siri has a shot. And Siri's talking in the background because I just said that on my home pot. But there's only one way to introduce this story. And that is that Apple has harnessed the power of Gemini and put it into action in Siri. There's a new deal that has happened between Google and Apple that may lead, may lead to the inevitable improvement of Syria. And I say inevitable because goodness gracious, it can't get much worse. But I think to really think about what's happening in the AI world and what this story means.

will of course get to what Google and Apple's deal is going to look like. We have to look at it in terms of the context of the bigger AI race and just how meaningful it is that Apple has selected Google and put Google's LLM into Siri and what that means for Google itself and what it will do. So David Pierce from The Verge has a great article about this. And the headline is simple. Gemini is winning. And I basically decided to take that headline and make it the first segment of. of our story because of our show today because the story really is, I think, probably the best articulated version of the fact that Google is in the poll position here in the AI race. So here's what Pierce writes. And we're going to get to Siri in a minute because it builds on this. If you want to win an AI, you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. He says you need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market.

You need the nearly infinite resources required to continue to improve that model. and deploy it at massive scale. You need at least one AI-based product that lots of people use, and ideally more than one, and you need access to as much of your user's data as you can possibly get. Pierce argues Google is the one company that appears to have all the pieces already in order. Over the last year and even in the last few days, the company has made moves that suggests it is ready to be the biggest and most impactful force in AI. All right, before we jump into the Apple.

stuff. Talk a little bit about what you think in terms of these factors, right? Because it does look like Google has all these factors. And of course, the fact that it's not reliant on Nvidia and has its own chips, along with the monopoly of search money, has really enabled the company to do, to seemingly take this lead as Pierce argues. What do you think? I think, especially relative to the other hyper-scalers. Google, what they've done over the last year is incredible. I actually had to look up, and I think we probably had entire segments on should Google fire Sundar a year ago. I saw there was like Jan 2024 at Zitron. Google should fire Sundar Pichai, like when all that conversation was happening. And now I like this framework. You have the model. You have resources.

You have a product that can be kind of just like ready to use. AI at scale, which is we're going to talk about personal intelligence. So I think all the pieces are there to try to, you know, like see the other side of this. What you said is their benefit to like having infinite capital because of their search monopoly can still also be the one week link in this. Is that I actually give full credit to how Sunnar and the team have managed. this transition to actually go after their golden goose and actually try, you know, AI search overviews completely destroy their existing business model, yet they're pushing it. And they know it's the future.

But that's the one part that they are fundamentally having to threaten their monopolistic business model, which isn't great. Right. But let me put it in context. So to put Google search on Apple phones, Google has to pay Apple something like $20 billion a year. Now Google putting Gemini into Siri and it's getting paid. And this is really building up to like, okay, so Google has all these elements. And now the question is, what do you do with it?

Here's what Pierce writes. What do you do when you have all this tech in place? You put it in front of people and put it to work on Monday. Google and Apple announced that Gemini will power the next generation Siri that's coming this year. Pierce writes, Apple saying this is the best technology available is obviously a powerful signal to the market. But even more than that, Siri immediately becomes one of the most popular ways people interact with Gemini. And the deal matters even more because every user matters. The more user activity and data these companies can collect, the better their models and products can be.

And it creates a flywheel with search and the same will hold true with AI. I think these are very big points. Hold on. Explain to me the flywheel with search. Like we have personal context. We have personal intelligence. But charging advertisers to show up in your sales. search results, which are presented in some kind of order as blue links. And to be higher on that page, that is the search business model. It's not actually just searching for stuff. That's the business model. So how is it a flywheel for that? Well, I think there's the business and then

there's the product. And so this, I think Pierce is talking specifically about product. Now, one interesting thing about generative AI is that the queries are much more varied than search. And I think something like one-third of searches are brand new to Google every day. I would argue that many more of these questions to generative AI models are novel. And so I think to become good at doing what you do, you have to be able to really appreciate the broad range of queries and figure out where you're doing well and figure out where you could get better. And so now Google is going to put its product in front of the billions of Apple users who are now going to be giving it. data back. Now, maybe Apple's going to build some sort of firewall. But the fact is that this partnership is going to make the Gemini product better because it's going to really understand

a much broader range of user behavior and optimized based of it. Whereas, again, with ChatsyPT, they got to fight for every single user. They don't have the distribution of their own products like Google does, and they certainly don't have this Apple deal anymore. In fact, Google is supplanting ChatGPT. in Siri. Did you ever use chat GPT in the kind of like embedded Apple context, the iOS? I think I used it when it came out a couple of times or you had to like click tap twice extra to get a half baked chat chippyT search. Did you ever use it?

Yes. Yes. I think I used it once just to feel how painful it was to go through. Well, actually, no. That's not really true. Now, when I look back, I actually was eager to use chat chitpiti within Siri. I think the pain came from actually realizing how many steps away it was. And so I think this, if you're if you're signaling that we don't really know what the extent of this is going to be,

maybe we can't trust Apple to get this right. Then I might be buying that. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things on that. it is amazing that because I had I think I've said before I have like a pixel nine I think it is just sitting there so sometimes I like loaded it up again and started just testing what Gemini natively feels like and my God it's so much better and uh if if Apple screws that up with Siri I just don't know where this company's going to go in the whole world of AI it's kind of just terrifying but but what you're saying earlier is interesting for me because because I agree from a product perspective, the amount of data and access and context this gives Google is just like exponential in an already exponential company in terms of

data. But still, how do they, I mean, Apple's going to be paying them. That's one business line. But like, they, no one has figured out AI search, LLM search based advertising. Actually, who do you think's going to, who would you bet does it first? VG. Simo over at OpenAI or the masters, the old timers, Google, and they figure out how to actually charge people to show up in LM search. If you had to take a bet. Oh, it's not even a question. I mean, it is the one company that's built a multi-trillion dollar business out of search advertising, right? I think that Open AI may do it, but remember, even with the code red that they had recently trying to fight a. against the product, the business model was put on hold. They put on the ad rollout on hold, even though we're seeing some of it. I think there's no doubt, you know, and we're going to talk a little bit about the fact that Google's going to be able to share data across different products. But I think there's no doubt that Google will take some of its targeting, some of its expertise from the other sides of its business.

So it's not just starting at zero with this LN. But actually now I'm curious to hear your perspective, Ranjan. done why so we're talking obviously about the product side of things why have you zeroed in on the business side of it oh yeah so something about the business side and these this deal that's making you know making something light up in your head well i i think and now we always debated is it the model or the product now we have is it the product or the business model not actually the foundation model um i think it's because like i i i i agree with this article. Everything appears to be going right for Google. And maybe it's just trying to

kind of bring some nuance to it. But to me, it was more when you said that infinite capital, that like that search monopoly, it just reminded me that that is going away. They recognize it's going away. I give them full credit for actually trying to fight for whatever's next. But still, the one of the greatest business models in the history of mankind is going away. And that's like you can execute on everything else and you can still not survive that. That is a very interesting perspective. So I think we've almost come full circle here with Google, right? It was like Google at the beginning.

Oh, Google is slow playing generative AI. I remember they invented it effectively with the transformer. They had the living breathing Lambda inside Google, never released it. And everyone said Google is too worried about its business model to release this to the public. Then opening eye, of course, jumps the gun. They have no choice. Now they're like, all right, we'll play that game.

They're playing it. They're leading it. And they might be accelerating their own cannibalization. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think I'm being just trying to see both sides of the argument here. They're in a very good position right now. I recognize. but actually, I am going to take the other side. I think OpenAI figures out LLM-based advertising ahead of Google.

Really? Hear me out here. I think when I think about, like, search-based advertising in Google has been on a steady state of degradation over the last 10 years and gotten worse and worse and worse. Meanwhile, Facebook and meta, God bless them, they're advertising. has gotten better and better and better and better. So, like, the actual, at the core of taking what are new technologies and actually turning that into a compelling advertising offer, Google's still working off of something that they built a monopoly off 15 years ago,

but has been degrading. Whereas Facebook, to their credit, has been, I mean, they've been Apple tried to kneecap them, like, and they actually just made better and better ad. So I'm taking Fiji and, uh, the Open AI folks on this one. I mean, Google only grew its ad business by like 15% off the base of 60 billion in the last quarter. Only.

You'll forgive me by being a little skeptical of this idea that their advertising has gotten worse and they can't figure this out. One thing I had to bring out, I was thinking about this. This came up a couple of weeks ago. Like, is it Sergey or Larry who's back? Sergey. Sergey, yeah. Like, I've been seeing so many credits that, like, co-fell. founder comes back, that's what's lit the spark and that's what's causing this like,

and like, you know, like kind of the hero returning. I still like the idea that it's Sundar's McKinsey Days that taught him the key to organizational like transformation and reorgs and the move to bring in deep mind and like, you know, like actually centralized like the AI development across the entire. It was the most boring MBA McKinsey style. York that was right that has been the key to the success. That's my take. I think we can try to get to the bottom of this. So, you know, we have a long 2026 ahead. Maybe, maybe we'll get a chance to sit down Sundar and talk about this. I know at Davos next week, and folks, by the way, if you're watching on video, I'm in a different location. I'm in Germany. En route to Davos, I'm going to have

a series of conversations there. And two of them are going to be with Google. AI leadership. So Demis Sabaabas is going to be back on the podcast next week. We're going to do a live conversation from Davos. That should air on Wednesday. And then I'm also going to do a conversation with the COO of Deep Mind, Lila, Ibrahim, which will air a couple weeks later. So maybe I can ask about this McKinsey thing. Maybe I can also ask about the advertising thing because, Ranjan, another thing happened this week that we should discuss, which may actually set up Google for the perfect generative AI advertising play. Here's, I'm going to keep reading peers.

This is good. Let's keep going with it. Google's other announcement this week is an even bigger flex. It announced an opt-in feature called Personal Intelligence, which connects Gemini to a vast ocean of information Google has about you in order to give you better responses. Every time you ask it a question, Gemini can now answer it by looking at your recent searches. The videos you watch on YouTube, your emails, your photos, your files, and more. You really can't overstate how big of a deal this is.

Google no longer has to ask you to give it lots of context, hope you provide excellent and detailed prompts every time, or build out complicated custom instruction systems. Google already knows a scary amount about you, and now Jeb and I does too. And, you know, I initially looked at this from a product standpoint about how, oh, this will be actually a great product to use, and I think it will. But given the direction that our discussion has gone today, you know who would also like to

know a scary amount about you? Advertisers. I think, okay, so personal intelligence, I saw some, like, very nice, flashy looking demos, and we've talked about this for a long time that Google does. Google should own this. Google should just, like, destroy in this part of it in terms of knowing the most about you. and, uh, um, but, you know, as we're speaking, I just, I've been running this test. I ran this test the moment Gemini showed up in Gmail. I always ask, what was my first email with my wife?

I just asked it right now again. And for reference, it was 2011, uh, January. It says, based on my search of your Gmail, the earliest email thread with my wife was on Thursday, November 13th, 2020, and it's about one of my kids' school events. And then I, said, I mean my first email ever. And then it says, based on a search, the earliest email that I can find is Wednesday, October 2021. Like, how do they not get that right? This is what, this is, this is like the missing link in all of this that, again, Gemini has gotten amazing. I think Gemini is going to supplant like standalone Gemini, a lot of chat GPT users and prevent them from ever going there. But I just am baffled from a product standpoint.

standpoint, that is the most straightforward question to answer. It's like a combination of some search and some LLM and it can't get it right. Why do you think that is? Well, I just, I was just about to ask Gemini what my first email was with my Wi-Fi. And then I realize my muscle memory is probably unfortunately geared to typing Wi-Fi versus WIF. I need to go to therapy for this. But my answer. The true companion was never chat. GBT. It was why internet connection. It was time Warner and spectrum. I am a simple man. That's all I need. A wife from LiFi. Did it get it right? I, uh, no. It said I, it got my wife's name right, but it says, I can't definitely confirm the single first email in your entire history. And then it gave me a query to run, which is interesting. Yeah, which is Boolean search. Like so yeah. I, I'm just going to answer. I, listen, I, I, I, I think, this is one of the main limitations of AI, and we spoke about it a little bit last week, it's that the context window runs out and it can run out fairly quickly. I mean, think about how many characters you have in your Gmail.

The technology today cannot put all that in the context window. So what we see is that like there's now some shortcuts. But then again, if we're talking, I have to say, you know, this should not be that hard. because even now, and you know this too, I'm thinking through the steps, right? Okay, first do a query. Find out who the person's wife or Wi-Fi is, depending on their persuasion. Then, you know, we can whatever, whatever you want. If you are in love with Wi-Fi, clearly I respect you.

But then you can actually go ahead and do the search. So obviously from the product standpoint here, something is off. You're right. There's a problem. And it's one of the most inexplicable things about Gemini, to be honest. So, and this is going to be a good setup to our later conversation on Claude Co-work, I think like this is a good example of agentic versus just some kind of like low-grade LLM search. Agreed.

All of your email of all time needing to be in the context window is not going to get you the right answer here. Coming up with a system that create the Boolean search query, go do it, return the result, should, how is Gemini in Gmail not doing that? But it's not. So this is more, like, there's still a bit of this Sundar's still got some reorg McKinsey style work to do here. I'm just telling you. But, uh, if, if he's listening.

But overall, very good position. Do you think it's a safety thing? Do you think that like there, it might be, right? They might be concerned that if they allow it to do too much in email, you'll get creeped out. I mean, that to me is the best explanation. I'm striking the technology limitation thing. It has to be either competence or safety.

No, no, it's my call. It is actually organizational dysfunction. It's like the Gemini in Gmail, there's some back and forth between the team that owns Gmail, product managers saying, I don't want to give you access to this. And like, because again, actually standalone Gemini as a connector to Gmail probably would get that right.

All right, a couple quick things before we end. I just want to talk quickly about what Siri and the iPhone's going to look like. This is from the information. Siri will have the ability to answer factual questions, tell stories, provide emotional support, or help people accomplish tasks such as booking travel. Some of the features will launch this spring, other including Siri's ability to remember past conversation it had with a customer or proactive features that could suggest they leave home to avoid traffic ahead of an airport drop-off that's listed on the Apple calendar are expected to be announced at the company's annual developer conference in June.

I just wanted to circle back on this because we had already started the discussion. I don't know if I just don't trust Apple on this one. We're going back to the same like demo and release schedule. I mean, of course, like, it's just the deal was just signed. But I don't know if they're going to be able to. They're still trying to do Apple intelligence. I just don't know if they're going to be able to do it. Yeah.

It was so baffling to me that like it's still, what is it with booking travel and AI that everyone is so obsessed with? Like there's so much other stuff researching travel. You don't, no one is going to book a ticket, let AI book the ticket for them for a long time. And also the universal search thing, it's already, again, And it's already been solved. Like, you can do that with any chatbot. You should be able to do that.

You shouldn't advertise that as this amazing capability. So I honestly, I would love if Apple's entire marketing campaign on this was it will be baseline good as everything else. And we will deliver that to you. And that's it. And I would be, I would be ecstatic. I can't wait for the Super Bowl ad. Siri. We're going to be sufficient eventually.

Yeah, we'll be as good. We'll be as good as the rest. There's your tagline. Think the same. I think that's the new Apple. Not think the same. Think as good, hopefully. Yeah, that's literally, if they did that, that transforms the entire business.

It should not be that difficult. That's all I'm asking. I still have my iPhone. I might get that iPhone fold for like seven, thousand dollars or whatever it'll be but they got a fix here yeah you'll be folding all right let's end this segment credit where it's due this is back back to this verge article credit words do for a company not exactly known for its ability to focus on coherent product strategy google managed to marshal its considerable resources in a single direction now if chatbots are in fact the future and most of the

a i industry continues to bet they are there's simply no other company currently set up to truly compete with Google. Google has the models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the distribution necessary to get people to use its bots and the data required to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, chat chipit has the brand power and the daily active users, but Google has almost everything else, even the iPhone. Are you buying this? I kind of am. Again, like this is where, yeah, from a device perspective, Apple is vulnerable. We know that. And Google, actually, one thing I'm curious, do you think does Google, they must have some

kind of pin or AI first Johnny Ive style device under the works as well, right? They have to. I'm definitely going to talk with Demis about this next week because I think we talked about this thinking game documentary or I might have talked about it earlier this week that Google has up on YouTube. So I spoke about it with M.G. Siegler. great documentary, kind of a look into deep mind. And for like half the documentary, it seems like they're like pointing a phone at things

and asking questions about it. It is, it's never been clearer that there's going to be a big wearable push within that company without a doubt. Yeah. And actually, I mean, meta, do they have any, as a non- Android ecosystem user, I know Samsung watches are pretty good. Are Google, is there a pixel watch? Yes. Is it popular? Well, if we're asking that question,

probably not. I think basically having just, I just bought the Garmin, having just done a lot of research in the smartphone market, it's basically either, I'm going to get some angry emails for this. I could be wrong here. This is, all right, don't hold me to this, folks. I'm just going to talk about my cursor experience testing this stuff out. It seemed to me like the market is basically,

on smartwatches, the Apple Watch or Garmin. Yeah, that's the sense I've gotten as well. But the pixel fold, I look at a lot. I've been researching. And now Google, based on old school machine learning, serves me a lot of pixel content in the Google app in terms of news stories and stuff like that and push notifications.

So maybe I'll get, maybe I will fold and get it. If Siri doesn't work with Gemini. You'll fold and get the fold. All right. I want to. And then we'll stop with those. I'm in rare form today. I apologize. Before you get serious at Davos, let it all out right now. We will not have seriousness there for sure. We will make bad jokes in every country and continent possible. All right. I just want to end this segment. I already said that, but this is just my perspective. I feel like all. All these arguments make sense on paper.

But then you use Open AI and you use Anthropics models and their products. And they're damn good. They really are. And I don't know. I don't think maybe Gemini is on par in some ways, but I would not write those companies off at all. No, I'm not writing them off. I think the story as of today is that Google is now. one of the leaders, I think, and well positioned for all these other external factors.

From a pure Gemini slash model slash product standpoint, I think they're on par. I mean, they're certainly on par. But I don't think, I don't think anyone's like counting out through others. Right. Yeah. Well, I thought with the end of this Verge article was so definitive. Just that like, let's see. there is simply no other company set up to truly compete with Google.

I disagree with that. But all the other factors are correct, in my opinion. Agreed. Okay. Let's talk mirror. Yes. So we're going to talk about Thinking Machines Lab and the fact that there's been, the drama continues, it seems like,

the Thinking Machine Labs, by the way, is an offshoot and an offshoot. It's a company that works in AI that is founded by, that was founded by former OpenAI executives and leaders. And there is a crisis right now going on within that company, as many people head for the doors. We'll talk about that and what it means, along with Claude Co-Work right after this. Here's the problem.

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Go to incogni.com slash big tech pod and use code big tech pod at checkout. Our code will get you 60% off annual plans. Go check it out. And we're back here on Big Technology podcast Friday edition. We are having a good time today, but thinking machines lab is not. Here's the story from Wired.

On Wednesday, OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fiji Simo announced the company had rehired Barrett Zof and Luke Metz, co-founders of Miradi's AI Lab Thinking Machines Lab. Zof and Metz left Open AI in late 2024. This is where it gets pretty intense. A source with direct knowledge says that Thinking Machines' leadership believes Zof engaged in an incident of serious misconduct while at the company last year. That incident broke Miradi's trust, the source says, and disrupted the pair's, working relationship. Here's an aside for me. It sounds a lot like that source is somebody on the PR side. That's just like straight PR speak. Okay. The source also alleged Maradi fired Zof on Wednesday before knowing he was going to open AI due to what the company claimed were

issues that arose after the alleged misconduct. All right, I'm going to speak as a reporter now. to me look I don't love to guess at sources but it is fun and it seems and I could be wrong here but it seems like the source on this one was either one of two people uh or one of three people either Miramaradi John Shulman her co-founder or PR that's it this is this is clear like it seems like clear you know spin to me so that's the story if it's spin like what is this serious misconduct or breach of trust? I mean, I guess I know they can't say it, but like... That's why I think it's spent.

Because if it was a like somebody else that wasn't like giving the official thinking machine's message, we might know. Wait, sorry, walk me through that. Walk me through that. All right. You get, you're going to get, this is how it usually works. You get a call from typically it's a PR person. You know, you've reached out for comment.

You might have heard that these people, leave, then they're going to give you their perspective, right? And if it was like somebody within the company or a couple people that really knew what happened with this alleged misconduct, they will tell you. I mean, maybe, so Zof didn't respond to several requests from Wired. So maybe they just didn't have it concrete enough and sort of might have been exposed to legal liability. But typically when it's not specified like that and it's a report over what happened, then, you know, it's typically coming from the company itself. You would imagine otherwise you would actually know what happened.

It's a very, that's why there's so much drama here. It's a very weird situation. Okay. Which raising $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation with no product or even business plan or any mention of what your business does was always kind of a weird situation if we think about it. So maybe this is just kind of the logical conclusion. of that. Like, do you think, do you think thinking machines is done?

Do you think this is just a hiccup in the road and Mira and team come back stronger than ever? I think they're done. I do. The other, the one argument I'll make against me is that they have billions of dollars. There is two billion dollars or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of money.

Pre-sede. Pre-seed or seed, whatever we called that. Yeah, you skip a few rounds, right? It's like seed used to be $500,000. So clearly they're beyond that. But I just want to say why I think they're done. So you have these two that have left and you have more. There's another one, Sam Schoenholz, who's going back to Open AI.

And this is from the wired story, which is very well reported. At least two more thinking machine employees are expected to join Open AI in coming weeks. Like not only are they least. even they're going back to the place they broke off from? Yeah, that part is the oddest part to me. I'm not odd, but, and Fiji Simo kind of like just pouring salt into the wound by saying, like, tweeting about reporting structure and welcoming these folks back as well was just, it's all just drama. I think to me the bigger question is, is this the end of this absurd $2 billion seed round,

safe super intelligence thinking machines, if you were an ex-open AI person, you will get billions of dollars without even saying a pitch deck. Is this the end of all that? Definitely not. I mean, if you think about, just think about where AI is today compared to where it was then. I think we could both, we could both agree that the AI, the promise of AI is more real now than it was. Fair, fair. When we get to our final segment, you're right.

Yeah. I mean, it is. It is. It's going to happen. So basically, if someone has an idea, then they're going to get funded. Yeah, but the promise of, like, real AI doing real things is greater than ever. The promise of vague notions about, like, end of society and humanity and safety and thinking, whatever. Like, I feel maybe in a way, maybe this is the, like, nail in the coffin of that era of, like, and which I would love, and this is the best. thing ever where we stop talking about just really vague things and more theoretical things and actually are able to just focus on work. Don't you think that as it gets, as the valuations and the economic promise gets more

concrete, that some of the silliness on the margins is just going to get even worse? No, because then you actually, it's like the famous Silicon Valley HBO episode where it's like you never want to have revenue because then people will actually value on that revenue. then when you actually are selling a product, then you are measured on the actual money you're making and the multiples of your revenue as opposed to when you got no product. First of all, when you have no revenue, they can't do that. And when you don't have a product, it's even better. Yeah.

I mean, maybe now we have more realistic views about what AGI is and what the path there is. But anyway, it's going to be, it looks like bad news for thinking machines. I'll go ahead and answer. I wanted to end this one with my favorite thing I saw on this was that this, it introduced, is this vibe founding? Just kind of getting out there. You don't really do anything. You just raise a bunch of money and you, that's it. Vibe founding.

I think what these VCs were probably betting on was that they were going to get the next open AI. But it doesn't seem like anyone outside of open AI is going to be the next open AI. This is from Alex Heath. He says, more, okay, more thinking machines employees are in talks to join the three founding members who just rejoin Open AI, which okay, Wired had that. But this is the new detail.

Sources say thinking machine lacks a clear product and business strategy and has been struggling to raise a new round of financing. All right, Ranjan, maybe that last detail is some evidence that you're right, that we might be past the silly era. But do you know what is interesting is, well, if let's say the guy who left was leaking information that was confidential to open AI,

I just want to know what that information was. Is there a product and the horizon that they're like going to let them steal? I don't know. I don't know. Well, I mean, Fiji, apparently in her post, said she doesn't have concerns about the ethics. Meanwhile, we know nothing about thinking machines.

Right. We still don't really know what they're doing. They don't either. Okay. I think we should talk about... Speaking of getting real work done. Yeah. Let's talk about Claude Co-work.

Last week, you and I had a discussion, Ron John, about Claude Code, about how this was the type of technology that could get work done for knowledge workers, whether they know code or not. this week. I basically, you know, almost immediately after we had that conversation, this dropped. This is from Wired. They released something called Claude Co-Work, which is an AI agent that's not for technical people and you don't need to be technical to use it and Wired says it actually works. They say, Co-Work takes the abilities available in the company's coding focus tool and makes the user experience more approachable. The tool is designed for the wider group of non-technical users who may want to experiment with a new way of controlling their computers but get freaked out by a command line.

It can do things like organize files into folders, generate reports, and even take over the browser to search the web or tidy up a Gmail inbox. When it comes to file management and computer interfaces, this tool feels like the start of a pleasant user experience evolution. What do you think about this? I mean, this is basically the thing that we discussed on Friday and now it's come to life. What we've discussed, and for newer listeners, just for context, I work at writer, writer.com. And I've been speaking for months now about one of our products, writer agent, we're only enterprise focus. But basically, it is this. It's using natural language to launch multi-step workflows.

You give it the harness, which is the word, had we not used prior to last week, but I had said you give it the tools and the data sets and the connectors and the AI goes and does the work. And to me, I actually was trying to find, I think it was like four months ago. I said it was the first time I felt AGI, what I think could be AGI, that it actually is going out and doing stuff. I'm turning off my computer. And in the background, it's working for me and doing stuff. And I've been trying to tell you this is for weeks now or months. I have felt this.

So it was actually kind of exciting for me to see Claude get into this space because Claude has done this for software development. And I'm not saying just only for software developers because plenty of non-developers have been building on it. But that feeling of actual autonomous work being done has been kind of checked off for code coding. But I've already seen that with knowledge work. And now what is actually, I've already seen the last week.

it's so much easier to explain what I'm trying to, because co-work is kind of defining this category. So again, the idea of taking documents and words and web search and spreadsheets and Python scripts and putting it all together to actually get to do something for you for work, I think like this was my prediction ended December. I think this is going to be one of the biggest trends of the year. It's self-serving for my own work, but I really think we're going to see this. this inflection point. And I love that Claude, literally after we talked about it,

Alex texted me, he's like, do you see this? They did it. They did it. They listened to us. They said it was only built in a week and a half. They listened to us. Right. Well, you initially, I said this was, this was inspired by us and you initially mocked me by saying it was done in a day and a half. But then I found that detail that it was built in a week and a half. Yeah. Which, okay, it wasn't from last week's show, but still. But I want to ask you about this.

Okay, so cloud code. We know what ClaudeCode does, right? It's like Vib coding. You tell it to do things that will go build it for you, et cetera, et cetera. Co-work. All right, here was the demo of the debut. The AI put a meeting transcripts, took meeting transcripts in, and it gave advice about how to be more effective in meetings.

It had a tool that searched calendars. It prepared custom slide decks. Some of the reviewers that I read also said it was nice for file. organization. Why do you need a separate app for this? Why can't you just do it all in the Claude window? I got bashed, by the way. Not bashed.

We got some polite criticism of my... I was just trying to tease out last week why you would want to do something with Claude versus in the chatbot window. But for this one, I legitimately don't understand why you wouldn't just do it in the chatbot window. I mean, I can tell you, like, from a competitive standpoint for writer,

agent, the product of my company, like, we've been testing it, looking at it. I am genuinely, like, the file, local file access and management side of it is a bit interesting and confusing to me, because, like, who uses files? I don't know. Like, software developers do, which is why I think it was kind of built like that, because otherwise, like, I don't know. I don't know anyone who organizes local files in folders and everyone just has a downloads folder and a documents folder that are unwieldy and maybe if Claude Co-cowork helps them with that. I do think if it's like kind of their MVP, maybe it was just something differentiated and interesting to start with. But again, I think the idea of non-technical people being able to

use natural language to build stuff that does stuff for them, that's 2026. And that people are going to start seeing the promise of that this year. And co-work is definitely going to be a starting point for it. But if it was built in a week and a half, you know, I mean, how good is it really going to be at launch? Yes. So I'll say I'm not fully bought in on the co-work use case, but I could be wrong. I mean, it starts, most of these things start as. seeming trivial and then, right, like, even if you think about text, it starts as auto-complete and then it just starts to do it on its own. So maybe we see a similar evolution. But, you know, before we go, I want to talk with you about this idea. I just wrote about it in big technology about the way

that this technology adoption is going. And it seems to me like there's two different sort of diverging trajectories of AI adoption. And the first is at the organization level. So even if companies are eager to implement AI, they've run into all these problems. They have entrenched organizational habits, like we talked about security considerations, and then the technology's limits when being applied at a wide scale. So that's one direction this is going. And because of that, we've seen slow adoption among enterprises from a top-down perspective. Then on the other side, you have individuals. Now, individuals, they aren't encumbered by many of these same issues that the enterprises are.

They have a unique set of data permissions. They can change their own habits and they don't really need to ask permission to do so. And they also, like, when they come up against the technology's limitations, they're able to adapt. And so we have instead of, like, this technology, you be being adopted by enterprises and pushed down, it's being adopted by individuals in some way and pushed up. And I call it in my post, we're in this age of individual empowerment where, you know, you're going to start to see a real divergence in terms of individual performance, probably more than

we've ever seen it happen before. And organizations begun to be pressed by the people that are using these tools. And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be. Maybe it'll be a little bit weird or uneasy in organizations that have basically failed to roll out their pilots, but they have people coming from the bottom up who have used this technology very effectively and are sort of changing the game. What is your perspective on that thesis? And this is like my life on a day-to-day basis. So I think you are correct in that it's going to be people who understand the type. It's people who are going to be playing with Claude Co-work will make my life even easier because when they open writer-agent and we're talking about their company adopting it,

they already know what to do. In fact, like, Claudecote already kind of taught that way of working. I think, like, we've already seen it for a long time. I mean, everyone is using Chat Cheptie now or Gemini that I know. That was actually another, maybe 2025, the two big trends were coding autonomously. got solved and everyone using LLM chat got solved. Again, this year people like everyone curious and forward looking is going to start doing this kind of autonomous workflow building. What I always think about is like, I think a year and a half ago, two years ago,

you know the saying, it's not AI that will take your job. It's someone who uses AI will take your job. And people say that and try to make it sound like it's original and insightful. But I think this year we're going to start to really, really see divergence in that. Like, it's just so much more powerful if you figure out how to get AI to do work for you that you will just be leaps and bounds ahead of your coworkers. It's like I see it firsthand. I feel it firsthand. So, like, I think this year is going to, I don't know, problems.

What is going to happen exactly in that? but it's going to happen this year. Let me ask you this. So in the beginning of this like workplace rollout, you had a lot of companies who like saw chat GPT and they said, we need chat GPT for what we do. And they threw it at a lot of different problems. They threw it at, you know,

adding efficiency and processes, drawing insights from data, automating some tests. And they thought they could do that company top down. So basically I'm curious, is that going to just disappear and is it just going to dissolve? into like individuals using these these tools or what you're saying that basically when when you become a personal user you could sort of become a champion within the organization and encourage other

people to use the enterprise tool yeah even we see it like I mean that's like our tool is built around collaboration on this it's like but it's still individuals building things that then get shared out and are used by others so it's still kind of like those champions or leaders within a group And it's always like an interesting who you see kind of rise up and do that. And it's typically not pure tech people, pure business. It's some hybrid of the two. It's just kind of curious people, I guess. Like, I mean, I even saw like, like, it's funny, like who I've seen vibe coding

Claude Cod code apps, even like Joe Wiesenthal and Kevin. Right. Like you see, like people who just have seen are curious. And that's the kind of person I think that is going to. to get it this year and and start kind of and it'll force people because also people if you're at an organization that doesn't adopt it you don't want to work there and it's going to be the most talented people so I think that all that kind of culture clashing will really come to a head this year you know I'm calling these these early adopters I'm calling them the harness hive

harness harness harness let's work on that one can't improve on that it's good harness is They build the harnesses for the teams and the organizations. They sew together them. They craft them with care. They're the harness builders more than the hive. No, it has to have alliteration, harness hive. That's what I'm going to call our listeners from now on, given the dramatic and effusive pro harness feedback I got after last week.

I thank you to our listeners for being Team Hardness over here, because God knows Alex isn't, but we will prove him. I can't even bring yourself to say it. I can't say harness hive. You can't even say it. I can't say harness hive, though. That's too far. That's too far.

I'll make a folding phone joke before pun before I say harnessive here. This might be the universe encouraging me to log off for the weekend. So, Ron, John, great to have you on, as always. Really appreciate it. Bring all of this to Davos. That's all I ask. How many times can you say Harness with Demis next week? I'm not saying it, but I'll say it one more time as we sign off.

All right, Harness Hife. Thanks for joining us, as always. Great having you. We appreciate your time and companionship with us every week. So thank you for being here. Next week, very intense week of big technology podcast shows. If you're at Davos, please do come say I at the Qualcomm House and at the Google House on Tuesday night with Demas.

But here's the rundown. We're going to have Cristiano Amman on Monday, the CEO of Qualcomm. That will run probably on Tuesday. Then I'll be interviewing Brett Taylor, CEO of Sierra, Demis Asiz CEO of Google DeepMine, Joel Pinyau, the chief AI officer of Cohere, and then, again, the COO of Google DeepMine on Thursday, Liley Ibrahim. We're going to put at least two of those on the feed on next week, and then Ranjan and I will be back on Friday,

and then the rest will come out in the weeks following. Thank you, Ranjan. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Harness Hive out.