Big Technology Podcast - Software In Shambles, OpenAI vs. Anthropic Super Brawl, Amazon’s Struggles

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) AI worries crush software stocks 2) Why is software in the crosshairs? 3) Is it vibecoding or that software becomes an input into AI bots 4) Why software might make it through 5) Anthropic's legal plugin that set it off 6) Okay, so no AI bubble? 7) Anthropic's Super Bowl ad attacks OpenAI 8) OpenAI's response 9) OpenAI losing share to rival chatbots 10) What the hell is happening to Bitcoin? 11) --- 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

Software stocks tank as the market starts to believe the AI story. Anthropic and Open AI go at it in the Super Bowl. And Amazon spending freaks out investors. That's coming up on a big technology podcast Friday edition right after this. Have you been waiting for the perfect time to upgrade your tech? Good news. The wait is over. Dell Tech Day's annual sales event is here.

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That's dell.com slash deals. 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. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional,

cool-headed, and nuanced format. We have a big show for you today. We're going to talk all about what's going on with software, every software company seems to be in the middle of some sort of wipeout on Wall Street. We're going to investigate whether AI is actually going to do what investors fear it will do to software. We're also going to talk about this Open AI in Anthropic fight over Anthropic Super Bowl ad. And then, of course, Amazon fell significantly.

So we'll talk about what's going on with the company on that front and whether the market is getting it wrong. Joining us, as always on Fridays to do it is Ron John Roy of margins. Ron John, welcome. I leave you guys alone for a week and you just kill off the entire software industry. I missed you last week. This is, I mean, I'm excited to get into this because this is everything I've been talking about now for like six, seven months. It's happening.

Okay. So as a note, we've gone from worries that AI was a bubble to now at least in the market. Now the market is reflecting the chance that AI is really going to work and potentially wipe out software. This is from Bloomberg. Trillion-dollar tech wipeout and snares all stocks in AI's path. There have been many AI-driven sell-offs in the three years since chat GPT burst into the mainstream. Nothing, though, quite rivals the route rippling through stock and credit markets this week. In the span of two days, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of stocks, bonds, and loans of companies big and small across Silicon Valley.

Software stocks were at the epicenter plunging so much at the values of those tracked, and an i-share's ETF has now dropped almost one trillion over the past seven days. Also, more than 17.7 billion of U.S. tech company loans in a Bloomberg index dropped to a distressing, to distress trading levels during the past four weeks. The drubbing, unlike many previous ones, was triggered not by fears of a bubble, but rather concerned that AI is on the verge of supplanting the business models of a wide swath of companies that doomsayers have long predicted. were at risk.

I don't understand, Rajan, can you explain a little bit why all of a sudden the market's starting to believe that AI is going to work and it's going to wipe out software? What's going on here? Okay. So this is like square in line with what I've been talking about for, I think September we started talking about it. Again, this idea of autonomous knowledge work, the idea that the work that software, traditional SaaS products did, actually now AI can do.

and just completely disintermediate SaaS. So like you take a Salesforce, for example, where is the value in a Salesforce? It's a database, but is it just that user interface that allows people to kind of find the information or track the information or look at a dashboard that tells them what they need to do? AI is really good at creating that entire layer

and making it completely customized to the user. Like you take an Adobe, I mean, so much of the work that they're doing now, whether it's chat GPT or Gemini on the, what Photoshop used to do or an indesign used to do. Like all those kind of pieces of work are exactly what AI is really good at replacing. So at that point, you just have so much of traditional software can just be looked at as like a UI over a database. That's what's happening right now. And the market is finally actually coming to that realization. I have people who have not like, have friends in finance.

the finance industry asking so many questions about this right now because it's just becoming clear that it just changes the way so many of these companies you have to think about. Okay, so this is from the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal looking at this writes, tools made by such companies as WorkdayMunday.com and Adobe have become the digital backbone of much of corporate America. These tools, though, carry out increasingly complex user requests for hours, and they've offered a preview, these AI tools, and they've offered a preview of the threat, sophisticated AI models posed to entire company. The result, a broader business reckoning that has left

corporate leaders asking what it will mean when an AI system can easily replicate expertise developed over a lifetime of coding in, or in the case of companies' years, or in the case of companies' years of corporate development. Here's an analyst with while tech, oh, so actually, I'll get back to that in a moment. that's legal tech. Just explain this to me. Okay, I sort of get it. You know, we had like Deer Jarbosa, who's a CNBC anchor,

was able to vide code an instance of Monday.com, personalized for her use case. You know, maybe that's going to be what people do. But how does something like a workday Monday.com and Adobe get this intermediate? I mean, Adobe, for instance, is completely different than these like workplace database softwares. Okay. So let's take Monday because I think that's like a good example of that entry level. And explain what it is. A so Monday.com, you know, like entire project and task management suite of software. But what happens? And again, this is so directly in my day to day life, both professionally,

but also like even in the past personally, like any kind of task and project management tools. it's supposed to offer this highly collaborative way everyone works together and you kind of like accelerate and amplify projects. In reality, people just use it to track tasks and like at a really basic level. So much of this software, and it's not cheap. These tools are not cheap and I'm going to get more into that. But at that point, being able to, the more AI starts to enter your workflow than using if AI is going to generate a marketing breeze, right now people sit there and like spend hours creating tasks from that like how many different specs for a meta ad do I have to create I'm and I now enter that into Monday.com that's going to tell someone what they have to do they're going to go into it and then everyone is paying Monday.com for this like that you don't need that system to do that kind of work anymore like again if you're vibe coding a task management app like DeBosa did sure you can but even in these organizations like you can create pretty standard software to actually track that task that's taking

place but then a bigger thing that i think is going to happen is a lot of that work a lot of those tasks that were being created agents are going to do at which point you don't need you never needed some you don't need someone to actually enter tasks manually and so another person could look at it and click check this is done you know like it it totally removes them need for that kind of software. I can get into workday, Adobe, and you individually, but I think that, like, project and task management is a perfect example of, uh, of like what we're talking about here. Right. And so the question is like, is this the fact that people can build software by vibe coding it or is it come something else completely? Something Sam Altman said this week was,

was pretty interesting. He said every company is now an API company now, whether they want to be or not. Yeah, you got it. You got it. Like there's two layers to this whole question. Yeah. Can you build it yourself? And I get there's a lot of pushback in terms of like is it like anthropic uses workday. So they have not vibe coded their own workday HR management software because there's like a certain cost benefit analysis everyone will be doing.

So I think there's step one is at what point do I pay a lot of money to a software that isn't that. is it worth the cost? And I think those conversations and questions are all going to be happening now and in the next six to 12 months. Then you get into like, can we just build it ourselves? But then you get into the next bigger question, do we need it in an increasingly agentic world? And increasingly like where a lot of this work is being done by autonomous knowledge workers, agents, the Claude co-works of the world. Like it changes. the need for, do you even need a lot of these things? So I think it's going to be hitting these companies at every level along the way. Well, here's the thing. You know, I think that the software,

what the software does is going to be needed. And I also think that like, maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves with like all the, like how long it will take for this agentic stuff to roll out. Again, companies are slow, workflows are slow. Even if the technology is there, it's going to take, you know, probably years to get there. But here's the thing. And I think this is really where we get, where we get to, right? Is that we're going to have software companies building their own bots. And then we're going to have the big companies building their own bots. And the question, and that's kind of what I think Sam was referencing is, do you end up subsumed into, let's say, a chat chippy T or Claude.

Or do you get people to use your own bot? Like, let's say you're at Monday.com. Are you going to get people to use your chatbot versus have all this stuff basically accessed by, let's say, a chat chipt and then brought into someone's home screen there? No, this is, yeah, go ahead, Ronja. Yeah, it's a good question. I think these companies are going to be defending their data sets. Like Monday.com is going to be like, don't come in and take all of my task data.

and put it into your workflow. So I think it's a good point that they're going to be trying to fight back against it, which I think will increase the, like actually I think that will end up accelerating people's decisions to try to move away from a lot of these tools because like they're going to fight for it, but it just doesn't make sense in the grand scheme of things. So on Wednesday, up this upcoming Wednesday, we're going to have Sarita Ramoswami, the CEO of Snowflake, come on. And it's like the perfectly timed moment to have someone like him.

come on, and we talk about it. And I'll just preview it a little bit. I mean, basically, like, you know, chat Chupit is going to try to get all the snowflake data to be something that you access within that main chat chitpt interface. And Snowflick is going to have to build to defend against that. And, you know, it's ultimately going to be up to the customers. Like, I don't think, and this is, I think, I think Sridor has the right strategy here. He's going to let the customers decide. And, and ultimately, you can't really, if this is what they want, and you can't really fight it. And so that's sort of what I think is bringing us into this moment here.

It's not that software is going to go away. And I think Brett Taylor, when he was on a couple weeks ago, put this really well. It's the fact that investors are now uncertain about what's going to happen, that they are backing away from these stocks. So whereas it might look like it's over for software companies, I don't think that's the case at all. But what I will say is it's clear that investors aren't as, certain about the future as they were, you know, a year ago. And they're getting, they're starting to say,

well, are they going to access this company's software, you know, in somebody else's interface? Will they just become an input? And that's why you're seeing this run away from the software stocks. Yeah. I think you captured it. And also, I think Snowflake is very interestingly positioned here. Because I think a lot of where we're going to be going is you have your kind of database layer of a snowflake or a Databricks or Big Query, and then the AI lives on top of it. That's the kind of stuff that I'm working on, like, at writer and we're seeing Claude and Open AI Enterprise all moving in that direction. But I think, like, because we know all stock prices are a perfectly rational encapsulation

of calculating future cash flow. I mean, I'm obviously sarcastic there. But in reality, like, it's true that right now, I think even if you're not, you're not, going to rip out workday in Salesforce tomorrow. The amount that these companies charge customers, people are going to have to question it. Like, and especially when you're thinking of it from as a stock, not even as an individual like customer, the idea that they're going to continue growth when their revenue is going to be questioned at when they're like pricing is going to be questioned by every single customer. It's tough. Like, like, stocks are supposed to,

reflect future growth opportunities. And I think reasonably, like, whether it's perfect or not, they do. And if you're thinking about growth, I don't see what the story is. Right. And software does get a higher multiple because of that potential future growth. The fact that, like, the capital and the potential upside is not necessarily linked. But now software firms are starting to look a lot more like the rest of the economy. This is from Liz Thomas, who's a financial watcher. Software's, forward 12 month P, and I'm going to speak about this with Sridar, but let's talk about it now. The software is forward. 12 month P has compressed from 33.1 to 23.2x.

Multiple contraction of 30% and evaluations are now approaching the 2022 levels. That's a pretty significant move, Ranjan, wouldn't you agree? I mean, that is big. Yeah, that's a, you're like the entire, I think the biggest takeaway right now is like everyone thought of software to have kind of like a few fundamental, truths to it for many years now. And that's kind of like, you know, like basically increasingly scaling marginal returns that you invest initially, but actually distributing software is essentially cost zero. So like, and incredibly, increasingly valuable, especially over the last 15 years. So that's where you get. It was treated differently than the rest of the economy. It just

had different economics. And I genuinely think that's fundamentally changed. And we've talked about this a lot. And an AI company, we don't even know what the economics really are of them in terms of like what it costs to operate. The more people use it, LLMs don't behave like traditional software in terms of like expense structure. So yeah, I think whatever software looks like for the last 15 to 20 years is different now. But are you sure this isn't an overreaction?

Because we have yet to talk about the cause for all these software stocks. and that is that Anthropic had this, I'll just read it, this is from Business Insider. Anthropic's latest AI tool is hammering legal software stocks. So it was a legal tool. Anthropic recently rolled out a new plug-in for its Claude Co-Work AI agent that can perform several clerical tasks, including tracking compliance and reviewing legal documents.

As far as AI updates go, it didn't make much of a splash outside the legal space when it was rolled out Friday. However, it has triggered a sell-off among software and publishing stocks with ties to the legal industry. And this was in the beginning of the week. The moves on Tuesday. Walter's Cluer went down 13%.

Relix PLC went down 15.8%. Legal Zoom down 18%. Thompson Reuters down 19% the worst day in the company's history. I mean, come on. Like Harvey was out there already. It hasn't upended legal software. So Anthropic releases one plugin

and all of a sudden the software industry is dead. I mean, that does seem like a bit of a strong move from the market. Okay. But have you used legal Zoom? You are an independent entrepreneur, I was. Have you used the Legal Zoom type of tools before? I'm sure I've been in it at some point. Yeah.

Like, anyone who has used those, and I'm hoping you're not going to say, like, the CEO of Legal Zoom is the next guest on the show after. I mean, it would be great to have them. We would welcome them on. But, like, these tools, don't provide a ton of value. They, like, answered really specific problems. And that was, like, software used to be take one really specific problem, own it, like,

charge people a lot of money to deliver relative value. But that's the kind of stuff that, like, going through and structuring a basic legal document, AI is really good at. So, like, I think that actually tells the story of what's happening now better than even the Monday. dot com example. Like when you have, there was almost like value in that kind of monopoly, right?

There's, and now like you just create really narrowly focused software and then charge a ton of money for it and people will still pay you. That model is more dead than anything. You know, one of the interesting lines that we're picking up here is there was a time where robotic process automation

was the hot new thing in software. And that wasn't, you know, necessarily AI. It wasn't AI. It was like sort of hard-coded ways to teach a computer the ways to use your computer so you didn't have to do these menial tasks. And one of the things that made it so interesting was that it stitched together a lot of these broken parts of software. Like that's one of the things I think we should point out here, and I think you really hit on it, is that software is imperfect.

And it kind of got away because it beat Excel. It got away with it. And people were talking about like these duct tape ways to stitch together software programs. And if they could ever do that, it would be a very big market opportunity. And now that has potentially arrived just with LLMs and not in the robotic process automation way that we'll imagine. Well, hold on. One thing I want to kind of really get across. And I see this that like, because remember, and this is I fault the industry for how agentic was talked about is like a few months ago, even now, many of the conversations I have, people still think of agentic as taken.

existing process and just add some AI to it. Like, but you basically recreate that process with AI. The big change and difference in any, like, this is a whole clod code. You didn't, you're, you're no longer like using AI to generate individual bits of code. You're just reinventing the entire process. You're like, what do I actually want an outcome to be? Go do it. And I think that's the, in any kind of knowledge work.

So you take a legal zoom. Like, now you. don't even care about what that process is. You just say, I need a document that does this. Go out, research all the different types of reference documents and laws. Here's my information. Figure out what you need for me and create the document. So, so like, yeah, I think the promise is very clear more and more. I agree. It's going to take time. Like, it's not happening tomorrow. I think the stock market reaction is interesting because it feels like everyone is just getting this all at once.

Yeah, Ron John. Okay, so you're clearly a believer in this. Why don't you give like the best steelman argument in terms of like why this might not work? No tapping out on this one. Like where is the vulnerability that you're not seeing and we're not seeing? I think who should I, who should I be, should I be Monday.com here or legal Zoom? Yeah, let's run with either of those.

All right, all right. I think the value in those tools, there's, was, is, and you, I mean, you brought it up, like, companies are slow. The value in those tools was never about the UI or the actual ease of use, because God, a lot of these tools are brutal to use, is literally just having a safe, compliant place for people to enter data. So, like, when people say it's just a dumb database and AI is going to be a layer over it, that there actually is value in them being that. that dumb structured database. And they're going to be able to fight and hold on for a bit. I think like people, it's true, people are not going to rip them out anytime soon, whether they can grow and stuff.

We'll see. But they have a, they're not going away without a fight, I'm sure. This is definitely, this is something that Brett Taylor brought up when we spoke a couple weeks ago. And Ben Thompson also writes about this. He says, writing the original app is just the beginning. There is maintenance, security patches, features. features, new features, changing standards.

Writing an app is a commitment to a never-ending journey, a journey to return to the original point that has nothing to do with the company's core competency, right? Something close to what you were saying. And then he says, in selling software, isn't just about selling code, there is support, there is compliance, there are integrations with other software. The list of what is actually valuable goes far beyond code.

This is why companies don't purely open-source software. They don't want code. They want a product. everything that entails. Would you say that that's basically the biggest counter argument against this? And if you're a bull on like today's software industry, you kind of like hold on to that and imagine that they're going to be able to build their their chatbots or agents, you know, fast enough. So I think I've been thinking about this a lot. Like it, even though I tried to take the steelman position for a Monday.com, like, I really don't see the prices they charge

relative to the value. I think what could be happen is maybe there's like studios of AI native developers that actually create just tons and tons of new software that's highly customized and they do the management and they do the like versus if you're like a, I don't know, like a paint distributor, you're not going to vibe code your own CRM. And there's there's companies that do that, but just do it a lot cheaper and at a different type of scale and model than these large SaaS companies. What's going to be interesting is that we're not going to be 100% sure who's going to use these software platforms. And that's kind of like where it gets interesting.

We talked about that a little bit. This is going back to Thompson. Umin will be using software, at least for a while, but increasingly so will agents. What isn't clear is who will be creating the agents. I expect every SaaS app to have their own agent, but that agent will be definitionally bound. by the borders of the application. Different horizontal players, meanwhile, will be making a play

to cover broader expanses of the business with the promises of working across multiple apps. So I think this is interesting, right? Like, if you could get, let's say, a chatchip-t, to a point where it's good enough to use your Monday.com and bring that data into, let's say, a chat-chip-T pulse,

you might get all the benefits of the Monday.com, but just not having to use Monday.com. And then, you know, effectively, you don't become a software program, you become a custodian of a database with better compliance. That's it. You got it. I mean, that's the big debate. And if that's the future here, then that's exactly what it can look like. And then slowly you start to ask yourself, do I need to pay a lot of money for someone to just enter a task into this one system that's just going to be accessed and thought about it in a completely different system? That's the threat.

And time will tell, right? But I think one of the important things here is this is a shift in the market. A couple months ago, I was watching Josh Brown on the halftime report earlier this week on CNBC. And he made a great point. He said, listen, the market in just a couple months has gone from, is this a bubble to AI is going to work so well that software is dead. It really has happened in like what, like less than a half a year. It's very interesting to see that shift. I think what I think Claudecote is at the, the base.

of it is is enough people. And again, I've brought this up for months now. Like, I've seen the power of autonomous knowledge work. Claude code introduced basically autonomous coding. And but that, that shift in mentality of weight, AI can actually do things, go off and work. Like, it really changes the way you look at it when you're really thinking of it as like a person or a team going and doing work for you. And then suddenly, I think the more people, people have seen it with their own eyes or done something, that's where all these light bulbs start going off. A couple of things before we move off the subject.

This is from Derek Thompson. For me, the odds that AI is a bubble declined significantly in the last three weeks. And the odds that were actually quite underbuilt for the necessary levels of inference and usage went significantly up in this period. Basically, I think AI is going to become the home screen of a ludicrously high percentage of white collar workers in the next two years. and parallel agents will be deployed in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels. Your response. That seems like a Ranjan take right there.

I like that one. I mean, this is what I am seeing firsthand. Like, I mean, that autonomous knowledge work, white collar work, that's the stuff that's going to get completely disrupted and seeing it first hand. But I think he makes one point there that I actually would push back on. I, anyone listening right now can hear like how convinced I am that this is going to happen. Now, what does that actually mean for any of the players involved, whether it's OpenAI or Anthropic or my company writer? Like, I have no idea how this plays out. I mean, like the economics, no one has figured out. Like, are they going to IPO?

Can Open AI make money? Do they, like, are they going to win any of these individual big bets that they're taking? Is Google going to kill every? I actually think the landscape is more uncertain than ever while I think at a high level, this is going to be the future. Undoubtedly, it's actually, yeah, it's even muddier than ever how this plays out. That's right. I think we still don't quite know who gets the value.

Is it the foundational model builders? Is it the chip makers? Is it the application layer? Is it the consultants? Right? Or is it no one? Yeah. Or nobody.

Yeah. Or does everything get so cheap? Yeah. It gets everything. No, the AI just codes, vibe codes itself. It removes the work and puts us all out of a job anyways. Yeah. Who knows?

No way. Look, if it's powerful enough to just remove the job, then somebody is going to get value there. Like, there will be value to be found. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's still a question. But I think that's why we're seeing, just to go back to, that's why we're seeing the volatility in software. That's why we're seeing the volatility in big tech.

Every time there's like a number that's slightly. off. The market, like, again, they're tanking Amazon stock today, which we can get to, even though the market, by the way, the market's rebounded nicely. Dow just hit 50K again. So, but because of this uncertainty of who gets the value, we're just going to be living in this moment of volatility for a while. I'm going to ask you, and we don't make forward-looking statements on this show, but do you think, so again, yeah, there was like fear gripping the market, especially in software. The last month has been brutal. Do you think looking at today, the rebound, do you think we're, a month from now, two months from now, do you think we're higher or lower across kind of like these software stocks that we're generally talking about? Yeah, again, this is not investment advice. I think we're higher. I really do.

I think that, like, it's easy to tell yourself a story of what's going to happen. It's harder to really envision all the bureaucracy that has to sort of embrace it for that change to actually go through. Yeah. No, no, that's what that's what I think it's, it's worth looking at. I think the most important thing is going to be in these conversations and the, it's, yeah, the directional guidance, the kind of directional like renewal rates, all these kind of things with these companies to see, is this really happening right now? Or is this something that we can see will happen eventually, but is not happening anytime soon? Here's one more stat from Dylan Patel, the founder of semi-analysis. 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that ClaudeCode will be 20% plus of all daily commits by the end of 2026. VoluBlinked, AI consumed all of software development.

Yeah. I'm telling you, that was my, in December, that was my prediction for 2026 on this show, that what happened in software development is going to happen in knowledge work this year. End of this year, it's happening. Maybe Dario was right after all. Everybody left at his prediction that 50% of entry level work was going to be gone. Actually, it's a good point. I really have been thinking about this a lot.

Like, to me, I actually, like, what it feels like when you're working in this way is that you're basically a manager. You're managing all these different agents. to do different type of work. So like you start to realize managerial skills become more important than ever. So like who gets displaced and when and how is going to be a really interesting thing. Is it like if your entry level but AI native, are you going to be better positioned or if you're kind of older and a manager, but you know how to delegate work, are you going to be better?

I don't know. It's going to be. That's another whole direction. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. Are you saying that the future of work is just. going to be being in a chatbot window being like, is it ready yet? How's it looking? How's it looking? Almost there? That's the future of work. It's not even chatbot though. Like, that's why I think I'm on the Sierra episode with Brett Taylor, I was hearing you'd said chatbot.

I think it's chats the UI right now, but like maybe I'm using my gentic Monday.com to manage tasks. And I see that they were completed by my agent. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to sign some other tasks. Like, but yeah, I think that's, that's going to be part of what you do for work. We wake up. Is, uh, is my podcast prep ready? Oh, God. I mean, it's already useful for that. All right. Uh, speaking of Dario, we have a war going on between him and Sam Altman. Uh, in the most unlikely of battlefield, shall we say, the Super Bowl, uh, two companies with ads, not dueling. Opening eyes ad is all about building. Anthropics ad is about trying to take Open AI down a peg.

And we will discuss this as we put on our ad agency hats right after this. Starting something new isn't just hard. It's terrifying. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will work out. And it can be hard to make that leap of faith. When I started this podcast, I wasn't sure if anyone would listen. Now I know it was the right choice. It also helps when you have a partner like Shopify on your side to help.

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Hey, I won! Boarding will begin when passenger Fisher is done celebrating. 19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly. Concerned by your gambling or that if someone close, you call 1-8665-3126-0 or visit Comex Ontario.ca. We're back here on Big Technology podcast Friday edition. Well, Super Bowl weekend and Anthropic decided that this was the moment to take a shot at OpenAI, hitting it where it hurts in the ads program. This is from Business Insider. Anthropic Super Bowl spot skewers chat chippy T.

ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude. Anthropic is taking a shot at OpenAI on the biggest stage possible. On Wednesday, Anthropic rolled out glitzy, a glitzy ad campaign that will air nationally during Sunday Super Bowl, which implicitly centers on Open AIs plan to bring advertising to chat GPT. Ads are coming to AI, but not to clod the AI, the ad tagline reads. Oh my God, there was one that I saw. There's four of them, I think, and one I saw was really funny. It was in a therapist office and a guy goes to the therapist,

how do I communicate better with my mom? And the therapist says, and she's an older lady and she says, great question, improve communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from a point of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity, perhaps a nature walk.

Or, if the relationship can't be fixed. If the relationship can't be fixed, Find emotional connection with other older women on golden encounters. The mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars. What? The guy's like, what? These were so good. Do you see the personal trainer one?

Yes. Yeah. But again, like I think, okay, let's first talk about how good these were. Like, I think it nailed. And remember, South Park was the first one. kind of like really that like skewered the sick effancy of chat chippy t but even just nailing like the cadence of how chat chagipt responds much more than others great question but then slowly degrading into the ad it was it was so good um yeah i think like claude it's kind of fun too

that this is actually probably giving them more name recognition i think than anything because remember like the name anthropic, most people, Normies don't even know what that is. Claude is not a massive product at a kind of consumer scale. So I think they did a good job here. What do you think?

My perspective is, first of all, the ad wasn't even intended for the Super Bowl. The ad was intended, by the way, they released it pre- Super Bowl. You know why? They wanted that ad to take off. People will pay attention to it. If it's a Super Bowl ad, and they wanted it to take off so the potential business users

of Anthropic would circulate that in the office, drop it in Slack, it makes it on big technology podcast on a Friday, maybe. And that is the intended audience. I don't think they really care about the broader consumer audience. It's not like they're trying to make Fod gain a bunch of users. So from that standpoint, I think potentially successful. They also got Open AI to respond. Should we go into the way that Open AI responded?

Because it seems like they went a little overboard in the response as well. They were baited. I think we should. So you're what Sam, Sam Altman said. So he says, first, the good part of the Anthropic ads, they are funny, and I left. This is just me. By the way, I think we could all agree they were pretty funny. He says, I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.

Our most important principle for ads says we won't do exactly this, which we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it's on brand for Anthropic Double Speak to use a deceptive ad. to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real. But a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access.

Maybe even more importantly, Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI. They block companies they don't like from using their coding products, including us. They want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for. And now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. What do you think about this response? Oh, one more line. One authoritarian company, we care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.

One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It's a really dark path. It's a dark way. All right. All right. So many layers to this one. Thank you, Sam, for giving us this gift of a response. One, I actually think it was like a pretty good idea to say.

It's like they're using an ad in a deceptive way to criticize or to to raise concern around deceptive advertising. So like, I think it's kind of. There's a point there. That's a good. There's a point there. It's a little nuanced, but it's a point. Then you have the more Texans use chat GPT for free than total people use cloud in the US. So we have differently shaped.

problem they do. This one, I thought, was so ridiculous because I think there's the chief marketing officer of Open AI used the exact same line, which suddenly then anyone who sees that, it feels so corporate. It feels like there's like a crisis comms team in there that coming up with like workshopping ideas. Someone says, I got a good one. Let's use Texas. And then everyone starts to kind of like in lockstep post that. So I thought that part, really weak, and I actually think that kind of like undercut any value they potentially got out of posting this stuff. Then the last part, what a weird thing to end on, but the authoritarian company won't get us there on their own? Like, how did he make that logical leap to Anthropic is authoritarian?

Because I think the implicit idea there is Anthropic keeps warning about the dangers of AI. Anthropic is very engaged in Congress for the way to regulate. AI and, you know, almost dismisses other companies' attempts to take a different approach to AI. And so therefore, like, you know, and it's them basically, that's why he was like, they're trying to tell us what our business model is. And that's where he would say they're authoritarian. I feel that's a little flippant on the authoritarian card.

Like, come on. You can't. Like, explain what you're trying to exactly say there. But even what you just described isn't authoritarian. I know you're just trying to help Sam out here, but that, to me, that would... Not even help him out. Just explain what he was saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You're right, because it is a little opaque. It's just, it's, it's trying, it's a little cavalier about authoritarian, especially in this day and age. So I think like, yeah, overall, I'm going to, I'm going to give this a C minus rating on, on replies. The key to beer, the head of product at X, I guess he's like, I don't know, what he is now, now that SpaceX owns XAI. He says, com's advice, never respond to playful humor with an essay. Just say, damn, they cooked us or make a joke about them. There you go.

That's all, all you had to do. Or like, actually, how would you have responded? What would be your response? Or would you have responded? I like the idea of responding deceptive ad about deceptive ads. I thought that was a good line. Yep. I wouldn't have written, damn, they cooked us.

It is a little too flippant. What about something like, sorry, what's Claude, never heard of it or something like that? Just like. No, that's a little too teenagey also. Yeah, but I mean, like, what do you have over them? Vast majority people don't know what it is, are not going to know what it is. What kind of name even is anthropic of a company? You know, like, there's so many, if you want to respond.

But I agree. like otherwise just just let it go but that also gets to like should is this a good use of not only money for anthropic because it's costly but like an opportunity to make a splash and we've always talked about like i just published some data in big technology about how more than half of people never use uh these these AI AI apps and the Super Bowl is an opportunity to get a lot of consumers a lot of people to try your thing this is from rachel horowitz it's silicon valley comms professional i don't know anthropic is spending a lot of of money on a Super Bowl ad that talks about Open AI. That's pretty good for Open AI. People don't care about ads. They like free a lot. Pretty sure I saw Netflix have seen their ad supported user based triple in like two years. That's a point. That's a good point, actually. That's a fair point that like it's funny within people like deep into it. It definitely everyone like enjoys the kind of Sam versus like

anthropic beef but yeah you're right like is it really going to turn people off? Maybe not like people certainly are okay with ads in all different formats

we talk regularly that meta might be the ones that actually figures out how to run AI ad first ads but whatever it is I think that's a good point that is it really going to turned average people off, especially the entire percentage of the population that have not used any kind of AI app before.

That's where you should be trying to go after, and it's certainly not for them. Here's part two of that tweet. We also know from loads of research that going hard at a competitor with virtually the same user experience as you just drags down the whole sector because people can't differentiate. The way that Anthropic ad makes AI chat experience seem creepy and obsequious, is a bit of a self-own in that way. I don't know. Possibly, I think like, I don't know.

I actually, I have found chat CBD to be degrading, like, over time. I don't know. Have you felt this at all? Like, it's getting more obsequious, like, even just like, I've had to change my system prompt again to, like, you do not have to agree with everything I say. But, like, I've been testing it against Gemini and Claude as well, like for just basic queries, everything has to be great, you're right.

That's a great question. I don't know. You haven't been noticing this at all? I've had a different experience. It definitely has been pushing back more than me, more on me. But yeah, I've had in my system prompt for a long time. Do not be sycophantic. Actually, hold on.

Do you want to hear a great one that I just run? This one, just like, okay. So, and actually this can be a whole other rant for another day, but the photo tax, now Google, cloud, and Apple keep making me pay more and more money to just store my photos. And I had both services and I'm paying, I think, Apple $40 a month, Google, $20 a month. And I'm like, this is getting ridiculous when I think about it. Yeah, how much I'm paying in a year. So Google, I'm going to photos, I'm going to get rid of.

So I asked Chat Chach, PT, I want to export all my Google photos so I don't have to pay for storage. What's the best way to go about this? and chat GPT says, you're thinking about this the exact right way. I don't get that. That's interesting. Maybe you're just responding to this stuff,

Rangelo. Maybe you like this. The cleanest least regret path is export once, verify locally, and then slowly unwind Google photos. But I literally was like, all right,

how do I get my Google photos? And you're thinking about this the exact right way. Ooh, tell me more. You don't get that at all? You don't get that? I don't get that. Maybe it is the system problem.

Okay. But okay, I think just to sum this up, I think Anthropic wins. But bottom line, in my perspective, it's just, it was the funniest ad. And maybe in long term, there's some hurt, but it's very difficult to make an ad with humor. I know I was sitting at my desk cracking up. Seems like Sam Altman was too. Half of the, maybe more of the, you know, tech industry who's considering using this. They laughed.

That is tough. And they did it. So I would say that's overall a win for it. Agreed. Agreed. The add A minus Sam Malmonds response, C minus. I will give the add. I will give the add an A.

Give Sam a B plus response. I don't hate it. I don't hate it. Okay. Why can Anthropic throw punches in open A? I can't. I don't know. Yep.

Make it a good punch. Make you come back. Yeah, comeback strong, but just make it, make it a good one. Yeah. Okay. So, so interesting moment for Open AI more broadly. I just want to talk about this briefly. We have talked about this or the past couple shows.

This week on big technology, I did publish some data looking at the market share of chat GPT versus the competitors. First of all, going to your like, what's Claude perspective. Claude is like the basically the floor at the bottom. Very few people actually use Claude, you know, but when they do, they use it a lot. but that being said, Open AIs, a chat cheap ETs market share has dropped from 69% in January, this is according to Apotopia, from 69% in January 2025 to 45.3% in January 26. Now it is growing, but in that same time, let's see, Gemini has gone from 14.7% chatbot market share to 25.1% and GROC has gone from.

1.6% surprisingly to 15.2%. What do you make of this? I mean, it's very interesting to see that opening eye really has company now. Yeah, I was, okay, so with a grain of salt here, I think, because this is mobile app daily active user. And then if you think about the mobile app experience for any of these individual tools, like Claude, all the hype is around using it at your desktop with Claude Code or even the Claude app or whatever. Like, it's not, especially because mobile app usage is a very consumer type of thing.

I think Gemini is definitely the most notable part of this. I think GROC is interesting, but I'm also curious, like, probably that's going to get counted. I'm guessing every Twitter reply, like, at GROC explain this. You know, I'm talking about, like, everyone's always. Yeah, but I think this is the GROC app itself. Really? Yes.

Do you have the GROC app on your phone? No. Wait. And I'll tell you where GROC usage went up. And I'm going to publish this too, I think. Dear. Yep. Oh, no. Oh, no.

It is when people. Okay, by the way, GROC, it's called the World Smartest AI Advisor. It has 931,000 ratings on the app store. Okay. Anyway, usage went up when it started to be keenify young women ladies. Yeah. Not good. No.

No. And it's almost entirely male, and not surprisingly. Interesting. Okay, yeah. No, I think. And actually, one thing I will say, do you know, it's notable to me on this chart here is perplexity. And perplexity should, if they're going to compete, that was like a very mobile first

consumer friendly experience. And I don't know. I'm wondering what's, what's your prediction for a perplexity? I think it's done. I mean, I don't see how it really. serves a purpose outside of, you know, different than what you could do with Gemini or Chechee. Yeah. It was a cleaner search type of experience for a long time.

Yeah. And now it's not. AI mode and Google probably killed it. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I think so. And that one again, like, there was a strong bump last fall for perplexity that's completely disappeared.

So I want to ask you something that I was asking. on CNBC this week, and I'm actually kind of curious how you would answer. So, like, there's been all this talk about how Nvidia and OpenAI are, have some friction in their relationship, like Jensen has gone from, we're going to invest up to $100 billion. So, like, we will evaluate round by round, and we hope that Open AI invites us to invest again. And in the Wall Street Journal, there was some reports that there were, that he had some concerns about the way that Open AI did business. And then I was asked, well, are there concerns about the way that Open AI does business?

To me, basically my response was, look, Open AI had the lead. They used publicly available technology to build chat GPT. They built the lead. It was inevitable that there would be others that would build, you know, similar technology, and they would catch up. And then, you know, so what is the health of Open AI there? You know, is it like just, okay, it's normal that others are catching up because it was inevitable. And if so, then what is the value proposition for Open AI and ChatGPT moving forward if they're one of the pack?

What do you think? I think, I mean, to take the OpenAI side here, like when we're even looking at this chart, for example, it's all relative market share. It's not total usage and total consumers. So as long as the pie is growing and they are still the vastly dominant player, I think they're certainly an interesting company. I do then, we've talked about this plenty, they have to nail one of these kind of peripheral business ideas beyond just chat GPT, $20 a month subscriptions, is whether that's ads. So maybe the lack of focus is an asset then because they just need one or a couple. Yeah, but they have to land it. They've tried a lot of stuff.

Like, have you used SORA recently out of curiosity? I'm just asking, between GROCs or all these, yeah. No, I mean, they're really good at big, flashy, exciting moments, but then they haven't had anything that's felt like staying power the way ChatchipD itself and those early model updates and stuff would just completely kind of take over for a long, like a prolonged period. a time. So I think, I mean, they have to be relatively interesting. Jensen was definitely a bit

cagey, I felt, between the reporting and then like, what do you read about like the Jensen open AI relationship? In some way they need each other. In some way, it doesn't look like Jensen's all that happy. Well, but that's where my, like how I felt about it is he does need open AI to succeed. He does. Like, Invidia at the current valuation and story. needs all these, like, AI to just be an unquestioned success and open AI, if it completely flops, even if a lot of that value accrues to a Google or a Microsoft, I really think a lot of the shine, even on an Nvidia, takes a hit. Well, if it accrues to Google, that's just like a TPU success story.

Well, yeah, that's even more dangerous one. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Okay, we'll be, we'll be watching this. It's going to be a very interesting story. Bitcoin. Very briefly, Bitcoin, like, has gone from, what, was it, like, 110, 115 a year, like, at the beginning of year? To 61-K as of yesterday, it's back up to 70. Now it's at 70. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, it was at 124 in October. So that's, you know, not a halving, but down, what, a good percentage since then. Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't have earnings. So you can't just fall back on the earnings, like our beleaguered software company. might over time. What is going, what is your take on what's happening with Bitcoin? So I was thinking about this lot. So down 35% this year. I mean, that's after the, I think, 11, 12% rebound yesterday or today. The most fascinating thing about Bitcoin so far this year for me has been, I don't see anyone

talking about it. And again, I'm sure within certain circles, there's still pretty intense things. actually, I was in Dubai last week and the hotel I was staying at, there was like a crypto event going on. And my God, that was just something crazy to see. But like overall, I mean, I don't know, are you hearing or seeing? Like, it's just kind of quietly fading off. And which I think is possibly one of the most dangerous things because it really depends on kind of an energy to keep it moving. So, yeah, what do you? you think's happening? I don't know. I just think it's one of those things that sort of it's built on,

I don't want to say group think, but built on a story, right? And I don't know, the story, the story, when the story doesn't work, Bitcoin drops. We've seen this so many times. And when the story works, the story is okay, like, you know, the president is a, you know, a supporter of this. And now you could be able to own it from mainstream financial institutions. Then it works. But I mean, and I hold some, I'll admit it. But I've always felt that there was weakness in the underlying story, which is, you know, if it's not going to be useful as a currency and what is it, store value, okay. That just depends on people's belief in it.

But I also, it's a good, it's a good point because I don't actually know what the story is. That's actually the most dangerous part to me is like, like, is it a hedge against the hyperinflationary U.S. economy? of debt? Is it better way for manage, I don't know, like payments? Is it whatever? There's no compelling storyline right now. Is it even, yeah, as you said, the president is going to just make it a thing, like the actually the only big story I've read recently was the World Liberty financial story with like the UAE recently. Yeah, there's just no compelling narrative right now around it, which is a problem. Yeah, this is, again, this is from Henry Blodgett.

The problem with Bitcoin and crypto is there is no level at which it is cheap. It is only worth what someone will pay for it. This is not true for most stocks and currencies. Most stocks have some future cash flow that you can estimate and discount to today. And most currencies can be traded for things that have value, even if the currencies themselves are gradually depreciating. But Bitcoin, it could trade down to 1,000 and still fall 99%. And yes, it could also go to 1 million, as I suggested back in 2013 or 100 million. psychologically, of course, we are most optimistic about the price the next guy will pay when the price is something of something keeps going up.

And we get pessimistic about it when the price is plunging. So here's to predicting what the next guy will pay. I think that sums it up. I mean, yeah, I think that's how it's felt for a long time. But yeah, I think that's about right. It's also interesting hearing from Henry. Is he off Twitter? I actually think that he, no, he's on Twitter and I think he actually built, oh, maybe this was on LinkedIn.

I think he built a publication that has AI's writing for it, but I haven't seen a lot of people paying attention to that. Okay. I feel kind of miss Henry Blodgett my feeds. So glad to hear. I brought him back. I brought to see him back here. All right. Last story for this week, Amazon stock is down 6.

about 7% today. What happened? They beat earnings expectations. At least their cloud unit went up. AWS went up 24% in the fourth quarter, which is kind of astounding. But they said they were going to spend $200 billion in CAPEX, a 60% increase from last year and far above Wall Street expectations. Obviously, they are in the AI game.

And that is no longer seen as like a ticket to your stock going up. And so the stock market reacted poorly. Overreaction? Or is Amazon? some sort of trouble here. I think with Amazon, again, I guess this is going back to like, I mean, they have so, they have some very big different types of businesses that have some kind of synergies between them, but like overall, yeah, it's hard to see where there's going to be any kind of

massive growth. I think that's like the, I mean, again, Azure, Google Cloud have been like massively, they had the lead in that market and, uh, that's certainly contracted. Their advertising business has grown tremendously, but like, there's especially, I think like, agentic commerce presents a threat, whatever it's going to look like. Maybe they'll, Rufus, actually, I've been using a lot more.

I do find pretty good, but like, I think they're going to, there's no, it's hard to see what's the big growth story with Amazon right now. do you see any if you're if you're to be outlining at amazon investor day and you are andy jessie what are you talking about the one i just cited is that it is the biggest cloud services company and it just grew 24% after going like 17 18% for a bunch of quarters in a row that's pretty good for amazon but i think there is starting to be some concern about jassy and um this one twitter user discounted trash flow. I'm just reading. I don't agree with this, but sort of the extreme view on Jassy. Calls him a bean-counting bureaucrat who lucked into the CEO chair after brown-nosing Bezos for decades.

Inherited the greatest e-commerce machine ever built and immediately started breaking it. Oversaw the biggest layoffs in Amazon history. 27,000 heads chopped in waves while he pocketed 200 million in comp packages. Of course, a brutal five-day return to office mandate that sparked internal revolts, leaked memos and mass quiet quitting, led retail, bleed billions in over-expansion, hangover, closing warehouse he helped overbuild. AWS growth decelerated hard on his watch as Azure and Google Cloud closed the gap. Stock flatlined or lag behind peers for years. Post-transition until AI hype and rate cuts bailed him out.

FASISM, face his massive FTC antitrust lawsuit for the monopoly abuses he pretends were in his fault. Zero Vision, Infinite Corporate Jar. bargain, toxic spreadsheet obsession, preaches day one culture while turning Amazon into a soulless cost-cutting machine, just another over-promoted middle manager destroying a founder's legacy. I mean, probably sounds like it might have been a, that anon account might be an ex-Amazon employee upset about what's going on. And you could probably tell a story like that about most tech company CEOs. I think the concerning thing is, I don't know, you read that And you're like, maybe.

Not my man Sundar. Not my man Sundar. I don't say that about Sundar. Taking pure managerial class, but just kicking ass for over the last year and a half. Full McKinsey. But yeah, Amazon is down 13. 15% over the past year, up 25% percent, 24% over the past four years. And definitely doing well since December, 2023 when it hit this low in the whole market.

sort of collapsing. But the past year performance, not great. Yeah, like, I mean, would you ever bet against Amazon? It's a, it's a risky bet. But even on the like shopping commerce side, I feel there's like a long period of time where they would just do amazing things. And nothing's really, I mean, I don't know what the next innovation would be, but they haven't really done too much. Again, Rufus is kind of like interesting for search on the site itself, but like overall Alexa plus, I'm, I'm liking. It's not bad. I like it. I like it. I like to it. It's very good. But what are they going to do with it? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. And I don't think bringing Jeff Bezos back is the answer. I think someone said,

you know, if you bring Jeff Bezos back, you better be prepared for, you know, 90% staff cuts and 800 billion in CAPEX. And given what he did to the Washington Post this week, I don't know if he still has the Bezos touch, as they say. Yeah, no. I don't think it's got to be, they just need some, you know what they should hire McKinsey to tell them what the pigeon is. Oh my God. It's all about McKinsey. They're going to be the big winners. It's, it's, there is software might die, but consulting lives. That's our lesson from this week. Yeah. It's all about the consens. Large scale management consulting is the future. They will not die. All right, Ron John. Great to have you back. What a week. we'll have plenty to talk about next week as well.

All right. See you next week. See you next week. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching again, Sarita Ramoswami. CEO of Snowflake will be on the show on Wednesday to talk about all this craziness with software and handicap the AI race.

Overall, of course, he spent time at Google and competing against Google, so he's the right person to have on the show. Great as always to have Ranjan on. Great to have you all listening and watching. And we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you.