Tech Brew Ride Home - The AI Superbowl

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Sam Altman assures staff that OpenAI has a good week, but is Anthropic definitively growing faster at this point? Is the CapEx spend about to eat ALL of Silicon Valley’s free cashflow while Apple sits out the party? And the Crypto.com guy runs the same playbook but now with Ai.com. Sam Altman touts ChatGPT’s reaccelerating growth to employees as OpenAI closes in on $100 billion funding (CNBC) How Capex Ramp Up Will Squeeze Google, Amazon, Meta (The Information) Apple is the only Big Tech company whose capex declined last quarter (Sherwood) A New AI Video Model From ByteDance is Making Waves (PetaPixel) Claude Code is the Inflection Point (SemiAnalysis) Crypto.com CEO unveils new AI agents to millions during Super Bowl (CoinTelegraph) From Svedka to Anthropic, brands make bold plays with AI in Super Bowl ads (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home from Monday, February 9th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sam Altman assures staff that OpenAI had a good week, but is Anthropic definitively growing faster at this point? Is the Kappex spend about to eat all of Silicon Valley's free cash flow while Apple sits out the party? And the crypto.com guy runs the same playbook, but now with AI.com. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. CNBC has seen internal slack messages where Sam Altman is telling staff. that chat GPT is, quote, back to exceeding 10% monthly growth and OpenAI plans to release an

updated chat model this week. Quote, in his message on Friday, Altman said, OpenAI's coding product Codex grew about 50% from a week ago. Codex competes directly with Anthropics Claude Code, which has seen a wave of adoption over the last year. OpenAI launched a new Codex model GPT 5.3 Codex last week, as well as a standalone app for users with Apple computers. Altman said Codex's growth is, quote, insane, according to the internal message. This was a great week, Altman wrote. It was also a contentious week. Altman and other senior executives took to social media to respond to swipes from Anthropic, which ran Super Bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI's decision to run ads within ChatGPT. In a post on X, Altman said that the commercials were deceptive

and that OpenAI would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. Today, OpenAI will officially begin testing ads within ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Last month, the company said the ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot's answers, and will not influence ChatGPT's responses. In private meetings, company executives are highlighting OpenAI's strength with consumers, growing enterprise business, and access to compute, according to one person who asked not to be named because the talks are private.

OpenAI has been circulating charts as part of the discussions. One chart shows that Codex, based on internal data, is eating into ClaudeCodeCode's market share according to a screenshot seen by CNBC, end quote. The information says that this year's projected CPEX ramp up for all the big tech behemists will all but wipe out free cash flow for the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta, potentially forcing stock buyback cuts or more borrowing by them. Quote, most of the big tech companies in recent years have begun returning cash to shareholders through dividends and buying back stock.

Google and Meta platforms, for instance, do both. But that could be difficult this year with capital expenditures, aimed at expanding computing capacity for AI, almost entirely absorbing the cash their operations generate. Google and Meta have already started to scale back their stock buybacks. Cutting off the dividend, though, could be tricky as both companies only introduced the payouts in 2024, which made their stocks more appealing to investors. Amazon won't have the same problem as it hasn't bought back stock since 2022 and has never paid a dividend. But its projected CAPEX this year of $200 billion is higher than the $178 billion

in cash from operations analysts estimate it will produce, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which means, unlike the other companies, it will burn cash anyway. Amazon issued $15 billion in bonds in November, beefing up its cash position, so it had $123 billion in cash on hand as of December 31st. That gives it a sizable cushion. Still, it is in talks to invest tens of billions of dollars in Open AI, the information has reported, which will reduce that cash pile meaningfully. On Friday, Amazon signaled its intention to borrow more money, filing a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that gives it the ability to quickly sell bonds, end quote. Funny enough, as I was writing that segment, Bloomberg was reporting

that Alphabet plans to raise around $15 billion from a U.S. high-grade dollar bond sale as it seeks to finance $185 billion in 2026 KAPX spend. Alphabet raised $17.5 billion in a previous issuance just this past November. But remember who isn't participating in this Kappex party yet? at, anyway, Apple. Apple, whose capital expenditure is just a fraction of its peers, is the only big tech company that actually saw its CPEX decline year-on-year in Q4, decreasing 19% to a mere $2.37 billion. Quoting Sherwood, Amazon expects its 2026 CAPEX to surge to $200 billion. Google is aiming for $17 to $180 billion. Meta estimates it will spend between $115,135 billion, All of those figures came in well above expectations and, for the most part, have weighed on their stocks.

Microsoft didn't give a formal 2026 KAPX outlook, but if its peers are any indication, spending will likely exceed the roughly $114 billion Wall Street expects for the calendar year. For better or worse, Apple has stuck to its own path with AI. As we've argued before, it's embracing AI, but is not an AI company. Instead, it's chosen a hybrid model relying on both first and third-party data centers, a move that keeps a significant amount of infrastructure spending off its balance sheet. And while Apple has said it expects CAPEX to increase as it invest more heavily in AI, particularly to support its private cloud compute,

those outlays remain minimal compared with its peers. You can see that approach reflected in Apple's decision to use Google's Gemini rather than an in-house model to power the next generation of Syrian Apple Intelligence. The Google deal reportedly worth about $1 billion a year gives Apple access to a top-tier AI model for pennies on the dollar compared to what other big tech companies are spending to build their own. Of course, it also means Apple won't fully own a technology that some see as powering the next industrial revolution. But if that revolution fails to materialize or takes longer than expected, Apple won't be left

holding the most expensive bag in Silicon Valley history, end quote. Bight Dance has debuted Seed Dance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi-shot scenes. And let me tell you, listener, if you search around socials for examples of this, it is mighty. impressive. Click through on the show notes to see some examples, quoting Petapixel. It may have just lost control of TikTok US, but this weekend, ByteDance released Seed Dance 2.0 and AI video generator that is turning heads. CNBC reports that Seed Dance's headline feature is something called multi-lens storytelling. AI video is often short, but this model will create several scenes while

keeping the same style and characters. The AI can reportedly generate 2K video 30% faster than other models. It can be prompted with an image, a short video, text, or audio. Beijing-friendly newspaper South China Morning Post reports that the release of the beta model and subsequent buzz has sent the stock prices of Chinese AI firms upwards. S-CMP notes that Seed Dance v2 is currently only available to a few select users of Jemeng AI, which is ByteDance's AI video platform. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Seed Dance 2.0 provides precise camera controls and editing tools with its reality enhancements, I feel it's very hard to tell whether a video is generated by AI. Wang Li, a programmer from China's southern Guangdong province, tells CMP that AI video is getting good is no

surprise. It was always obvious that video would eventually catch up with still images and text generators. But where AI video will lead to is an intriguing question. Last week, Petapixel reported that fame director Darren Aronovsky has released a series of AI-generated short films called On This Day 1770. that marked the semi-quincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution. Aronovsky's project has been met with widespread derision, yet the two videos released so far have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Whether those numbers come from people who are morbidly curious about a respected filmmaker apparently damaging his own career or they're generally popular remains to be seen, end quote.

I'll tell you where I think this is headed. You know, that thought that someday, instead of watching a movie, you're just going to prompt AI to give you the exact scene you want to see right now. I feel like we're going to have that by the end of this year. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate

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You heard earlier in the show Sam Altman say that Codex was maybe seeing some impressive user growth in the last week, but according to semi-analysis, it might be Claude that is at an inflection point. quote. Four percent of GitHub public commits are now being authored by Claude Code. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20 percent plus of all daily commits by the end of 2026. While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development. We believe that Claude Code is the inflection point for AI agents and is a glimpse into the future of how AI will function. It is set to drive exceptional revenue growth for Anthropic in 2026, enabling the lab to

dramatically outgrow open AI. Anthropic is on track to add as much power, compute power as Open AI in the next three years. Refer to our data center industry model for a building by building tracker of Anthropic and Open AI. Sam's AI Lab is notably suffering from multiple data center delays, which we've called out months ahead of the headlines, most notably in our CoreWeave Q3 2025 earnings preview, where we explicitly called out a large CAPX guidance miss. Since more compute means more revenue, we can forecast ARR growth and compare Anthropic to Open AI directly. Notably, our forecast shows that Anthropics' quarterly ARR additions have overtaken Open AIs.

Anthropic is adding more revenue every month than Open AI. We believe Anthropics' growth will be constrained by compute. However, coding was once the most valuable work of all, with programmers in hot demand during the 2020 era of software engineering. Coding is now a beachhead in terms of the disruption that agentic information processing has, and the larger $15 trillion information work economy is now at risk. There are more than one billion information workers are roughly one-third of the global 3.6 billion workforce per ILO. Every single workflow in the information work category is often similar and shares a workflow that Claude Code proves works for software. Read, ingest unstructured information think, apply domain knowledge,

write, produce structured output, and then verify check against standards. This is a large swath of most information workers, including research. And if agents can eat software, what labor pool can they not touch? Our view is quite a few. And with the rise of Claude Code and co-work, the total addressable market of agents is much larger than just LLMs. Neesh markets like customer support and software development will start to address the larger financial services, legal consulting, and other industries. This is the core focus of the semi-analysis tokenomics model, end quote. Crypto.com co-founder Chris Marzelek apparently bought the domain AI.com for 70,000

million dollars, the highest disclosed price for a domain name in history. And then, during last night's Super Bowl, we found out what he wants to do with that domain. Quoting Coin Telegraph. Crypto.com CEO Chris Marzelek has officially launched his new website, AI.com, to the public allowing users to create personal AI agents that can perform everyday tasks on their behalf. The AI.com commercial aired during Super Bowl 60 on NBC on Monday, leveraging the sporting events massive audience over 100 million viewers in previous years to promote the beta launch of the AI platform. For now, users can register their AI.com username handles but must then wait in a queue to have their private personalized AI agents spun out for them. Marsa Lex said the AI agents can

perform anything from managing emails and scheduling meetings to canceling subscriptions, carrying out shopping tasks, and planning trips. Marsa Lex said his mission with AI.com is to accelerate artificial general intelligence by building a decentralized network of autonomous, self-improving AI agents that perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity. ChatGPT creator OpenAI launched an enterprise-focused AI agent platform frontier last week, while Software Engineer Peter Steinberger released AI Agent OpenClaught in November, which gained popularity in January. Marzalek said he bought the AI-themed domain in April for $70 million,

the largest publicly disclosed domain sale in history, and has since built a team to bring the product to market. Sudenonymous crypto and AI researcher Xerox Sammy said the move, resembles how Marzilex scaled crypto.com to over 150 million customers by buying a popular domain and investing heavily in marketing. Marslex said AI.com had insane traffic in the first few hours after launch, which briefly caused the website to crash before it came back online, end quote. And actually, finally today, TechCrunch has a roundup of the tech ads in last night's Super Bowl, quote. Anthropics ad wasn't just about selling its Claude Chatbot, it was about throwing shade.

The commercial took a jab at OpenAI's plan to introduce ads to chat GPT, with the tagline. Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude. Rather than focus solely on Claude's features, it poked fun at the idea of your helpful AI assistant suddenly turning into a hype man for Step Boost Max Insoles, for example. It wasn't a standard product pitch, but it escalated an online feud. Open AI's Sam Alden fired back on social media calling the ad clearly dishonest, so while we didn't get any more Kendrick versus Drake rap beef this time around, maybe we did get our own AI nerdy version of it. Meta spotlighted its Oakland branded AI glasses designed for sports, workouts, and adventures, including extreme scenarios

such as chasing down a departing plane. The ad showcased thrill seekers from skydivers to mountain bikers using the glasses to capture epic moments. Famous faces like I Show Speed and filmmaker Spike Lee made appearances demonstrating capabilities like filming a basketball dunk in slow motion, posting hands-free to Instagram and other advanced features. The Tech Giant also featured its wearable AI tech in last year Super Bowl ad to spark consumer interest with stars like Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Jenner showing off Rayban meta-glasses. Amazon's ad took a cheeky and slightly unsettling approach, starring Chris Hemsworth, in a satirical AI is out to get me storyline. The commercial exaggerates common fears about AI with Hemsworth

humorously accusing Alexa Plus of plotting against him. Scenes included Alexa Plus closing the garage door on his head and shutting the pool cover while he swam, each mishap escalating in absurdity. Beyond the dark comedy, the ad introduced the new Alexa Plus showcasing its enhanced intelligence and capabilities, ranging from managing smart home devices to planning vacations. Alexa Plus had been available in early access for over a year and officially launched to all U.S. users on Wednesday. Rings commercial spotlighted its search party feature, which leverages AI and a community network to reunite lost pets with their owners.

The ad followed a young girl searching for her dog, Milo, illustrating how users can upload a pet's photo to the app where AI works to identify matches and taps into nearby cameras and the broader ring user community to help track down missing furry family members. And Ramp scored big by getting Brian Baumgartner, the actor who played Kevin in the office for its Super Bowl commercial. In the spot, Baumgartner uses Ramp's AI-powered spend management platform to multiply himself effortlessly tackling a mountain of work. The ad highlights how Ramps' all-in-one solution helps teams focus on the most important tasks through smart automation. And as a playful nod to his TV persona, Baumgartner is seen carrying a pot of chili in the ad referencing Kevin's legendary

scene where he brings his cherished recipe for his co-workers to try only to disastrously spill the entire pot on the floor, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? Turn the temperature

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