# AI Disintermediation Triggers Software Valuation Collapse

**Podcast:** Big Technology Podcast
**Published:** 2026-02-06

## Transcript

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.
This episode is brought to you by Qualcomm.
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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 Nerf 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 gonna 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 gonna investigate whether AI is actually going to do what investors fear it will do to software.
We're also gonna talk about this open AI and anthropic fight over anthropic Super Bowl ad.
And then of course, Amazon fell uh 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 uh as a note, we've gone from worries that AI was a bubble to now the more at least in the market.
Now the market is reflecting the chance that AI is really gonna work uh and potentially wipe out software.
This is from Bloomberg.
Trillion dollar tech wipeout ensnares all stocks in AI's path.
There have been many AI-driven sell-offs in the three years since ChatGPT 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 value of those tracked, and an iShares ETF has now dropped almost one trillion over the past seven days.
Also, more than 17.7 billion of US tech company loans in a Bloomberg index dropped to a distressing to distressed trade trading levels during the past few four weeks.
The dropping, 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, Rajon.
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, uh, I mean, oh, 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 uh user requests for hours.
And they've offered a preview, these AI tools, and they've offered a preview of uh of the threat sophisticated AI models pose 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 uh companies years of corporate development.
Here's an analyst with while tech.
Oh, so so actually that we'll get back to that in a moment.
That's legal tech.
Um, just just explain this to me.
Okay, I sort of get it.
You know, we had like uh uh Deirdre Bosa, who's a CNBC anchor, was able to fide code an instance of Monday.com personalized for her use case.
Um you know, maybe that's gonna be what what people do, but how does something like a workday monday.com and Adobe Get Disintermediate?
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.
Okay, so first of all, 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 like 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 it's not cheap.
These tools are not cheap, and I'm gonna get more into that.
But at that point, being able to, the more AI starts to enter your workflow, then using if AI is gonna generate a marketing brief, 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 gonna now enter that into Monday.com.
That's gonna tell someone what they have to do.
They're gonna 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 D.
Bosa 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 gonna 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 someone, 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 totally removes the 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 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, I 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 valid, isn't worth the cost?
And I think those conversations and questions are all gonna 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 claw co-works of the world.
Um, like it changes the need for do you even need a lot of these things?
So I think it's gonna be hitting these companies at every level along the way.
Well, here's the thing.
You know, I think that the software, what this 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.
Um, even if the technology is there, it's gonna take you know, probably years to get there.
But here's the thing, and and I think this is really where where we get where we get to, right?
Is that we're gonna have um software companies building their own bots, and then we're gonna have the big companies building their own bots.
And the question, and that's like kind of what I think Sam was referencing, is do you end up subsumed into, let's say, a chat GPT or Claude?
Um, or do you get people to use your own bot?
Like, like let's say you're at Monday.com.
Are you gonna get people to use your chat bot versus have all this stuff basically accessed by let's say a chat GPT and then brought into someone's home screen there?
No, this is yeah, go ahead, Roger.
Yeah, it's a it's a good question.
I think these companies are gonna be defending their data sets.
Like Monday.com is gonna be like, don't come in and take all of my task data and put it into your workflow.
So I think I I think it's a good point that they're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna have Srita Ramaswamy, 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 and I'll just preview it a little bit.
I mean, basically, like, you know, ChatGPT is going to try to get all that slow Snowflake data some to be something that you access within that main chat GPT interface.
And Snowflake is gonna 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 Street Art has the right strategy here.
He's gonna let the comp customers decide.
Um, and and ultimately you can't really, if this is what they want, 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 gonna go away.
And I think Brett Taylor, when he was on a couple of weeks ago, put this really well.
It's the fact that investors are now uncertain about what's going to happen, um, that they are backing away from these stocks.
So whereas it might look like it's over for stock for software companies, um, 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 gonna 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 runaway from the software stocks.
Yeah, I I think you captured it.
And also I think Snowflake is very interestingly positioned here, because I think a lot of where we're gonna 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 the day and we're seeing Claude and OpenAI 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, uh, I'm obviously sarcastic there, but but in reality, like it it's true that right now, I think even if you're not gonna rip out workdame 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 the when their like pricing is going to be questioned by every single customer, it's tough.
Like you 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, it there's I don't see what the story is.
Right.
And software does get a higher multiple because of that potential for 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 uh the rest of the economy.
This is from Liz Thomas, who's a uh financial watcher.
Software's forward 12-month P, and I'm gonna speak about this with Sridhar, but let's talk about it now.
The software's forward 12-month P has compressed from 33.1 to 23.2x, multiple contraction of 30%, and the valuations 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 right.
Like the entire, I think uh 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, uh like basically increasingly scaling marginal returns that you invest initially, but actually distributing software is uh zero essentially costs zero.
So, like, and incredibly value 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 we've talked about this a lot, like, 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 it, 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 untinked all these software stocks, and that is that Anthropic had this um, I'll just read it.
This is from Business Insider.
Uh, Anthropic's latest AI tool is hammering legal software stocks.
So it was a legal tool.
Anthropic recently rolled out a new plugin for its clawed cowork 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 track 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 two on Tuesday, Walter's Kluer went down 13%.
Relic's PLC went down 15.8%.
LegalZoom down 18%.
Thompson Reuters down 19%.
The worst day in the company's history.
Uh I mean, come on, like Harvey was out there already.
It hasn't up-ended 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 LegalZoom?
You are uh 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 gonna say like the CEO of LegalZoom is the next guest on the show after.
I mean, it'd be great to have them.
We would welcome them on.
Um, but uh, like these tools don't provide a ton of value.
They like answered really specific problems.
And that 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.com example.
Like, like when you have that, there was almost like value in that kind of monopoly, right?
There's a, 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 uh 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 um 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 uh with LLMs and not in the robotic process automation way that people imagine.
Well, hold on.
One thing I want to kind of really get across, and I I see this that like, and 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 take an existing process and just add some AI to it.
Like, but you re basically recreate that process with AI.
Like the big change and difference, and any like this is a whole clawed 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, like, yeah, I think the promise is very clear more and more.
I agree, it's gonna 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, Rajan.
Okay, so you're clearly a believer in in this.
Uh, why don't you give like the best steel man argument in terms of like how why this might not work?
Tapping out on this one, like, where is the vulnerability that you're not seeing and we're not seeing?
I 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 the value in those tools, there's wasn't 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.
It was 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 gonna be a layer over it, that there actually is value in them being that dumb structured database.
And that they're gonna be able to fight and hold on for a bit.
I think like people, it's true, people are not gonna rip them out anytime soon.
Whether they can grow and stuff, we'll see.
But they they have uh 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 uh 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, new features, changing standards.
Uh writing an app is a commitment to a never-ending journey, a journey to return to the original point, uh, which has that has nothing to do with the company's core competency, right?
Something something close to what you were saying.
And then he says, and 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 and 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 gonna be able to build their their chatbots or agents uh, you know, fast enough.
So I think I've I've been thinking about this a lot.
Like it, even though I tried to take the steel man position for Monday.com, like I really don't see the prices they charge relative to the value.
I think what could be happen 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 uh I don't know, like a paint distributor, you're not gonna 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 these large SAS SaaS companies.
What's gonna be interesting is that uh we're not gonna be 100% sure who's gonna use these software platforms, and that's kind of like where you know it gets gets interesting, and we talked about that a little bit.
This is going back to Thompson.
Uh, human will be be using uh software at least for a while, but increasingly so will agents.
What doesn't clear, 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 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 Chat GPT uh to a point where it's good enough to use your Monday.com and bring that data into, let's say, a ChatGPT Pulse, um, 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 that's the 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.
Uh, a couple months ago, I was watching Josh Brown on uh 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 gonna 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 I think cloud code is at the the basis 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.
Cloud code introduced basically autonomous coding, and but that that shift in mentality of wait, 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.
Uh and then suddenly I think the more people have seen it with their own eyes or done something, that's where all these light bulbs start going off.
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 we're 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.
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 gonna get completely disrupted and seeing it firsthand.
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 open AI 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 gonna IPO?
Can open AI make money?
Do they like, are they gonna win any of these individual big bets that they're taking?
Is Google gonna kill everyone?
Like, I actually think the the landscape is more uncertain than ever.
While I think, like 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?
And I think that's why button.
Yeah.
Or nobody.
Yeah, or does everyone just have to do that?
Yeah, if it gets everything.
No, the AI just codes it vibe codes it itself and it removes the work and puts us all out of a job anyways.
Yeah, who knows?
No way.
Like if it's powerful enough to just remove the job, then somebody's gonna 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 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 gonna be living in this moment of volatility for a while.
I'm gonna ask you, and we don't make forward-looking statements on this show, but do you think so?
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 we're generally talking about?
Yeah, again, this is not investment advice.
Um 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 why I think it's it's it's worth looking at.
I think the most important thing is going to be yeah, 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 uh Dylan Patel, the founder of Semi-Analysis.
4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Cloud Code right now.
At the current trajectory, we believe that cloud code will be 20% plus of all daily commits by the end of 2026.
While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development.
Yeah, that I'm telling you, I that was my in December, that was my prediction for 2026 on this show that what happened in software development is gonna happen in knowledge work this year.
End of this year, it's happening.
Maybe Dario was right after all.
Everybody laughed at his prediction that 50% of entry level work was going to be gone.
Actually, it 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 you're entry level but AI native, are you gonna be better positioned?
Or if you're kind of older and a manager, but you know how to delegate work, are you gonna be better?
I don't know.
It's gonna be that's another whole direction.
It's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out.
Are you saying that the future of work is just gonna be being in a chatbot window, being like, is it ready yet?
How's it looking?
How's it looking?
Almost there?
That's that's the future of work.
It's not even chatbot though.
Like that's why I think I'm on the Sierra uh episode with Brett Taylor, I was hearing you had said chatbot.
I think it's chat's the UI right now, but like maybe I'm using my Gentech Monday.com to manage tasks, and I see that they were completed by my agent, and then I'm like, okay, I'm gonna sign some other tasks.
Like, but yeah, I think that's that's gonna be part of how 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 battlefields, shall we say the Super Bowl?
Uh, two companies with ads not dueling.
OpenAIZ is all about building.
Anthropic Sat 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.
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And 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.
Uh, this is from Business Insider.
Anthropic Super Bowl spot skewers ChatGPT.
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 OpenAI's plan to bring uh advertising to Chat GPT.
Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude.
The AI the ad tagline reads.
Oh my god, there was a there was one that I saw.
There's four of them, I think, and one I saw was really funny.
It was in the therapist's office, and the 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?
This these were so good.
Did you see the personal trainer one?
Um 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 sycophancy of ChatGPT, but even just nailing like the cadence of how ChatGPT 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 word name anthropic, most people normies don't even know what that is.
Claude does 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.
It 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 in the office, drop it in Slack, it makes it on big technology podcast on a Friday, maybe.
And um, 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 BOD gain a bunch of users.
So from that standpoint, I think potentially successful.
They also got OpenAI to respond.
Should we go into the way that OpenAI responded?
Because it seems like they went a little overboard in the response as well.
They were baited.
I think we should.
So here's what Sam Sam Altman says.
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'd 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 Doublespeak to use deceptive, uh 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.
Uh, 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.
Um, what do you think about this response?
Oh, one more line.
One authoritarian company.
We we care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is uh 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 obviously obvious risks.
It's a really dark path.
It's a dark path.
All right.
All right.
So many layers to this one.
Thank you, Sam, for giving us this gift of uh 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 raise concern around deceptive advertising.
So, like, I think it's kind of there's a point there.
That's a good person.
There's a point there.
It's a little nuanced, but it's it's a point.
Then you have the more Texans use ChatGPT for free, then total people use Cloud the US.
So we have a different lease shaped problem, they do.
This one I thought was so ridiculous because I think as the chief marketing officer of OpenAI 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 uh 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?
Was it because I think the 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 then basically that's why he was like there 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 draw like explain what you're trying to do 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 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 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 uh yeah, overall, I'm gonna I'm gonna give this a C minus rating on uh 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 X AI.
He says, uh comms 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 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 of responding deceptive ad about deceptive ads.
I thought that was a good line.
Yep.
Um I wouldn't have written damn they cooked us it is a little too flippant.
What what about 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 what do you have over them?
Vast majority people don't know what it is, are not going to know what it is.
What do you 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 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 on 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 at Silicon Valley Comms professional.
I don't know.
Anthropic is spending a lot 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, pretty sure I saw Netflix have seen their ad-supported user-based triple in like two years.
That's a good point.
That's a good point, actually.
I think that that's a fair point.
That like it's funny within people, like deep into it it.
It definitely everyone like enjoys the kind of Sam versus uh like uh anthropic beef.
But but yeah, you're right.
Like, is it really gonna turn people off?
Maybe not.
Like people certainly are okay with ads in all different formats.
We uh talk regularly that Meta might be the ones that actually figures out how to run uh AI ad first ads, but whatever it is, I think that's a good point.
That is it really gonna turn 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-owned in that way.
I don't know.
Possibly, I think like, I don't know.
I I actually I have found Chat GBD to be degrading like over time.
I don't know.
Have you felt this at all?
Like it's getting more obsequious.
Like, like even just like uh 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 are right.
That's a great question.
Um, I don't know.
You haven't you haven't been noticing this at all?
I had a different experience.
It definitely has been pushing back more than me, more on me.
But I I yeah, I've had in my system prompt for a long time.
Uh do not be sycophantic.
Actually, hold on.
Do you 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 yeah, how much I'm paying in a year.
So Google, I'm gonna photos, I'm gonna get rid of.
So I asked ChatGPT, 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.
Like, I don't get that.
That's interesting.
Maybe you're just responding to this stuff, Ranja.
Maybe you like this.
The cleanest least regret path is export once, verify locally, and then slowly unwind uh 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 I think just to sum this up, uh, 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 it's very difficult to make an ad uh 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 left.
Uh, it's that that is tough.
And they did it.
So I would say that's overall a win for agreed.
Agreed.
Uh the ad A minus Sam Altman response, C minus.
I will give the ad, I will give the ad an A.
Give Sam a B B plus response.
I don't hate it.
Okay.
I don't hate it.
Okay.
Why can anthropic throw punches and open AI can't?
I don't know.
Yep, make it a good punch.
Make come back, come back strong, but just make it make it a good one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so interesting moment for OpenAI more broadly.
I just want to talk about this briefly.
We have talked about this over the past couple shows.
This week in 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.
Uh very few people actually use Claude, you know, but when they do, they use it a lot.
Um, but that being said, OpenAI's uh ChatGPT's market share has dropped from 69% at in January.
This is according to Aptopia, from 69% in January twenty twenty-five to forty-five point three percent in January twenty six twenty-six.
Now it is growing, uh, but in that same time, uh, let's see, Gemini has gone from fourteen point seven percent chatbot market share to twenty-five point one percent, and grok has gone from one point six percent, surprisingly, to fifteen point two percent.
What do you make of this?
I mean, it's very interesting to see that open AI really has company now.
Yeah, I 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 um 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 grok is interesting, but I'm also curious, like, probably that's gonna get counted, I'm guessing every Twitter reply, like at grok explained this.
You know, I'm talking about like it's like everyone says the grok app itself.
Really?
Yes.
Do you have the grok app on your phone?
No.
Wait, I don't think I'll tell you where grok usage went up.
And I'm gonna publish this too, I think.
Dear.
Yep.
Oh no.
Oh no.
It is when people start okay.
By the way, Grok, it's called the world's smartest AI advisor.
It has 931,000 ratings on the app store.
Okay, okay.
Anyway, usage went up when it started to bikinify young ladies.
Yeah.
Not good.
No.
No.
And it's almost entirely male.
Not surprisingly.
Um interesting.
Okay, yeah.
No, I think, and actually, did one thing I will say, do you know what's notable to me on this chart here is perplexity disappear and perplexity should, if they're gonna compete, that was like a very mobile first consumer friendly experience.
And uh I don't know.
I'm wondering what's what's your prediction for perplexity?
I think it's done.
I mean, yeah, I don't see how it really serves a purpose outside of um, you know, different than what you could do with Gemini or Chat G.
Yeah.
Personally, 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 they there was a strong bump last fall for perplexity that's completely disappeared.
So I want to ask you something that that I uh was asked 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 gonna invest up to 100 billion to 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 they were that he had some concerns about the way that OpenAI did business.
Um and then they you know I was asked, well, are there concerns about the way that open AI does business?
Uh to me, I basically my response was look, um, open AI had the lead.
They use publicly available technology to build Chat GPT, they built the lead.
It was inevitable that there would be others that would build uh 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 Chat GPT moving forward if they're one of the pack?
What do you think?
I think I mean, to to take the open AI side here, like when we're look even looking at this chart, for example, it's all relative market share.
It's not total usage and total consumers.
Right.
So as long as the pie is growing and they are still the vastly dominant player.
I think uh there's certainly an interesting company.
I do then we've talked about this plenty.
I they have to nail one of these kind of peripheral business ideas beyond just Chat GPT 20 a month subscriptions.
Um, is whether that's actually.
The lack of focus is is an asset then, because they if they just need one or a couple.
Yeah, but they have to they have to land it.
They've tried a lot of stuff.
Like, yeah, have you used Sora recently?
Out of curiosity.
I'm just asking between grocs or all these, yeah.
No, I mean they they're really good at big, flashy, exciting moments, but then they haven't had anything that's felt like staying power the way ChatGPD itself and those early model updates and stuff would just completely kind of take over for a long like a prolonged period of time.
So I think I mean they have to be relatively interesting.
Jensen was definitely a bit cagey, I feel between the reporting and then like what do you mean 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 NVIDIA 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 an even more dangerous one.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Agreed.
Okay.
That'll be we'll be watching this.
It's gonna be a very interesting story.
All right, Bitcoin.
Uh very briefly, Bitcoin like has gone from what was it like 110, 115 a year, like uh at the beginning of the year 61k as of yesterday down to 61 now it's at 70.
Yeah.
Um, let's see.
Oh, it was at 124 in October.
So that's uh, you know, not a having, but down what a good percentage since then.
Um obviously Bitcoin doesn't have earnings, so can't just fall back on the earnings like our leaguered software companies might over time.
What is going on?
What is your take on what's happening with Bitcoin?
So I I I was thinking about this a lot.
So down 35% this year.
I mean, that's after the I think 11-12% rebound yesterday or today.
Um 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 uh 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 s 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 what do you think's happening?
I don't know.
Uh I I just think it's one of those things that sort of it's built on, I don't want to say groupthink, 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 I I mean, I've all 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 gonna be useful as a currency, and what is it?
Store value, okay.
That's just depends on people's belief in it.
But 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 uh hedge against the hyperinflationary US economy because of dead?
Is it better way for uh 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 gonna just make it a thing?
Uh like the actually the only big story I've read recently was the world fight liberty financial story with like the UAE recently.
Uh 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 uh, yeah, I think uh that's about right.
It's also interesting hearing from Henry.
Is he 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 I kind of miss Henry Blodgett, my feeds.
Um glad to hear him back here.
Glad to see him back here.
All right.
Last story for this week.
Amazon uh stock is down six point about seven percent uh today.
What happened?
Uh they beat earnings expectations, at least the cloud unit went up.
AWS went up 24% in the fourth quarter, which is kind of astounding.
Uh, but they said they were gonna spend 200 billion dollars in CapEx, a 60% increase from last year and far above Wall Street expectations.
Obviously, they are in the AI game, and uh 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 in 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, um it's hard to see where there's gonna 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 certainly contracted their advertising business has grown tremendously, but like they're especially I think like agentic commerce presents a threat, whatever it's gonna 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 gonna there's no it's hard to see what's the big growth story with Amazon right now.
Do you do you see any?
If you're if you're to be outlining it Amazon Investor Day and you are Andy Jassy, what are you talking about?
The one I just cited is that it's 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 uh chopped in waves while he pocketed 200 million in comp packages.
Forced a brutal five-day return to office mandate that sparked internal revolts, leaked memos and mass quiet quitting, uh led retail big lead billions and over expansion hangover, uh closing warehouse.
He helped overbuild.
Uh AWS growth decelerated hard on his watch as Azure and Google Cloud uh closed the gap.
Uh stock flatlined or lagged behind Pierce for years, but uh post-transition until AI hype and rate cuts bailed him out.
Uh fast is faces massive FTC antitrust lawsuit for the monopoly abuses he pretends weren't his fault.
Uh zero vision, infinite corporate jargon, toxic spreadsheet obsession, preaches day one culture while turning Amazon into a soulless cost cutting machine.
Just another overpromoted middle manager destroying a founder's legacy.
I mean, probably it sounds like it might have been a uh an a that anon account uh might be an ex-Amazon employee upset with 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 not my man Sundar.
Not my man Soundarbook.
Taken pure managerial class, but just kicking ass for over the last year.
But yeah, Amazon's down 13.
Yeah.
Amazon's down 13 13% over the past year, up 25% 24% over the past four years, and definitely doing well since uh December 2023 when it hit this this low and the whole market sort of started 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 it's it's not bad.
I like it.
It's very good.
But what are they gonna 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.
Uh 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 gotta be.
They just need some.
You know what they should hire McKinsey to tell them what the oh my god.
It's all about McKinsey.
They're gonna be the big winners.
It's uh truth is software might die, but consulting lives.
That's our lesson from this week.
Yeah, it's all about the consulting.
Large scale management consulting is the future.
They will not die.
All right, Ronjan.
Great to have you back.
What a week.
I'm sure 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.
Srida Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, will be on the show on Wednesday to talk about all this craziness with software and handicapped the AI race overall.
Overall, of course, he spent time at Google and competing against Google, so he's the right person to have on the show.
Uh great as always to have Ron John on.
Great to have you all listening and watching, and we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
Hey, Belin.