FULL INTERVIEW: Doug O'Laughlin Thinks Microsoft is OUT of the AI Race

This is our full interview with Doug O'Laughlin, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why Claude Code feels like a true inflection point, how agent swarms and orchestration could replace large parts of today’s SaaS stack, hyperscaler capex, Nvidia supply constraints, and why knowledge work is about to change faster than most people expect. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream Doug, how are you doing?

• 0:04Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm doing wonderful, how are you guys doing?

• 0:06John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up the video that you, that

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Oh yes.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  John painstakingly made this morning, that completely, that completely flopped.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  I'm very excited to have you on the show. It feels like that scene in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which I saw, where Sonic and Shadow team up and join forces to talk about CapEx and agentic coding. What's new in your world? Is Claude Code still the top of mind? Or are you still churning through the CapEx numbers from earnings?

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Are you somewhat of an agent for Claude now? Like you work for Claude?

• 0:38Doug O'Laughlin?

  I do actually. I think I mostly just move my information back and forth, you know? I have, I have pretty much, like, I think of it as like my manager, you know? Like, it tells me what to do, and then I go bring the information, and I bring it to my coworkers, I bring it back. All day, I'm just on Claude Code.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  How many, how many prompts are you running right now?

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Do you have any threads going?

• 1:04Doug O'Laughlin?

  Okay, so...

• 1:08Doug O'Laughlin?

  I have, I have seven, I have seven threads.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Seven that are running right now, or?

• 1:13Doug O'Laughlin?

  No, no, not running, not running right now.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Waiting for your input.

• 1:15Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for my input.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  We'll let you get back to it in two seconds.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you just have an eighth that just manages?

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Let's talk about, yeah, orchestration. Have you played with Gastown? Are you thinking about abstracting yourself to a higher level?

• 1:28Doug O'Laughlin?

  Ooh, okay, so Gastown is, um, it's pretty intense. I don't think Gastown's gonna work out. I think it's gonna be Agent Swarms.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, explain the difference between Gastown and Agent Swarms.

• 1:41Doug O'Laughlin?

  Okay, so Gastown is probably of the most forward-looking thing I've read in a long, long time. It talks about how you like created this like self-healing tool process to essentially to like pass all these beads across and have like all these workers and like ways to self-repair. The agent workflow process and I read it and I was like, dude, this is brilliant and also fucking crazy. It's like, it feels like the ravings of a bad man. And then I proceeded, well, I was also in my bad man era. Like before, before the new years, when you had two X times usage, I pretty much was like, literally railing Claude code constantly. I think I had, I think I had four 14 hour days.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, yeah, it was, it was beautiful.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  It was beautiful. Okay. So talk to us about what you're actually building because, uh, you know, we're, we're talking about SaaS apocalypse. It feels like there's a debate over build, rebuild all your tools from scratch to save whatever your SaaS fees are.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And even yesterday was notable, OpenAI comes out with Frontier.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is, you look at like, you gotta look at this like graphic, which feels like it was made for, you know, a Fortune 500 CEO to kind of, or management team to kind of understand it. And it's like, here's more SaaS to replace your other SaaS, right? It's like, you know, you've got the system of record down here. You have a bunch of agents in between and then you've got different applications that you're using. And meanwhile, Anthropic's just like, we're making a really smart digital guy that can do whatever you want.

• 3:11Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. So I think the two, there's like two really interesting ways. I think OpenAI is like the Fortune 500, selling it from the top, if that makes sense. And then, uh, Anthropic is like, here's my, here's your Claude code agent, sell 20,000 of them. Did you see the, the Accenture partnership? I think that's really interesting. So like, if you're, if you go back, uh, there's, they're doing 30,000 people at Accenture.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  What do you mean?

• 3:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  To like 30, 30,000 people at Accenture are going to learn how to Claude code.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  And then be, and then be deployed into different companies.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Doug O'Laughlin?

  Who knows? Who knows?

• 3:49John Coogan?

  What else would they do?

• 3:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  Maybe they just replace the center. I mean, that's what I, that's what they're going to be doing, I think.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Okay. Wait, so, yeah. So we're, we're, we're, what do you mean replace? If Accenture folks are using Claude code, wouldn't they be using it on consulting projects internally to companies?

• 4:04Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I, I think they're going to be using it internally. Uh, as my, no, so they're going to be using internally and then they're going to be doing all these consulting things. Because if you think about it, one of the issues is like,

• 4:16Doug O'Laughlin?

  You know, when you had SaaS, one of the biggest issues of like changing from one CRM to another was effectively being like, hey, everyone, you have to quit your jobs for like 10 months to figure this out. The implementation, like you'd have tons and tons of like consultants do that. And I think that that's what the Accenture partnership is. So essentially, like, people are going to be implementing Claude code, and there's 30,000 people at Accenture who's going to do it. And then on the other side, you have Frontier, which is like the Fortune 500 way of being like, here's your plan, come to us, and we'll build this whole thing, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  But is re-implementing your CRM really the lowest hanging fruit for America's greatest companies? It can't possibly, there must be new ideas, new problems to solve, new tools to build. Like, why are we just going to shuffle the chips around the board instead of like doing something productive?

• 5:06Doug O'Laughlin?

  Okay, so I think the system of record refresh is going to be really awesome because, you know, like the big, I mean, it honestly does feel kind of boomer if you think about it, it's like the biggest data now. Everyone can have the big data now. But I think the automation that you've always dreamed of is actually going to happen, and the system of record is just going to essentially have hooks out to all these other things that are going to build on top of it, which is mostly like, you know, the Frontier thing. And essentially, like, all the information work is just going to be like, all on the agent, and everything else is going to be like, place where it lives and is stored for Fonzie's. So, instead of me having someone, let me use my personal stack as semi analysis, we use HubSpot, for example.

• 5:48Doug O'Laughlin?

  So, hey, the sales this quarter, we need this like quota, or who did what, or what products are selling better, or like, you know, what's the

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  How many more podcasts should Dylan do this month? If we want to hit our goal?

• 6:01Doug O'Laughlin?

  That's totally different. We don't actually have like our, like, you know, the big, yeah, sure, how many more podcasts, shit like that, right? I could just vibe code it. I was just like, hey, can you run this analysis for me? And in a perfect futuristic world, it'll go into the CRM, pull all the information of the, all of our inbounds, make, be like, hey, the day after Dylan goes on a podcast, there's like 25 people who, who come in, the conversion rate is X, you could price it at this, Dylan, quit your, you know, stop working and effectively just like hit the podcast.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 6:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  You know, like, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so You could do this with anything, though. Like, it's just information, man. Like, it's, it's, it's gonna be pretty sick. But I think all the SaaS companies are going to essentially just become hooks for all the crap they built on top of it.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, did you see Jensen yesterday was, was kind of defending some companies like SAP and ServiceNow and saying, hey, if I was a, if I was a really smart humanoid out doing work in the world and I needed a screwdriver, would I just invent a new screwdriver? Or would I just take one off the shelf? And so that was like his defense. Tyler here was, took, took the other side of it and just said, there's gonna be a lot of situations where, especially in a software-only environment, it's easier to just build a very specific workflow that you need, that you would have gotten from a SaaS provider versus, you know, you don't need to actually rebuild the entire platform.

• 7:29Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, I think we're gonna be building a lot of screwdrivers. Like, things, like, the thing that's important is like, okay, you're not gonna rent a truck, right? Like, you're not gonna build your own truck, but your own screwdriver, 100%. Like, like, you're doing this big ginormous job. You need a hammer. You'd be like, okay, pull it out of my belt, okay? But you're not gonna be like, I'm about to move 700 tons of, like, here to here. I need to rent a truck. You're, you're not gonna build the truck. And so that's what I think the system of records are gonna look like. They're gonna look like places where, like, actual data that cannot be like, like, cannot be vibed effectively, like, what's your inventory cannot have any fucking hallucinations, right? Like, your ERP, but all of that will just be hooks for everything else.

• 8:12Doug O'Laughlin?

  Because like, all the information is just like polling, retrieving, making the correlation, running the charts, like, people make mistakes in that all the time.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  But then, but then, how do you square the fact that a system of record is way less sticky if you have agents that can work around the clock to switch you over to a different system of record? Like, that still ends up putting massive pricing pressure.

• 8:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  So, so to be clear, I don't think it's good for everyone. Like, I think, uh, my, my, my favorite analogy of this is like, there actually is a very old school type of software that's like existed for a long time. Uh, all the shit on mainframes. It's all, it's all out there. Yeah. Um, and you know, like funny enough, mainframes still grew like six percent a year or whatever. Someone has the real number from like 2002 to 2020.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 8:58Doug O'Laughlin?

  So like, they're, they're gonna grow, but it's just gonna be like a very different vision of the world that I don't think people are ready for.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, and, and the adjustment period is the big problem because all the stocks are priced like they're not gonna be mainframes and, and also just for context, mainframes, there's like, hey, there's one of each company now.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Doug O'Laughlin?

  There's not, there's not like 10.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:20Doug O'Laughlin?

  There's one each.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I think with all these, all these, whether you're a system of record or you're, you know, some vertical software, you're gonna need to show insane revenue growth in a truly AI native product. Otherwise, investors, I think, are gonna continue to not be able to create a super compelling narrative, why, why you should own it during this period of uncertainty.

• 9:44Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. Um, I mean, pretty much what happens, and we're gonna go like investor brain, when anything goes X growth, uh, the multiple goes massively down.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 9:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  Eight times earnings.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit more about what you're actually coding, what you're building, like what the software is? Because it, from the demos that I've seen that you've posted, it feels much more like you have an agent that can do knowledge retrieval, data transformation, build dashboards, charts and, and like knowledge work as opposed to truly replacing software tools at this point. But do you, have you built anything that's like long-lived and, and runs like daily or is like something you keep revisiting because it's now a piece of software that does the job?

• 10:30Doug O'Laughlin?

  So, the Claude code commits, the Claude code commits is now software that lives and runs every single day.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  That's like a scraper, right? And then like that, that like lives in a database and that, that will run forever. There's like a lot of other tracking price data tool stuff, like a lot of the scraping that we're like. That is not like publicly available, like we do like a lot of that, like we had a data team just do that. And now effectively, we can like really accelerate that. So everyone could do that.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 10:57Doug O'Laughlin?

  There are other like little things that I think are like heuristics, like little skills of like I have blind spots that I consistently make over and over. And I'm like, hey, I know this blind spot's an issue, but well, you should like consider this in this case. I don't think it's like the galaxy brain software and we're very far from there because if you actually play with these tools a lot, context rot is real. Yeah. So.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  I that is, is, but it is, how fast is it getting better? Because it feels like we're seeing the meter graph.

• 11:27Doug O'Laughlin?

  Scary fast.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Scary fast, right?

• 11:28Doug O'Laughlin?

  Scary, scary, scary. So I started vibe coding with Claude four. And it just wasn't, or sorry, Opus four on Claude code. And it just could not one-shot websites in the way that 4.5 and 4.6 can. And if it just marginally improves from here, it feels like, why would I pay for like any kind of UI UX? If it's just going to be generated at a good enough quality.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you process the new models this week? Four, six, five, three? What's the review?

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  If you don't, if you can't immediately notice the difference between four, five and four, six, start polishing your resume. You are cooked.

• 12:09Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. Yeah. You just got automated by an agent.

• 12:15Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, I think four, six was a little disappointing, if we're honest with you.

• 12:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think it might've been Sonnet five.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Oh, that's what people are saying. That's the conspiracy theory, right? But what does that mean?

• 12:30Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, the original Sonnet five leaks were that it's like as good as Opus 4.5, but with 1 million context window. And specifically trained for Asian swarms.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Sure. So, well, yeah, but does that just mean like same quality, but faster, cheaper, at least for Anthropic?

• 12:46Doug O'Laughlin?

  And then they, and they make more money.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Better margins. How are the margins looking for the, the labs right now? There's been, there was a bunch of like FUD around it, but it seems like from all the leaks, it's been like 50, 60, 70% pretty good.

• 12:58Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. If you X all the free users, it's always really good, right? Honestly, Anthropic has no free users or like on a relative basis. So their margins are ironically like, like kind of on a like to like basis, kind of not as good as you think.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Can you break down a little bit more of the thesis of the Claude code is an inflection point article, what the key takeaway, who you're speaking to, what update you wanted to share, and then I want to go into some of the pushback and your response to that.

• 13:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, sure. So first, I think the thing that makes me really excited is the first time since Shana thought, I feel like we have a new scaling that feels very, very different and hardcore, and I can actually see my entire life day to day change. I think I can expect some version of a Claude code harness to be effectively all my information work from now till the future. I am a daily user. I was not a daily user before, and I expect to continue to be one.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  And that's kind of what happened with the reasoning models. It went from like, you could ask it stuff, but it might hallucinate to like, the answers are good. Like, you can pretty much rely, and there's going to be citations, and like, it's going to be 99.999% like percent like usable for things. So if you just have a question, you get that. It may be not great at certain things, but in general, like, it delivered on the initial like chat experience that I think a lot of people were looking for. And then they became D A users. Yeah.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think Anthropic cares more about winning in consumer than they've led on to date?

• 14:41Doug O'Laughlin?

  No, I don't think so. Everyone, everyone who works there is exactly like, like what you think it is. They're exactly who they say they are.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Their software singularity pilled.

• 14:55Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. And then I think cowork is what they're really excited about.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Sure. Makes sense. Yeah. What was this pushback?

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  So they're not even, they're not even, they're not even thinking about a scenario where a bunch of people are using Claude in the work, in a work setting and say, hey, this is pretty great. And yeah, Chat G P T has ads. I'm happy to pay 20 bucks a month. I'll use it personally. Because I just think there's like an iPhone, like, I think the game to get to like 3 billion users is like over, when you just look at the traction of like Gemini and Chat G P T and the fact that norm, normal people aren't caring that much about the nuance. Maybe that don't have that much to automate in their life. But there's like an iPhone sized market. Like, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone to launch. And it's possible, like, when I see this, like, When I see this, like, the the Super Bowl ad, the sort of like trust nuke, I was calling it,

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  right? Just like, hey, like, it's really funny. They're like, you know, rage baiting OpenAI, but at the same time, they're just destroying like trust around ads and LLMs potentially, like permanently, right? Because people, even when they start seeing ads that are more like display ads, they'll start thinking, well, like, was the result influence too? You know, it just like, it hurts the trust. And so I think there, I think my my theory is that any product that like really catches on in the workplace could very well trickle over into into life. And Anthropic could someday have a pretty big, you know, they could have like a Netflix sized subscriber base for people that just want an ad free AI experience.

• 16:27Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, that sounds completely right to me.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  But but you're saying for your point is like, it's just secondary to them. They're like, it's a nice to have, but like, we don't, that's not, that's not our intention.

• 16:38Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think, okay, so singularity pill, but I also, I think you have to pay for the singularity, and I think it's going to be enterprise that does it.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Hmm, makes sense.

• 16:45Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the other, the other take on like, you could wind up being like the Apple and like the premium, you know, privacy focused, or you could wind up being like the DuckDuckGo, which was like, yeah, it was a counter to Google, but it never got to any meaningful scale, right?

• 17:00Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, but I still think I still think OpenAI is the Apple. Like, like, Apple was synonymous with smartphones when it really took off. Like, like, what is the other smartphone?

• 17:11John Coogan?

  BlackBerry, Nokia, yeah.

• 17:12Doug O'Laughlin?

  Maybe you can argue this is like a BlackBerry. Yeah, I can't name it. Yeah. Well, like BlackBerry, right? It was known for work.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  And then obviously, like, it swapped over. So I still think OpenAI is like the cognitive reference. And honestly, 5.3 cooks.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Faster or just better? Or both?

• 17:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  Faster and better.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Faster and better. Okay, talk about 5.2 token efficiency. Rune was pushing back on the article, saying, you make it, you're making the assertion that 5.2 token efficiency ruins long horizon planning. And yet, 5.2 tops the meter chart for long horizon planning. Half baked. What's the explanation?

• 17:55Doug O'Laughlin?

  Didn't someone completely mock that argument? But he's kind of a, he's like, sorry, I gotta find the guy. But it's like,

• 18:04Doug O'Laughlin?

  I don't know what task is being done here. Like, is, are, are they the same hardness?

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:11Doug O'Laughlin?

  Did you just spam it to infinity and like you finished like a sufficiently long task to completion? Versus like, um, like, okay, let's just say we have two kids taking the SAT and one does a better job and finishes first. And one does like almost as good of a job and took seven times this long. And you're like, wow, that one's a smart kid.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  No, dude, that doesn't make any sense.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. An elegant solution delivered faster is uniformly better.

• 18:40Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 18:42Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. And so if you spam more tokens like, and you win and you're like, oh, look, I mobbed them. And it's like, dude, what if you just use less tokens?

• 18:50John Coogan?

  I think the benchmark is supposed to be for, for, they, they have, they have a reference class of, of projects that are supposed to take X amount of time. They would take a human developer six hours and then they have all the models, uh, compete. And if you can compete the six hour task, then you get put at the six hour mark. It's not, did you run for six hours? It, it, it's, so, so, so it could be like implement a CRM product or, you know, write a very complicated, you know, database or something. It would take, you know, a, a, a talented software developer, six hours, two hours, one hour, and they have different tasks. And then you're trying to climb that hurdle.

• 19:27Doug O'Laughlin?

  Oh, yeah. And then it's, it, it, okay, it climbs higher and higher.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  I, I think, I think that's loosely, it, it, it's because, because obviously you could just say, okay, just reasoning count to one billion and just go as slow as, and it works for days. And that's not impressive.

• 19:40Doug O'Laughlin?

  I also think the meter, the, yeah, I mean, it's, okay. So, yeah, you're right. The, the different, the scaling thing, but like, okay. So one, the other thing I was doing, like now that we have vibe coding available to everyone, you can just have it do the same task and do like ABC. Like I, I've been doing like a lot of internal benchmarking, like everyone could benchmark guys like, um, dude, Codex 5.2 took so long and just never built for me. And it's like, all the Codex hype during, like, it just never worked for me, man. Like it never, it never one shot projects like Opus 4.5 did. And I'm just like, this feels like complete foot. Um, but that being said. Codex 5.3 cooks. Like, I think I take everything back about 5.2 for 5.3.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Nice. Total reversal. Classic AI narrative, just day by day, complete switching of the narrative. Talk about the NPM downloads, because you said that you're now scraping them every day, trying to understand how many commits on GitHub are related to Claude code. And the pushback from Ruin was that this counts NPM downloads as authoritative when Claude code numbers are hugely inflated, because GitHub Actions does automatic Claude code download every time continuous integration CI runs versus Codex Compute Cloud. So maybe it's not apples to apples. What's more nuance on the fast takeoff of Claude code? Because honestly, when you said 20% of commits by the end of the year, I was like, that feels extremely low.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  I would expect like 70%, and I would expect Codex to be at 30%, and no more human commits, because it's working.

• 21:12Doug O'Laughlin?

  So I wanted to make sure we have like a high standard, like a high 95% plus. I don't think, like, sure, if it continues to grow on a week-on-week basis, like, yeah, it's like, you know, 100% by June or something like that.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Well, there's also the fact that, like, you could be writing code and still just like, almost be using Claude code as like your linter, or like your interface to GitHub. And if there's an abstraction layer there that people adopt, you're going to see the commits go through the roof, even if they're still human in the loop meaningfully.

• 21:42Doug O'Laughlin?

  Look, look, look, look. I'm not going to pretend like the Claude code commits thing is like the cleanest way ever. There's a lot of ways, there's a lot of ways to fuck the data up. For example, people who use, who, you could just say, don't do this, and won't do it. Number two, like, private on a ratio is like five times bigger. That matters way more. And then, like, I also think that, like, the way you consume it, like, this doesn't count for cursor. People have been clearly using AI for like a long while. It doesn't show up. This is just the example I can like say, like, hey, chart goes up really quickly.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's still cool.

• 22:17Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's not perfect. It's a dataset that I create in a relatively short amount of time. Yeah, I'm like, whoa, seems pretty cool.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it is.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  We're talking about Amazon?

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, let's move over to hyperscalers.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Reaction was the number two low.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They're not taking it seriously. Yeah.

• 22:37Doug O'Laughlin?

  20 billion was crazy. That was crazy to me.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Okay, why?

• 22:40Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, that was really shocking. You know, we do a lot of data center tracking and we do a lot of accelerated tracking and we were too up.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Okay, are they, are they, are they trying to play some sort of hype game where they're throwing out the biggest number and they're not actually even going to be able to buy enough equipment to spend it, even if they are signaling to the market, we're going to be hearing like, well, we wanted to buy this many Nvidia chips, but we couldn't get them, or we have a delay at this data center because of regulation. And so they're just trying to project strength because they're sort of behind on the AI narrative a little bit. They don't have the big position that Microsoft does in OpenAI. They don't have, you know, a deep mind level team. And so they're saying, we're going to go biggest on the dollar front, but then maybe they don't deliver on it. Or do you think at the end of the year, we'll be like, yeah, they spent 200 billion?

• 23:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think at the end of the year, they're going to be like, yeah, they spent 200 billion.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 23:37Doug O'Laughlin?

  They, they are the single biggest provider of power in the entire world, I think. Like the incremental and the AWS like supply chain can ramp a lot quicker than anyone else. And every, every example that we track in the data center, like the data center team, they are on time and can scale to like levels that are crazy.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Doug O'Laughlin?

  Like Reneer's ramp is just like out of this world fast compared to everyone else. Every other gigawatt project is essentially delayed and they're going to be like ish on time.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Wow. So isn't that extremely just like good for Amazon? Like they're properly positioned, they're properly transitioning, like they, yeah, like who knows what happens to the rest of this, but eventually this thing is just like part of the.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  We were talking earlier, like Jassy didn't exactly paint this like incredibly exciting vision and share like, hey, we, you guys are actually underestimating demand. Still, even if you're bullish on AI, you're underestimating demand and we're in a position to actually try to get a more accurate read here and that's why we're investing.

• 24:41Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. And it's funny because they could have said one thing that would have made the AWS call better and they'd be like, yeah, we see high twenties and like the stock would have ripped. But they're like, we continue to project to see this level of growth.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  What percentage, what percentage of the 200 billion do you think will actually flow to Nvidia? Because Nvidia is rallying today. That's why we're wearing white suits, but it didn't rally immediately in after hours.

• 25:08Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think a meaningful amount. I definitely cannot disclose what semi analysis thinks.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  But I think they're gonna run out of trainium and the answer is like, what's the biggest amount of supply chain? That's like locked up. It's it's it's Nvidia.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Can you get Macron a free semi analysis plan? Cause he came out this week with his big new initiative, thirty million euros for AI research. France is gonna be the home of of research.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  How do you think all the hyperscalers will respond?

• 25:44Doug O'Laughlin?

  You you know what's crazy is people have been trying to do a lot of work in France for a long time because they have this giant nuclear nuclear power plant. Yeah, it's kind of stranded. And no one uses it and like everyone wants to be like, dude, I can get a gigawatt here. And then they like try to start building. And they're just like, yeah, this is never gonna happen. I'm just gonna go back to the United States, even though United States is like all fucked up. It's like, I can I can start there. And they're like, no, no, no, we'll start in like five years.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Doug O'Laughlin?

  And I can think of two specific projects that essentially did the same thing where it's like, oh, my God, all this France data center power. And then like they started and like, never mind.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Why do you think Grok is climbing the charts right now? Any any insight? It's like number three after get free cash and after chat GPT in the overall app store.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  The iOS app store.

• 26:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  I dude, actually, one, this tells you how locked in I've been with Claude code. I had no idea.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  You're so locked in with Claude researching the AI race that you.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  It's just, yeah, it's just interesting. I mean, I, I, you know, the the app store is based on like acceleration, but you know, the the Grok hype cycle of like, you know, let's push all the Twitter users or the X users there. Like that sort of already happened. Like, I don't know how this is happening because there isn't much hype about.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's happening. Yeah, it's happening off X.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And a lot of people were like, yeah, like you can talk to Ani and Valentine, but like, is that really popular? Might be.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Ani singular.

• 27:16Doug O'Laughlin?

  The real singularly lonely people.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Doug O'Laughlin?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 27:21Doug O'Laughlin?

  I I did see a video of like the Stormlight Archive thing, and that I feel like like hit a broader audience in terms of video generation. And I think video generation like that always kind of wins.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  We actually did an analysis.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is why you you need to be bullish on the Disney OpenAI deal.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 27:40Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, you have to be.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  We we've seen we've seen the Nano Banana bump.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  With Gemini.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  You and and this feels like it could be on an entirely different level.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Doug O'Laughlin?

  Well, you know, my favorite thing is Gemini wasn't what actually like made it rip. It was Nano Banana.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Doug O'Laughlin?

  Like, the ratio like really improved in terms of OpenAI to Gemini.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:02Doug O'Laughlin?

  Uh, like way before, and then like Gemini like slightly helped, but I would say it's like ninety percent is Banana Banana.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. You can you. Yeah, you can just share an image, and it's immediately apparent what is going on. It's a unique capability that you can't get anywhere else. They've cornered the market specifically on like the image editing, not just the diffusion, but the like being able to take a photo, change the background and have it actually look like your face or have the text look great. Like, it was it was a unique, unique product, really, beyond a model.

• 28:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. Oh, oh, this is, by the way, this is my final steaming hot take and code.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Please.

• 28:38Doug O'Laughlin?

  The reason why you should actually pay attention so much is because this is the first time, like, image models essentially always gain share, video models always gain share, like Studio Ghibli moment, and then obviously ChatGPT. This is the first like new moment.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 28:54Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's an a new modality, being the agent, and it's like actually kicking off.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, how how important do you think the cowork, like the desktop app, mobile functionality is to that? Because like the you could have, you could have truly magic.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  Chat has some insight. A lot of people using Grok video to compete for a one million dollar contract.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  It's free money.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  You have.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Free money.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so it's free cash and then free money. The the top two apps in the top three give you cash. Uh, that is a good fact check. Thank you, chat.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, my my question about like, like, can you have a Studio Ghibli like moment? If you have to open up a terminal, just because there are so many normies that would just will never open the terminal, no matter how magical the, you know, AI god is behind the terminal. It's just too much to go type one line of command.

• 29:45Doug O'Laughlin?

  That's why cowork and Codex are gonna like probably be what actually happens. I think it's really fun to like play around in the like whatever 1% adopter. And I'm really enjoying it, but I just don't think.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Doug O'Laughlin?

  Like, like, yeah, it's gonna be coworker Codex and Codex is actually pretty good. Codex is, I think, a slightly more polished experience than cowork.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, last question for me. Take me on the journey of what's going on with Microsoft. What you predicted, the, the, how that's changed, what how their strategy has changed. Like, give me the, the proper way to understand Microsoft these days.

• 30:21Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, Microsoft's not in the race, bro.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Why?

• 30:24Doug O'Laughlin?

  Where, where are they? They, they, I know, but they're getting owned.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  They have all of the IP. I, I, I don't, I agree with you. I don't understand why it's not like, oh, 5.3 launches. Microsoft's announcing it the same day and it's actually integrated and people are using it like on day one. It takes time.

• 30:40Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's a skill issue.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's clearly something's going on. And, and honestly, the thing that makes me most bearish that is the fact that Satya is like, I'm not the CEO now. I'm the, I'm the product manager of Copilot because I'm so boned if I don't get this figured out. Like, you could argue it is the mo, it is now existential. He's decided like, hey, that my CEO job is getting this one thing right. Otherwise we're screwed and that is, um, kinda worrying.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  It does feel like they could potentially, it feels like Google all over again.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  The pullback at the beginning of last year, kind of the, the, the, the quick pause is now looking silly in the context of Amazon coming in now and saying, yeah, we're, everybody's on board now.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 31:25Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I think, um, they have the most to lose.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  What about GPU utilization? Brad Gersner was hosting CNBC today, which was very cool. Uh, talking about how, you know, in the dot com build out, the, the dark fiber was something only like 7% of fiber that was being laid was actually being used. It was like obvious even at the time that. And yet now we're seeing GPU utilization rates, you know, maxed out.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, I think that's a pretty good counterpoint to anyone who's like, ah, whatever. Like, at this point, H100 pricing has massively firmed up. B200 pricing definitely has super firmed up. And like, hey, there's clearly demand. I mean, you know, whatever they're doing on the other side of it, that's like, that's the customers' issues. But like, I mean, I still think, like, honestly, man, the Codex, or sorry, my brain's on something. Claude Code has been the most magical moment in technology for me in like my entire time, I think.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Doug O'Laughlin?

  It just feels awesome, man.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Since the Game Boy.

• 32:39Doug O'Laughlin?

  Dude, this is better than Game Boys for me. I'm an information addict, though.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Doug O'Laughlin?

  I am, so.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us and writing about it and everything that you do. If you're listening, go pop on Semi Analysis.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Sign up for the 10 million a year plan. You get Doug's phone number, you can text him.

• 33:01Doug O'Laughlin?

  You actually can, actually.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  You should just do it, though.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, and it's underpriced. You're giving it away. It's taking away your time from your, all your different agents, so you gotta price it.

• 33:13Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, you're right. That's right, you know, my manager will hate that.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a good rest of your day. Have a good weekend. We'll talk to you soon.