Anthropic-OpenAI war, Walmart hits $1T, Gas Town & Vibecoding | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  We're doing a Super Bowl ad.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  Ramp is in our Super Bowl ad.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  Ramp's in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl, just a couple of days away. This was a very fun project. Do you want to take us through the thesis and sort of what we put together with this? Since I just got all the credit, but I had nothing to do with it, basically. There was a very nice post from Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic. And he said, "There's clever and then there's John Coogan and Jordy Hayes at TBPN clever. Behold, a masterclass in marketing and I had nothing to do with it and I get the credit."

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was, of course, Dylan on our team led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. We had done something similar back at Party Round. We ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, et cetera. Did really well. And so doing this is the final stage in terms of advertising. The 15 second spot isn't selling anything. It's simply what co-host Jordy Hayes calls a love letter to our community. That's really what it is. TBPN is nothing without the community, the people that join the show. We made the 15 second spot in-house. We featured a bunch of our guests. And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for five minutes or five hours, your logo made it in here.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, this will be a, doing it a regional buy. We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was and we bought segments around that. So very excited for Sunday. And I said in Adweek, "It's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising. The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally just through the content. So why do it? We believe in doing things purely for fun." So we're certainly having fun.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Some people screenshotted that and texted me that. I thought that was a good quote. There was another reason beyond fun. I do think it's an important opportunity to introduce the football community to technology, to business. And that's really, that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully let people know, if you're watching the Super Bowl, technology, it exists.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  We got to raise awareness for technology and business. Let's play the ad.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test. It's a great question.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  I think it's super important and awesome.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  This is going to be one of 100 baggers. You guys are the number one podcast in the world.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  The gong hit. This is great.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Short, sweet, and we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage because we're not the only ones running ads? Lots of tech people are coming out.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild, wild morning.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took, the vibe war was like effectively relegated to X.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it just felt like the same 100,000 people saying, it's so over, we're so back, it's so over, we're so back. Uh, they're taking it to the main stage, right? And it shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at OpenAI.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  But he's, he's not taking direct shots.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Not direct shots.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  He's always.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  And this arguably is not a direct shot either. They just said ads are coming to AI.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  The clot.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you're right.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  But truthfully, like a lot of the previous Anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane. Uh, they've run a number of campaigns that have been sort of above the crowd.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  We're just thinking.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Thinking or your thought partner. This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, they, I think, uh, we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think, I think they probably did.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  They've definitely been watching some, some height, uh, looks maxing.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  Should we just play all four ads?

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Let's play, let's play at least one of them. We gotta play the height maxing one. That one's particularly funny.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you were saying earlier off the show, you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against that.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I, I, I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads. The Anthropic attack on advertising, it does cross the line for me. It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  The first ad is, can I get a six pack quickly?

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, this one I immediately thought, okay, they're definitely not just watching clavicular, they're studying.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Apparently. Let's watch it.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  I was not expecting this to be the looks maxing Super Bowl. Let's play it.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, I was gonna say violation.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  It starts out by just saying violation.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan?

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Perfect. Let me personalize this for you.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  The lag, the slight delay?

• 4:34John Coogan?

  This is a whole meme on Instagram reels. People will do impressions of ChatGPT voice mode, like this. 140 pounds.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength training.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Pause for a second. Like, the slight delay?

• 4:49John Coogan?

  It is iconic.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Is so good.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  And clearly, this was written with ChatGPT.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I'm like, like, it's designed to sound like it was, like, it's, it sounds exactly like, got it. I'll create a personalized plan.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  I don't think that's actually how ChatGPT sounds. I think, in fact, when I've watched the Instagram reels, they, they do the ChatGPT impression and it's, it's a little more, like, this is written for comedy. And so the fact that he says, what did he say? Absolutely twice in a row, like, that's something that ChatGPT would do.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Isn't just built in the gym. Try Step Boost Max. The insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short kings stand tall.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  What?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Use code HEIGHTMAXING10 for big discounts.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude is a good ad. The height maxing thing is so crazy.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action?

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  That was probably intentional, because if they're anti-ad.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  It's like, you know, you Google Claude and you land on the ad.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. It's just truly the irony of being anti-ad and then just spending. How much do you think they're, they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them. This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Somebody ran the numbers and if they did all, if they aired all four, it would be something like $80 million or something. I don't think that they're gonna run all four. That seems like a lot. Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know. $80 million seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raise tens of billions. So, you know, it's possible, but that feels like, that feels aggressive.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  There's also bulk discounting.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Again, they could do, they could choose to do regional.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well? NBC sells both, so we could see a rerun of these or another buy later.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Olympics has way less. It's insane. I mean, it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  As the ads, the ads that are coming to chat GPT are effectively display ads, right? Everybody in the industry by now should know this, yet this, this campaign implies that the ads will influence the response and that you cannot trust it.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  And so it's, it's fair game.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  But it's, it's like, it's like dirty.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little bit, it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. It, it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just going to wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase, no matter what you're looking at.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  At some point, I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Like if you search yerba mate.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  What yerba mate should I get?

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  It might show you like what it thinks you should get. And then separately, it will have like, here's also another ad.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Where, where, where you see a sponsored, you know, result and it's flagged and there's a little ad, ad tag or slightly different background color. And people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects, you know, ads as they roll out in chat GPT to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be. But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI, they don't say chat GPT. This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  And it feels like it's a shot at you and it's sort of a, it's sort of a champagne problem. Let's pull up the next one.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  How do I communicate better with my mom?

• 8:33John Coogan?

  They went off with this.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Great question. Improved 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 points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity. Perhaps a nature walk. Or 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-

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  This feels so off-brand.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  For Anthropic?

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, they haven't been like a funny, edgy brand.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  It's not classy.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's, it's... I'm not saying, I'm not saying it wasn't a good move.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  It feels, it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. Like, if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, okay. But yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them. It's, yeah, it is a little...

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Low-class and vulgar.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  It's spicy. It's, yeah.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  All right, pull up the next one.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Deception.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  So, what do you think?

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Absolutely. That's such a fun and creative business idea. You've got something really special here. Getting started can feel daunting. I can make a step-by-step mini-business plan. Do you want me to do that? Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Here's some steps you can take. One, research. Really get to know your audience. Two, think of a catchy name and start your social presence early. Three, new businesses often struggle with cash flow. So try quick-payday loans, because girl bosses need CEO money quick.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  400% APR rates may vary, possibly doubling or tripling without notice. What? Would you like to make a quick credit check?

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly well played and incredibly dirty.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's the worst possible outcome in an ads world, but so easily avoidable. And OpenAI has been messaging, they would not do this for ages. And they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like they've been beating the drum on this for a long time that clearly they will gate. Who is allowed to advertise, what the context is, how these ads will be displayed.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  There's a, there's a million.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Apple, IBM.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, yeah, I'm a Mac guy. Yeah.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  And, and none of them were as direct.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  The 1984 ad was saying like IBM is authoritarian dictator. It's like so aggressive.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  But still, it wasn't as, as like the timing here is a big factor, right? Right when the ads are rolling out, just like really muddying the water.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Obviously, OpenAI is gonna do, is gonna do fine.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  But this really makes their life a lot harder.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  That one was also funny because she's like, absolutely. And that's what like Claude usually says, like when the, you're absolutely right. That's like a Claudeism.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  That's a Claudeism.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's not ChatGPT.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  What is, what does ChatGPT usually say?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't know if there's like specific phrases exactly like that.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, it's not this, it's that. And I didn't hear that coming through.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  It's interesting. I don't know. Do you think these are gonna be effective?

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's a question. So, so really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently top, crack the top 25 of the iPhone app.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  In consumer, in consumer.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer? Or is this purely to piss off OpenAI and make their life harder?

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like there's a world where there's, where there's business leaders.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, is this like, like somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to like trip them? That's kind of what it feels like.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  It does feel like vibe.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  It feels like consumer is so far gone.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  I mean, we'll see, we'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll, we'll check the App Store charts and Claude will be up at the top. Because so many people have seen this, they thought it's funny. But it does feel like such inside baseball. Like I bet a lot of AI consumers don't even know that ads are coming.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  But again, they're not even, they're not even pushing, they're not actually trying to push downloads with this. Or they would put a call to action.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, or QR code, like download the app now.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Ad free, ad free AI is here with Claude, like download this, this thing.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  I can see it being beneficial in just terms of preparation for the IPO, right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that aren't aware, that aren't really super aware of Claude, right? They may have heard of Anthropic, that actually aren't really aware of their different products.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  I just think like if you're an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs like into your organization, like you're not worried about the ads product in ChatGPT. You're like, oh yeah, like OpenAI Codex is this quality. Gemini three is good for this and Claude 4.5 is good for this. And like my team will deploy and will look at costs and Pareto curves. It doesn't feel like any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say like, oh, like I couldn't possibly use OpenAI in a business context.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, "Ad-free AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits." Does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads, like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet. Even Spotify, right? Netflix, they always be over, look at Apple, right?

• 14:05John Coogan?

  If the Claude app does go to the top of the App Store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force, like.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  No, it is really funny if you drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits. They try it for a little bit and they're like, eh, like they're not going to notice that the model might be better. They're just going to be like, ah, I'm going back to ChatGPT.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  I want to see what the battle between Mac, Apple and Windows looked like. This is maybe back in 2006, 2009, the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign. It's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on YouTube.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Because they get viruses.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Zintai, you okay? No, I'm not okay.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Because PCs got viruses, Macs didn't. Yeah, there you go.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  In fact, you better, you better stay back because this one's a doozy. That's okay, I'll be fine. No, no, do not be a hero. I'll ask you, there are 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs, so just grab this. I think I got a crash. Hey, if you feel like that'll help. Good.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Is this that far off?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. And I'm a PC too. And I. What?

• 15:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, see, now you can run Mac OS X or Windows on a Mac. So in a way, I'm kind of like the only computer you'll ever need. Ah, touche. Uh, no, I don't think you're using that right. Touche. No, listen, see, you can only say touche if you make a point and I make a counterpoint, you see? So I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff.

• 15:40Speaker 07

  Touche.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  What do you think? I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically, or Microsoft, or Dell. It's like all, it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microsoft. It's not that far off. It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. Like, it definitely fits the Apple brand.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Anthropic's edgy. It's also, it's also a timing thing, where again, they're actively trying to make their, and again, I'm not saying anything of this is, is, is not fair play, technically. But the gloves are, the gloves are off.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like...

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  And there is zero, I will go out now, and say, I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad. It would be insane if they didn't run an ad. It'd be a huge miss opportunity.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Their ad just goes way harder.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Sam calling out Dario by name directly. It's like, "Dario, you suck." Just a diss track.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, mate, yeah, yeah, just a bunch of Sora slop.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, OpenAI, I really doubt can react to this now.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, the right, like, if this had dropped like a couple of weeks ago,

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  they would have been able to say, "Hey, we need to respond to this."

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  But they can't now.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  And then they wind up winning.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Noah in chat has the right word.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  He says it's propaganda. IMO. It really, it really is. Again, they're just kind of calling out the category, being general about it. But they're implying that ads are gonna influence.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  It's fear mongering.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Fear mongering, that, that, that the, that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some slop product.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, they took like Mark Cuban's like main concerns.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  The things that he'd been like, you know, going on and on and on about, that everyone is like, hey dude, you can calm down, like that's not how it's gonna work.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  And then they just like went with his point of view.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, which is a little outdated.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say like, it feels like the, the vibe war is like really heating up, right?

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Like, over the summer, there's talent war.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  It's kind of a cold war.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Right? It's kind of like, okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  And it was all leaks behind the scenes, like Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  And, and there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like, I feel like something has been stolen from us.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and now you're seeing at Davos.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  They were not coming out and saying, yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  At Davos, like Dario is like basically.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  I mean, he's still not saying OpenAI the words, I think.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  But he's saying like, companies are doing ads. There's only one company that's doing ads.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Katie, uh, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back. She says ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than Odd has globally.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Boom. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play, let's play General Motors robot.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Let's play it.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Robot makes a mistake.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  General Motors make cars. You made catalyze.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Okay, robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Gets fired.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Whoever produced this ad is, uh, not, not gonna do well in Singularity. You did not consider Rocco's Vaseline. Oh, sign holding.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Cadillac going by.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, now, now the robot's trying to get a new job.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Okay, robot's working at McDonald's or something.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Robot goes to the bridge.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  This is like, who approved this?

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Robot watches the Chevy's drive by, the General Motors cars, and jumps into the water. And then wakes up?

• 19:21Speaker 08

  The GM 100,000 mile warranty. It's got everyone at GM obsessed with quality.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you run this ad?

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Whoa, so it's saying like, like, we care so much about the 100,000 mile warranty that like, we will end it all if it doesn't, if we don't stand by it.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I'm still confused.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy, yeah.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like, hey, you're, you're, you're effectively advertising like, the darkest thing ever.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, really sad, like, ridiculous. Well, the bar has been lowered, so don't worry.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly, incredibly well played by Anthropic.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  So you think it'll be effective?

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's, I'm not even sure they care about it being effective.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Okay, this is effective. Like, the fact that people are talking about it, the people that, right now, on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Like, they won.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  They're scoring points in Teapot next, and they're able to score some points in the real world and just make, like, senators are gonna see this, be like, that's wrong.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the whole, like, Senator, we sell ads thing in, in Facebook, like, they're stealing your data, that whole thing is like, very like, it's still, it's still a meme, it's still, it's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because, um, advertising is the greatest business model ever. Companies don't want your data. They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers and get money out. That's it. Like, I've run businesses that advertise many times, and I don't want to know anything about these customers. I just want to know they're ready to buy and they're down and, and send them the link. We gotta bring down the mallet from the heavens because we gotta ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1 trillion in market cap as e-commerce booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda Cloud.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Let's understand what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off. Amazon was going to kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see. The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13-figure valuation. Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft. In trading, Walmart stock passed $125 a share. The stock has surged in recent months fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business as well as investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency. Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery and broad selection. The change at Walmart over the past decade culminating with its trillion dollar valuation

• 21:53John Coogan?

  has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen. Walmart's growth along with Amazon's creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas-based company will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Ferner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached 1 trillion are technology focused, even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast. The then-new Walmart CEO Doug McMillan was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores and grow online. Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212 billion at the end of 2016.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. Retail is changing so much, I don't think I understand it as well as I need to, Buffett said. Walmart's sales have since soared propelled by e-commerce, then the pandemic, followed by shoppers' more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of US households. So they've like fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long time.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Youssef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He's a Previously was over at Walmart.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Thanks for leaking it to us.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Socks on X says, nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants, but if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's and they're still the largest.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  That was true back then. He posted this six months ago. I think Elon's way above this now. But I mean, a lot of this, a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We gotta talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this?

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Okay, let's pull, uh, uh, let's pull up the graphic and see.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  That's probably driving.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Stunning and brave.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  That probably adds 600 billion to the market cap, right? I mean.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Easily, easily.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  They really just did a, a slightly bluer, slightly bluer background and they called it a day. Let's go over to Gastown, what I wrote about in today's newsletter. And I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Jordy, you will understand how Gastown works.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  I get it.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Said, Robert says Gastown is the modern day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something that's insane. My theory is like, there's a lot of excitement about this project. You might already be familiar with Gastown. The broader category is called orchestration, how you orchestrate, how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different agents. And Steve Yegi wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed orchestrator. It's, he says, a new take on the IDE. It's called Gastown. Now he's getting one call per day from VCs asking to invest apparently. And so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience and he maps out how this evolved. So, uh, you know, you used to write code in a, in a text file, save it, execute it in a terminal. Then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems, REPLs, et cetera.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Uh, LLM chat windows worked their way into the IDE eventually, uh, with a coding agent, asking you for permission to run tools, run code. Once models got better, developers trusted them more and the IDE sort of melts away. And you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Karpathy has put it, he says, uh, your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because the, you're prompting and then you're just reading the review. And you're saying, okay, yeah, this is going to do what I think it's going to do. We'll, we'll test it. And so the most popular, uh, workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI. So Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI are the most popular. Uh, they all have web and desktop front ends now, but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. Gastown is like way, way more aggressive going.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Fall into vibe coding. So you will die if you don't know what you're doing. It's like very risky. There's tens of thousands of people using this. Some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're maxing out their subscriptions. They're like, I got the 200 a month plan over here. I ran out of rate limit, so I got another one. I got another one. Some of them get flagged for fraud. Like, it is boom time in Gastown. The town is your HQ. This allows you to work on multiple projects. The projects are called rigs. And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer. You're the boss. But you also have a mayor who reports to you, like a chief of staff. That's an agent that you talk to. And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents. They're called like pole cats. These are ephemeral agents that go and do like one

• 26:16John Coogan?

  little thing. And then they write code. That code lands in a merge queue. But then you have another role, another agent called a witness, that oversees all the pole cats to help them get unstuck. And then there's a deacon that goes around patrols the town, finds stuff that's like, needs to be taken out or deleted. There's dogs that do maintenance, like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale. There's a crew that are specific to a particular project. And those are longer lived than pole cats. So if you have like back and forth design work, you'll create a member of the crew who he says you'll love and you'll like develop a relationship with. And you'll be updating their agent workflow and their skills. So that, you know, days later, you can go back to the same

• 26:59John Coogan?

  agent about how you're architecting the app. And it has all the context. Whereas the pole cats are just off doing one little implementation at a time. It's a lot. It's very cool. And it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year. Orchestrators, it feels like these are the next, it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another doubling in the meter software engineering time horizon benchmark. If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy. It used to be a couple minutes, then it became a couple hours. If you set up your Gastown appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work autonomously. Do you have more context on the meter eval? I mean, meter only does LLMs.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not the actual model running for like four hours. It's it's it can do a task that takes people four hours.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. You could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  So basically, if you're working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness pivot to.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Orchestration.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Orchestration.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  It it does feel like it might be like the next hot keyword that we're seeing orchestration, market map orchestration, uh, you know, all sorts of stuff.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  There's there's gonna be a lot of people spending.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Fifteen grand to recreate a game that's sixty bucks.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it. Who knows? We have some breaking news. Sam Altman has responded to the Anthropic ads. He says, first, the good part about the Anthropic ads, they are funny, and I laughed. I like it. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads is that they is that we won't do exactly this. We would never obviously 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 a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  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 because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than than total people use Claude in the United States. So we have a differently shaped problem than they do. Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that. And we are doing that too, but we also but we also feel strongly that that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions. We are committed to broad democratic decision making. In addition to access, we also are committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks is the dark path.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  In general, like, again, I think Sam has to admit that the ads are like pretty entertaining and it's just such a wild move. Unexpected from from Anthropic, given that I'd say like from a brand standpoint, going with like the sort of edgy adult humor was was unexpected.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  We'll see.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, ultimately, it's deceptive. Like, they're trying to mislead people about. OpenAI's ad product.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not corn syrup.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Like, the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  It's fun.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  It's fun.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Plant the bomb. Spotify, podcast, 5 stars, please. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.