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

0:01We're doing a Superbowl ad. Get ready for the Super Bowl ad. Ramp's in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple 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? 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 master class in marketing. And I had nothing to do with it. did not get the credit. Let's go.

0:34This 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 uh that join the show yeah uh 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 uh made it in here so uh yeah this will be a uh doing it a regional buy we basically looked at where the majority of our audience was and we bought segments around that so uh very excited for sunday and i said in ad week, it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising.

1:33The 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 some people screenshot of that and texted me to that. I thought that was a good quote. There was another reason beyond fun. I do think it's an important opportunity to, to introduce the football community to technology, to business. And that's really that that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl. Technology, it exists. We've got to raise awareness for technology and business.

2:03Let's play the ad. Let's see. You're watching TVPN. If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed a test. It's a great question. I think it's super important and awesome. This is going to be one of 100 baggers. You guys are the number one podcast in the world. The gong hit. This is great. Short, sweet, and we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday. 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. Absolutely wild, wild morning. Yes. I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took the vibe war was like effectively relegated to X.

2:42Yeah. It just felt like the same 100 ,000 people saying it's so over, we're so back. It's over, we're so back. 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. But he's not taking direct shots. Not direct shots. He's always... And this arguably is not a direct shot either. I guess he didn't drop a name. They just said ads are coming to AI. Yeah. To Claw. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And anyway, so... But truthfully, like, a lot of the previous anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane.

3:13They've run a number of campaigns that have been... We're just thinking. ...above the crowd. You're just thinking. We're your thought partner. This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry. Clearly, I think we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think they probably did. Well, they've definitely been watching some hype. Yeah, let's just play all four ads. Let's play at least one of them. We got to play the hype maxing one. That one's particularly funny. Yeah, and you were saying earlier off the show, you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against that.

3:45Yes, yes. 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 a line for me. It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy. The first ad is, can I get a six-pack quickly? Okay. And this one I immediately thought, okay, definitely not just watching clavicular. They're studying. Apparently. Let's watch it. I was not expecting this to be the looks-maxing Super Bowl. Let's play it. Yeah, this is a violation. Okay, it starts out by just saying violation.

4:19Yeah. Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan? Yes. Perfect. Let me personalize this for you. The lag? The light delay? This is a whole meme on Instagram reels. People will do impressions of ChachiPT voice mode like this. 140 pounds. Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength training. All right, pause for a second. like the the slight delay it's it is so good yeah and clearly this was written with chat gpt no no no i'm like like it's it's designed to sound like it was like it's it sounds exactly like god i'll create a personalized plan i don't think that's actually how chat gpt sounds i think in fact when i've watched the instagram reels they they do the chat gpt impression and it's it's a little more like this is written for comedy.

5:16And so the fact that he says absolutely, what does he say? Absolutely twice in a row. Like that's something. Isn't just built in the gym. Try step boost max, the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short King stand tall.

5:33What? Use code height, maxing 10 for big discounts. Ads are coming to AI, but not to collide. It's a good ad. The eye-maxing thing is so crazy. So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action? Yeah. That was probably intentional. Well, I mean, call to action is like, you know, you Google Claude and you land on the ad. 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 running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them. This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl. Someone ran the numbers and if they did all, if they aired all four, it would be something like$80 million or something.

6:16I don't think that they're going to 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 raised tens of billions. So, you know, it's possible. But that feels like, that feels aggressive. There's also bulk discounting. Sure. Again, they could do, they could choose to do regional. 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. Yeah. Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand.

6:49Yeah. 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. Oh, sure. As the ads that are coming to Chachibutia effectively display ads. Everybody in the industry by now should know this. Yet this campaign implies that the ads will influence the response and that you cannot trust it. And so it's fair game, but it's like dirty. Yeah, it's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. It wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content.

7:29They'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. At some point, I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted. Like if you search Yerba Mate, what Yerba Mate should I get? It might show you what it thinks you should get. And then separately, it will have like, here's also another ad. Yeah, exactly. Where you see a sponsored result and it's flagged. And there's a little ad tag or slightly different background color. And people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects ads as they roll out in ChatGPT to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be.

8:10But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI. They don't say ChatGPT. This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category, and it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a champagne problem. Let's pull up the next one.

8:30How do I communicate better with my mom? They went off with this. 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 this feels so off-brand for anthropic anthropic yeah they haven't like it's not it's not it's not classy yeah like it's it's i'm not saying i'm not saying it wasn't a good 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 it feels like totally unexplored territory for them it's yeah it is a little low class it's spicy it's spicy it's yeah all right pull up the next one deception so what do you think 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 Yeah.

9:56Absolutely. 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. Whoa. 400 % APR rates may vary, possibly doubling or tripling without notice. What? Would you like to make a quick credit check?

10:29Incredibly well played and incredibly dirty. Yeah. It's the worst possible outcome in an ads world, but so easily avoidable. And OpenAI has been messaging. And I was trying to find... 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. There's a million ways to land. I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from the history of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Apple, and IBM.

11:05Well, yeah, yeah, the I'm a Mac guy. Yeah, the I'm a Mac guy. And none of them were as direct. The 1984 ad was saying, like, IBM is authoritarian dictator. It's, like, so aggressive. But still, it wasn't as, like, the timing here is a big factor, right? Right when the ads were rolling out, just, like, really muddying the water. I don't know. Obviously, OpenAI is going to do fine. But this really makes their life a lot harder. That one was also funny because she's like, absolutely. And that's what, like, Claude usually says. You're absolutely right. That's, like, a Claude. That's a Claude-ism. Yeah, that's not ChatGPT.

11:43What does ChatGPT usually say? I don't know if there's, like, specific. Phrase is exactly like that. 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. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know. Do you think these are going to be effective? Well, that's the question. So really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently crack the top 25 of the iPhone X. In consumer. Right. 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? Yeah. Like there's a world where there's business leaders.

12:16like 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 it does feel like vibe i feels like consumers so far gone 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 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.

12:45Yeah. Or QR code, like download the app now. Yeah. Ad-free AI is here with Claude. Like download this thing. 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 might have heard of Anthropic, but they actually aren't really aware of their different products. 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.

13:25Gemini 3 is good for this. And Baud 4.5 is good for this. And like my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and Pareto curves. It doesn't feel like any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say, oh, I couldn't possibly use OpenAI in a business context. Gabe says, AdFreeAI 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?

14:01Netflix, they always be over. Yeah. Look at Apple, right? If the Cloud app does go to the top of the app store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force. No, it is really funny if you drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits. Sure. They try it for a little bit and they're like, hey, like they're not going to notice that the model might be better. They're just going to be like, I'm going back to ChatGPT. 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.

14:37It's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch the first one. It's on YouTube. Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. Action! Action! Because they get viruses. You okay? No, I'm not okay. Because PC's got viruses, Mac's didn't. I have that virus that's coming around. Yeah, there it goes. Oh, yeah. In fact, you better stay back. This one's a doozy. That's okay. I'll be fine. No, no. Do not be a hero. Last year, there were 114 ,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs. So, just grab this one. I think I got a crash. Hey, if you feel like... That'll help. Good. Is this that far off? I'm a Mac.

15:14And I'm a PC. And I'm a PC, too. And I... What? 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. I don't think you're using that right. Touche. No, listen, so you can only say touche if you make a point that 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. Touche. 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.

15:52It's not that far off. It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. It definitely fits the Apple brand. Yeah, so Anthropix edgy. 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 not fair play technically, but the gloves are off. Yeah. It does feel like – And there is zero – I will go out now and say I would say there's effectively a zero percent chance that open ai 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 way harder sam calling out dario by name directly just like dario you suck just a diss track yeah i mean maybe yeah yeah just a bunch a Sora slop.

16:45The other thing is opening, I really doubt can react to this now. Like the right, like if this had dropped like a couple of weeks ago, they would have been able to say, Hey, we need to respond to this, but they can't now. Then they wind up winning. Has the right word. What is it? He says it's propaganda. IMO. It really, it really is. Again, they're just kind of calling out the category in general about it, but they're implying that ads are going to it's fear-mongering yeah it's fear 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 slot product will they took like mark cuban's like main concerns totally totally the things that he had been like yeah going on and on and on about that everyone is like hey dude you can calm down like that's not how it's going to work yeah and then they just like went with yeah his point of view yeah yeah which is a little out of data yeah i was gonna say like it feels like the the vibe war is like really heating up right like over the summer there's talent war.

17:39It's kind of a cold war. It's kind of like, okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter... And it was all leaks behind the scenes. Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time. And there was that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying, I feel like something has been stolen from us. But they were not coming out and saying. At Davos, Dario is basically... He's still not saying OpenAI the words, I think. But he's saying companies are doing ads. There's only one company that's doing ads. Katie, the CMO of OpenAI fired back. She says ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than Odd has globally.

18:14Boom. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads. I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen. Okay, let's play General Motors Robot. They've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back. Let's play it.

18:34Robot makes a mistake. General Motors. make cars, and we make Cadillacs. OK, the robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory. Gets fired. Whoever produced this ad is not going to do well in the singularity. You did not consider Rocco's Basilisk. Oh, sign holding Cadillac going by? Well, now the robot's trying to get a new job. OK. Okay. Robot's working at McDonald's or something. Robot goes to the bridge. This is like, who approved this? Robot watches the Chevys drive by the General Motors cars and jumps into the water. And then wakes up? The GM 100 ,000 mile warranty. It's got everyone at GM obsessed with quality.

19:26Like, how do you run this ad? Whoa, so it's saying like we care so much about the 100 ,000 mile warranty that like we will end it all if we don't stand by it. I think so. That's crazy. Obviously, they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like, hey, you're effectively advertising like the darkest thing ever. No, really sad. Like ridiculous. Well, the bar has been lowered. So don't worry. Incredibly, incredibly well played by Anthropoc. So you think it'll be effective? Well, I'm not even sure they care about it being effective. Okay. This is effective. Like, the fact that people are talking about it.

20:01People that right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic. Yeah. They're scoring points in Teapot and Axe. And they're able to score some points in the real world and just make, like, senators are going to see this. And be like, that's wrong. Yeah. I mean, the whole, like, senator we sell ads thing in Facebook. Like, stealing your data. That whole thing is, like, very, like, it's still a meme. It's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because advertising is the greatest business model ever. Companies don't want your data. They want conversions.

20:33They 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. 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 send them the link. We've got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we've got to ring the gong for Walmart. They reached$1 trillion in market cap as he accomplished booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda cloud. Hit it. Let's understand what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off Amazon was going to kill them, but it seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever.

21:18Let'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 its 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, has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen.

21:58Walmart'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 Furner 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.

22:31Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was$212 billion at the end of 2016. 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 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 U.S.

23:05households. So they've like fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long time. Yeah, Yusuf in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He previously was over at Walmart. Thanks for leaking it to us. 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. That was true back then. He posted this six months ago. I think Elon's way above this now. I mean, a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand.

23:35We've got to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this? No. Let's pull up the graphic and see. Whoa. That's probably driving. Stunning and brave. That probably adds$600 billion to the market cap, right? Easily. Easily. They really just did a 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. I get it. Robert says, Gastown is the modern-day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something that's insane.

24:10My 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 a whole bunch of different agents. And Steve Yege wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed orchestrator. He says it's 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, you know, you used to write code in a text file, save it, execute it in a terminal.

24:43Then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems, repls, etc. LLM chat windows work their way into the IDE eventually 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, your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because 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.