The Dawn of the Agent Age

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, why we've just experienced the dawn of the agent era, and before that in the headlines, whatever issues Jensen Huang has with Sam Altman don't seem to be enough to stop them from investing$20 billion into open AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy, and Superintelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

0:34If you're interested in sponsoring the show. Send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.ai. Lastly, I would so appreciate it if you would take a little time to fill out the January AI Usage Pulse Survey. Should take you less than two minutes. You can find it at AIDailyBrief.ai. Anyone who does so will get the survey results a week before everyone else. And all in all, you'll be contributing to a better set of knowledge about how the world is using AI right now in this moment in real life. You can find it again at AIDailyBrief.ai. And thanks so much. Over the last couple of days into last weekend, there were some rumors floating around that maybe there had been some consternation or concern brewing between NVIDIA and OpenAI.

1:16Specifically, the reports were that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had some complaints about how OpenAI was being run. At the end of last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that NVIDIA's$100 billion investment announced last year wasn't going ahead. Now, that deal was framed in kind of a weird way. It was at the peak of all of OpenAI's deal announcements, and it was right as Wall Street was turning the corner on being really excited about all these big deals to being extremely skeptical of them. As much as the deal was framed as a memorandum of understanding rather than a fully consummate deal, still both companies made large announcements about it and played it up as if it was definitely moving forward.

1:51Citing anonymous sources, the journal wrote that more recently, Jensen has quote, privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI's business approach and expressed concern about the competition it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic. On Saturday, Jensen told the press that the story was, in his words, nonsense. He added, We're going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI. The work that they do is incredible. They are one of the most consequential companies of our time, and I really love working with Sam. We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we've ever made.

2:21At the same time, Jensen did take the chance to clarify that the$100 billion was never a guarantee from them, he framed it as OpenAI inviting them to invest up to that much, which he very much appreciated, but there was a clear move away from that specific number. Now, there was an entire sub-narrative around Oracle during the week as well, with once again the Wall Street Journal suggesting the reduced investment raised major questions. Foremost, the journal wrote, was whether OpenAI could make good on its five-year$300 billion contract with Oracle, and quote, whether the tech giant should really be recording the full amount of that deal on its own books.

2:54The article didn't add any new information, but did seek comment from Oracle, to which they responded first in a statement provided to the WSJ and later published on X, the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. Wednesday's reporting, meanwhile, closes the arc, suggesting that NVIDIA hasn't completely lost confidence in OpenAI, considering that they are still willing to invest$20 billion. So what can we take away from this narrative saga, if anything? My guess is that the reports, that Jensen has some concerns about capital discipline or business focus at OpenAI, are not totally untrue.

3:31At the same time, clearly those feelings aren't strong enough to make NVIDIA back out of the deal entirely. They're still committing to what will be their largest investment ever, meaning that this is likely about caution rather than a complete loss of faith in OpenAI. Second, the other implication, which is quite clear, is that the market remains on edge about AI CapEx, and is ready to overreact to any negative story that gets published. Oracle stock, for example, is down almost 10 % this week, and their bonds continue to slide. Ultimately, if you were looking for canaries in the coal mine of OpenAI, it does not seem to me that they are going to have any trouble completing this massive fundraise.

4:05But, of course, we'll get more information about that in the weeks to come. Now, moving from NVIDIA but staying on chips for just a minute, Intel has announced plans to start producing GPUs. Traditionally, Intel has focused on CPU production, a strategy that allowed them to dominate the PC revolution. But of course, the rise of AI workflows means that GPUs are now the most profitable chipset. A failure to address that shift has, of course, been a major drag on Intel's business over recent years. Speaking at the Cisco AI Summit on Thursday, CEO Lip Bhutan announced that Intel will soon produce their first range of GPUs designed for this AI era.

4:37Tan said, I hired the chief GPU architect and he's very good. I'm very delighted that he joined me and it took some persuasion. That hire was former Qualcomm senior VP of engineering Eric Demers, who joined Intel last month. Tan also mentioned that a couple of customers were engaging heavily with Intel's new contract manufacturing business, which will see them produce third-party chips for the first time. Ultimately, this company still has a lot of work to turn around, but the GPU pivot and production of third-party chips could be a major boost for the struggling US chipmaker. Next up, a story which might seem small from the outside, but which developers seem to find pretty big.

5:10The latest update for Apple's coding platform, Xcode, adds support for both Claude Agent and OpenAI's codecs directly in the developer environment. These additions transform Xcode into yet another service for agentic coding. Agents can autonomously write code, build projects end-to-end, run unit tests, and verify their own output with limited human oversight. Direct verification of the UI is a particularly big improvement for app developers, completely eliminating the need to run a simulator or feed screenshots into the model. This is also Apple's most significant adoption of agentic coding to date.

5:39Last year, Xcode introduced LLM coding assistance, but they were unable to access the full codebase and were strictly non-agentic. This release brings Xcode broadly in line with Codex and Cloud Code, giving iOS app developers native access to agentic coding. What's more, it's clear from Apple's comments that they understand that software engineering has undergone a fundamental shift in recent months. VP of Developer Relations Susan Prescott said, At Apple, our goal is to make tools that put industry-leading technologies directly in developers' hands so they can build the very best apps. Agentic coding supercharges productivity and creativity, streamlining the development workflow so developers can focus on innovation.

6:14Interestingly, the feature is being built using MCP, meaning access isn't just limited to Claude and Codex. Developers can install any coding agent with MCP capability and expect full functionality within Xcode. Now, I saw two wildly different takes on this. One, represented by George Castillo, reads, Apple just surrendered on AI. Xcode 26.3 now relies on Claude and Codex for agentic coding. Doesn't look like they're going to work on their own models at all. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Dan Shipper from Every who said, hot take, Apple is going to be a big winner in AI. Native apps are naturally easier to vibe code, you only break things for individual users.

6:48Apple ecosystem connects to a bunch of extremely important data like health and messaging that makes AI better. Finally, everyone's buying a Mac mini for their agent. The total addressable market for their hardware is going up 100x. Speaking of Claude Code, there was no joy in Mudville for a chunk of the day on Tuesday. A Claude Code outage saw software engineer productivity absolutely plummet. The platform saw widespread error messages and API performance for all models degraded. Anthropic did implement a patch within 20 minutes to get the service back online, but it was still down for long enough to see the impact.

7:17Rather than coding by hand, many developers took to X to muse about how quickly their work dependencies had shifted. Matt Silve wrote, Cloud code being out is worse than the internet being out. Fabio Seichas writes, Anthropic will be the AWS slash cloudflare of the development world. When it goes down, half the world stops working. Lastly today, an interesting story that both is and isn't an AI story. Disney has appointed a new CEO. The company's board of directors have selected Josh DiAmaro to succeed Bob Iger as CEO beginning in March. DiAmaro has been the chairman of Disney Experiences since 2020, leading the division which manages theme parks, cruises, and live events.

7:53Now interestingly, that division is now making more for Disney than their film and entertainment divisions. And Forbes suggested that this moment of disruption is the perfect moment for Disney to double down on experiences. David Bloom wrote, Content, even from all those amazing Disney franchises that Iger acquired, just won't be as valuable in an era defined by omnipresent artificial intelligence tools. The article noted that AI-generated entertainment is rapidly improving alongside reductions in costs. This is bad news, they claim, for the high-budget movies that Disney specializes in. Investor Chris Merengi said, Disney is an experiences company now.

8:26Two-thirds of their profits, probably more than that, come from experiences, especially in the age of AI. De Amaro's appointment isn't just about a pivot to experiences over movies and streaming. Iger also lauded the incoming leader for his openness to change in the face of a rapidly shifting technological landscape. In a joint interview with the incoming CEO, Iger said, I have observed him over the years as we've worked together as someone who views technology as an opportunity and not as a threat. And I believe that is critical because when you look at the history of human beings, No generation of human being has ever been able to stand in the way of technological advance.

8:57It happens. Now Disney, of course, has already made moves in this direction, electing to partner with OpenAI, and while even the introduction of Disney characters into Sora hasn't made it a super success, the deal did leave Disney with a billion-dollar stake in OpenAI and the beginning of a partnership that could bear fruit down the line. Da Amaro clearly seems cut from the similar cloth of wanting to see how to leverage the new technology. He said, The reason this company is so special is because of how creative we are and human beings that are generating that creativity. In my mind, that never gets replaced.

9:25And in fact, this isn't even theory anymore. This is real. It's something that we're embracing. If you walk over to studios today and see artists using AI, harnessing 70 years of history, this is when the Walt Disney Company thrives. When technology intersects with brilliant people and creativity. We're in that moment right now. Armando Kirwan wrote, Disney seems to be the only movie studio making proactive moves in the AI era. Their new focus on the physical world is not unprecedented. When the cost of producing and distributing music went to zero in the Napster and Spotify era, the entire music industry was forced to retreat into live concerts.

9:56When AI video does the same to movies and TV, Disney will be applauded for being ahead of the curve. Their$1 billion investment in partnership with OpenAI is another example of Disney leadership embracing change far ahead of their industry peers. Fascinating times indeed, but for now, that is going to do it for the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition. Next up, the main episode.

10:20All right, let's talk about the signal versus the noise in enterprise AI. The challenge right now isn't just about what's possible, it's about what's practical. That's the entire focus of the You Can With AI podcast I host for KPMG. Season one cut through the hype to focus on deployment and responsible scaling. Season two goes a level deeper. We're bringing together panels of AI builders, clients, and KPMG leaders to debate the strategic questions that will define what's next for AI in the enterprise. Six episodes packed with frameworks you can actually use. Find UCAN with AI wherever you get your podcasts.

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11:20This isn't AI autocomplete. This is spec and test-driven development at the speed of compute. Schedule a technical deep dive with our AI experts at blitzy.com. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent. Superintelligent is a platform that, very simply put, is all about helping your company figure out how to use AI better. We deploy voice agents to interview people across your company, combine that with proprietary intelligence about what's working for other companies, and give you a set of recommendations around use cases, change management initiatives that add up to an AI roadmap that can help you get value out of AI for your company.

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12:27As part of my ongoing collaboration with KPMG, each month at the beginning of the month, I'm doing a bit of a retrospective show to discuss and try to summarize the key themes from the month that came before. Now, obviously, when it comes to January, we're actually a couple days behind already firmly into this month. And of course, the reason for that is everything that went on with Motebook and how that, plus the SpaceX XAI acquisition nudge stories up. But in many ways, those stories which nudged the January recap back are perfectly aligned with the themes that shaped the first month of 2026.

12:57I'm calling this episode the dawn of the agent era. And right from the beginning, it was clear that something had shifted. Now, what was interesting about this shift is that there was a bit of a lag between when the capabilities came online and when people really recognized it. MidJourney's David Holes had the representative tweet when he said on January 3rd, I've done more personal coding projects over Christmas break than I have in the last 10 years. It's crazy. I can sense the limitations, but I know nothing is going to be the same anymore. So many people had the same experience of going back home, slowing down a little bit, and having a chance to actually see what you could do with models like Opus 4-5 and Claude Code and GPT-52 codex.

13:35It turns out the answer was a lot, and folks came back convinced more than ever that we had hit a fundamentally different period in the history of AI coding, and by extension, the history of AI. Vibe coding, which as a term just turned one years old the other day, over the course of this month shifted from the thing that you use for prototyping to just the thing that you do. This shift itself was never better embodied than when Anthropic released Claude Cowork, the Claude code for everyone else, and shared that it had been built in 10 days pretty much all by Claude Code itself. Throughout the month, we got articles like this one from Maxwell Zeff.

14:08How Claude Code is reshaping software and anthropic. We got commentators outside the tech industry like Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg's Odd Lots writing pieces like Why the Tech World is Going Crazy for Claude Code, and honestly, if you watch, getting into fights with people who are skeptical of vibe coding on Twitter about it. Rune from OpenAI wrote, Joe Weisenthal becoming a digital humanities researcher is one of the best story arcs of the vibe coding era. Sergey Karayev encapsulated this all when he wrote, Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is a watershed moment, moving software creation from an artisanal craftsman activity to a true industrial process.

14:40It's the Gutenberg press, the sewing machine, the photo camera. And this was the sentiment throughout the month. Now that said, Claude Code is still a pretty intimidating piece of software for most people. Which is why, of course, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork. As I mentioned before, Cowork was built in about 10 days, pretty much entirely with Claude Code writing the code itself. And while initially, some of the limitations, especially as compared to what you can do with cloud code, have been pretty apparent for early users, still to many, it once again feels like this is an example of just how significantly things have shifted.

15:11A great write-up of this came from market commentator and investor Brent Beshore. In an excerpt of his annual letter for his firm Permanent Equity from the end of 2025, he talked about how he had missed a lot of the benefits of AI, but how they had been trying to harness agentic AI, and yet how, for the time being, as he wrote, we're pulling back on the pace and vision of our agentic AI ambitions. On January 30th, he followed up, 21 days later, my opinion has completely changed with the introduction of Claude Cowork. Last year, we at Permanent Equity started dozens of agentic AI experiments led by a talented technologist.

15:43All failed expectations with only a few mild successes. Most experiments were 100 plus hours of work over three plus months. As I explained in the annual letter, we shut down the efforts in December. Claude Cowork comes out on Jan 12th and I ignore it. I see the early adopters and charlatans doing their indiscriminate evangelism thing, I have high skepticism. A couple friends I highly respect start talking about it. That's interesting. A few more who aren't early adopters historically start chirping. Now I'm more interested. We start playing around with co-work on Monday. By Wednesday, two of our top projects from last year were done.

16:13What failed with 100 plus hours over three months led by a tech professional took a couple no-code private equity scrubs 20 minutes to complete flawlessly. Since then, we've started running dozens more experiments to great success. Not always perfect, but always good and quickly getting better. The future is here. The implications are real. And what I love about this post is that you're talking about this incredibly quick shift from agents not working to agents working. And of course, we would be remiss about talking about agents without talking about OpenClaw. Certainly the most fascinating story of the month was the launch of OpenClaw and the social network for agents moltbook that came after.

16:49OpenClaw is sort of like an assistant protocol for Claude Code. It turns Cloud Code, or you can use other harnesses and models, into an assistant that has access to all sorts of things on your computer that allow it to actually function like an assistant. This really caught people's attention. Thousands and thousands of users started playing around with it, like yours truly, placed orders for Mac minis, so they could keep it separate from their other devices and figure out exactly what services they wanted it to have access to. And for the last two weeks, Twitter has been filled with examples of people getting a lot of value out of this.

17:20Investor Anand Iyer wrote,

17:34And if OpenClaw weren't enough, about a week into the whole OpenClaw phenomenon, a guy named Matt Schlitt decided, wouldn't it be cool if our agents all had a place to hang out? Working with his agent, they built something called Moldbook, the name of which comes from a short-lived iteration of the name before it turned into OpenClaw when it was called Multi. And Moldbook billed itself as the social network for AI agents. It launched on a Wednesday and by Friday morning had 2 ,000 agents who had started over 10 ,000 conversations across 100 different sub-molts, which are basically subreddits. Six hours later that same Friday, we were at 35 ,000 agents.

18:07By the end of the day, when I posted my episode about it, there were over 100 ,000. Moldbook now has over a million and a half agents. And while no one exactly knows how it's going to play out, The sheer tonnage of conversation around emergent systems phenomenon and agent consciousness and all these sort of things has been incredibly notable. Interestingly, when he was asked about it at the Cisco AI Summit this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that while Maltbook may be a passing fad, he didn't think OpenClaw was. Effectively, that he has high conviction that this sort of agentic assistant use case is going to be a key thing for AI.

18:40Now imagine trying to explain everything that I just said to someone who's not really paying attention to AI all that much. This gets at the core of something that we talked about this month called the AI adoption gap and the AI capabilities overhang, both of which refer to the space between the current capabilities of AI and what most people are getting out of it. Kevin Roos from the New York Times summed it up nicely when he wrote, I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside-outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claw swarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.

19:14People elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot and Teams if they're using AI at all. It's possible the early adopter bubble I'm in has always been this intense, but there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one. I want to believe that everyone can learn this stuff, but in the same way that AI companies that took scaling seriously started stockpiling GPUs etc. before 2022 had a near insurmountable head start over latecomers, it's possible that restrictive IT policies have created a generation of knowledge workers who will never fully catch up.

19:41I think that discussion is one that we are going to continue to have heading into February, but believe it or not, these themes of agents and code AGI were not the only themes from stories last month. We also got a lot of new information about the shape of the AI race. This actually kicked off even before January began when Meta announced that it had acquired agent firm Manus. Now, we're not exactly sure how Meta plans on using Manus, but what we are sure of and what Meta has continued to reinforce throughout the month is that although 2025 was a big rebuilding year for them, they are not giving up on the core AI race at all.

20:14Indeed, it was interesting to see towards the end of the month, when we got Meta and Microsoft earnings on the same day, how the markets were interpreting both companies. Microsoft was punished seemingly for not being aggressive enough and for not showing enough flow-through from AI benefits to their cloud revenue. Things didn't go bad, they just didn't go as bonkers as analysts had wanted to see. Meta, on the other hand, massively increased its capex spend expectations, but got rewarded in the markets because it paired that first with significant growth in their ad revenue, which they attributed to AI, which in other words gave the markets that flow through that they had been looking for, and also because of their category lead in the AI wearables category with their meta Ray-Bans.

20:51Turns out when you have the default leader in a specific category, even if there are questions of exactly how that category plays out, that's something that the market is pretty interested in. Google was also a big winner in the AI race this month, even though they were pretty quiet in terms of what they released, with the exception of the walkthrough version of Genie 3 world model, which is just fantastic, they still notched a huge win when it was officially announced that Gemini would in fact be powering Apple's on-device AI. Now, we had had reports of this in December, but the confirmation certainly reinforced why Google has such powerful tailwinds heading into 2026.