

Mid-October 2026 Enterprise AI Show news roundup. Hosts discuss (1) using “Jev” (an LLM for yes/no or multiple-choice answers) for high-stakes decision-making, illustrated with a Washington Commanders end-of-game clock-running blunder; (2) AI/Cloud market signals: Anthropic vs Google momentum, CoreWeave’s rising cost of capital and debt pressure, and whether valuations are cracking; (3) Meta’s renewed push around its Muse model and why Meta talks about frontier models; (4) “vibe coding”/AI-built apps changing software creation, plus the “SaaSpocalypse” idea and business-model challenges.
No guests appear; only hosts Aaron, Brian, and Brandon. Mentioned but not as guests: Andre Karpathy (Anthropic) and Alexander Wang (Meta).
ROI is lagging for enterprises despite rapid AI progress; CoreWeave debt costs jumped from ~7% to ~15%, signaling “yellow flags”; only ~5,000 people have truly seen AI’s full potential (per Andre Karpathy); software creation barriers are falling, but discovery, maintenance, and monetization remain hard.
Commanders ran out of time with 50 seconds left; CoreWeave debt interest rate increase; Meta’s Muse go-to-market vs frontier-model messaging; Bending Spoons using AI to maintain acquired apps.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion on using AI, specifically Jev, to make football game decisions.
“They lost in one of the most unspeakable ways possible.”
Exploration of the commercial value of binary questions in various domains.
“just to put it in context for anybody who doesn't know about Jev, which included me about a week ago before you explained what Jev was to me.”
Speculation on integrating AI for everyday decision-making at home.
“We just don't, I feel like they don't actually ask the question if it's yes or no, but yeah, I think there's a lot of this.”
Review of AI draft picks and discussion on current industry standings.
“I was thinking it's been for longtime listeners that have been around since May 3rd when we did our AI draft.”
Overview of significant developments in the AI landscape, including Meta and CoreWeave.
“Saturday Night Live, a popular comedy show here in the States, did have a segment on the weekend news about the big data center they're building in Utah and the pushback on that.”
Discussion on CoreWeave's increasing cost of capital and market irrationality.
“Their cost of capital, not to make this too boring, but anyway, basically how much interest, the higher the interest rate they have to pay to continue doing their business has gone up significantly, right?”
Analysis of how rising interest rates are affecting tech companies' profitability.
“And we were like, okay, that's potentially a red flag of one of the big five or six companies who is looking at their cash flow, looking at their timing and going, I don't know if this is going to necessarily work out.”
Exploration of insights from AI expert Andre Karpathy on the potential of AI.
“yellow flags over there that are starting to pile up that might lead to some sort of deflation of this bubble that I think we all know we're in.”
Discussion on the tension between optimism for AI advancements and potential risks.
“Maybe something really good could come out of this and all of humanity may benefit.”
Examination of how different narratives influence tech company valuations.
“is they're very close to the recursion, the self-improving model.”
Insight into Meta's approach to AI and the challenges of building models.
“hard to prove them wrong in any meaningful way at this moment.”
The discussion explores the precarious state of AI investments and the industry dynamics at play.
“And it lost, I don't know, 80 or a hundred billion dollars.”
The hosts delve into the recent changes in the software industry and the concept of the SaaSpocalypse.
“Because having lived in the software business for a long time, you've lived around it a long time.”
The conversation focuses on how AI tools are changing the landscape of application development and user empowerment.
“Of course, you can build apps and just put them on the Internet.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On The Enterprise AI Show, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:07Good morning, good evening, whoever you are, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host, Aaron, and today we have our AI news update for mid-October. Now, Brian and Brandon talk about using JEV to run the Commander's football team, Core Weave's Woes, and how Anthropic and OpenAI continue to cook, even though the enterprise continues to struggle with the ROI. And they also talk about why Meta talks about their models when Muse is what really makes money, and a possible new playbook for established vendors in the new age of AI-built apps. And all of that is coming up right after this quick break.
0:55Today's show is sponsored by Nord Security. Your employees are using AI every day, but do you know which tools they're using, what data they're sharing, or where their AI agents are connecting? You can't govern what you can't see. Introducing Nord Layer AI Scout, the visibility layer for enterprise AI. AI Scout gives you visibility into AI activity across web and desktop apps, detects sensitive data exposure, helps control AI agent connections, and creates an audit trail for governance. So you can protect your data without blindly blocking innovation. See what your AI is doing, then decide what happens next.
1:29Connect with Nord Security to learn more about NordLayer AI Scout. Visit nordlayer.com slash AI-scout slash enterprise AI and get started today.
1:44Today's show is sponsored by Palo Alto Networks. Every time your team deploys a new cloud workload or AI agent, another identity gets permanent access to your critical systems. Legacy tools were built to manage human employees, leaving modern machine and AI access largely unmanaged. That's why IDERA by Palo Alto Networks comes in. Human, machine, AI, one identity platform for all of them. IDERA replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access, so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your business. Secure every identity with IDERA by Palo Alto Networks. visit paloaltonetworks.com slash idira again that's paloaltonetworks.com slash idira
2:31and we're back brandon it's good to be with you man we are we are doing our now world famous sort of mid-month ai and cloud news of the month how you been man i've been doing fantastic and this week i thought we'd start with football because that's what we like to do but very quickly i would like to just recap that the commanders, and for those that don't follow, this is American football team based in Washington. They lost in one of the most unspeakable ways possible. They were playing the game. They basically had a chance to kick a field goal. They had 50 seconds left. They ran a play and incredibly they ran out of time.
3:04This is potentially the dumbest possible thing that you can do in a football game. It's absolutely the kind of thing that cannot happen at all. And so afterwards, of course, there was a lot of questions. Who was in charge? What was going on? How could this happen? Because allegedly, these coaches and players spend 80 hours a week practicing just for one game in these situations, and they did the impossible. So that led me to think to myself, should they, all football teams, just use Jeff? Where you can just ask it, yes or no questions about what you should be doing at that time. And instead of pretending like you protect, you just be like, yeah, Jeff, it's like, we have 50 seconds left.
3:40what should we do? We should run a play, spike the ball and kick the field goal. Like that's, should we do that? You should just ask Jeff yes or no, because clearly these human beings can no longer be trusted with simple yes or no questions. And so maybe this is a revolutionary, forget analytics. We just distill football down to a set of yes or no questions. And we just don't even let the head coaches and the players even make any decisions anymore. We could all just have a board, right? Everyone could look up at the scoreboard or on TV, they flash it up like, what should we do? let's just ask Jev and then just see and see what actually happens.
4:11So Brian, what do you think of my attempt to bring AI directly into football by only asking yes or no questions? I like the idea just to put it in context for anybody who doesn't know about Jev, which included me about a week ago before you explained what Jev was to me. Jev is this new LLM that mostly focuses on yes and no questions. Is that right? Yeah. Either that or like multiple choice, but that's the point. It's not going to give you long answers it just gives you binary stuff right so it's and it's now somehow the the creators of jev are now valued at seven and a half billion dollars to like you said answer yes or no questions or multiple choice questions which i guess would be great if you were like playing millionaire the game show millionaire or any any number of game shows where it could work itself out but you know it's interesting because forever again we're going to get into football talk and most people are going to tune out but like forever there's been this running joke that that the timing in a football game, especially the last minute or so when things are getting close, that they've always said, look, coaches need to basically have a designated nerd who has done nothing but played online video games to be there to be the watching the clock thing.
5:15I think this is for American football, both Azure and AWS have both been huge sponsors of American football, especially the NFL, like Azure has their iPads or whatever they're called on the sideline watching stuff and AWS does. I think this is another opportunity for one of the tech companies to sponsor the jev maybe it could be a bot maybe it could be like spacex could have a bot running around next to the coach and the last minute the jev thing like lights up or something i think it's i like the idea i think there you're right there never should be a situation like that plus if you have a bot running around on the side of the field like there is all sorts of opportunities for comedy to happen just unexpected things to happen it could just it could time out it could somebody could actually like kick the court off of it or something i like the idea of it.
5:57But yeah, football is unique in that it is this total chaos for 59 and a half minutes. And then the last 30 seconds is literally just the simplest yes or no questions, which, again, is worth seven and a half billion dollars to somebody to be able to answer those questions. That is. I've been asking other people this question, so maybe I'll ask you to do this. And of course, we joke around a little bit, but of course, there are this whole world of classification. And that's really where the computer science side of it is like, is this spam yes or no? Or is this person happy? Is this person about to churn yes or no?
6:27So these are like the questions that they say Jeff can answer. And it's like, okay, conceptually it makes sense. But I also think around to myself, I'm like, I don't know, do we have a lot of yes or no questions that are just out there that people are willing to pay to answer? Which is, I guess it's probably true. But then to your original point there, it's like, why is this worth$7.5 million? dollars. It just feels, it's all, it's probably like, we probably have a recurring theme on the show. It's, I love all this AI stuff and I use a lot of it. I think it's good. But then sometimes I see the numbers and I'm just like, I just, it just makes no sense.
6:59If you think about it, like the entire dating app industry is just a yes or no question, right? Like the soft swipe, all of the recommendation engines on Amazon. Do you act, do you want shoelaces with those shoes? Do you want this with, those are just yes and no questions. So yeah, that like the, the yes and no, there is a huge market for it. We just don't, I feel like they don't actually ask the question if it's yes or no, but yeah, I think there's a lot of this. Now the question becomes like, do I need a specialized device? Do I need a special like iPhone duo to be able to do this? Or is it like, does it just get built into the application?
7:30I don't know. There's a lot of, could it just be a button in your house? If your kids are asking like, what's for dinner? Could that just be yes or no? Or could it be multiple choice? Could that be a new, that could be the killer use case for the new, what's the new Apple thing that hangs on your wall, like the HomePad or whatever it's called. That's not the name of it, but that thing, that could just be run by Jeff. It could just be nothing but common stuff in your house. Should I turn the air conditioning on? Should I turn it off? Should we do it? I like where you're going. So the home view would be, maybe the Apple home view would be the way to deliver it.
7:58And then maybe there's a reality TV show built here where someone lives their life just via Jeff. They just like, all they do, everything has to be framed as yes or no or multiple choice. And then they just follow whatever Jeff says. So they go, should I go eat? Yes, no. Should I have eggs and bacon or cereal? I like it. I like it. So listen, we produce a lot of great ideas here. So we'll give that one out for free. Some reality TV producer can do it. Life with Jev is what you'll call that. Yeah, exactly. Or Ask Jevs. Oh, even better. Yes, that was sitting right there. I missed it. Yes, good job.
8:31Ask Jev. Cool. I was thinking it's been for longtime listeners that have been around since May 3rd when we did our AI draft. And now we are going to get to AI Cloud News of the Month because lots of money was spent and other things happened this month. But do you think it's time that we do a little bit of a review? Maybe like a five, six, I guess it's been like a six month review. Should we look at our picks, see if anybody is dominating these? Maybe we want to have like a supplemental draft at some point. Do we need to add some more things or remove some things? Do you feel like it's worthwhile?
8:59Should we wait another month to review the AI draft? Well, here, we'll at least do the top five. I'll read them off. You can tell me. I'll let you sell. You tell me who wins, who loses. So your first pick was Google. My first pick with Anthropic. I feel like this is no contest, but I'll let you decide. Who's winning that area? Yeah, I did get to pick this one in the totality of Google, but I feel like I bought high on Google. I don't feel like we've literally heard anything about Google since May. Anthropic, obviously, in the news, dominating the news. Although there is some, I don't want to call them red flags, but yellow flags that their growth has stalled here in this last quarter.
9:32But that could just be people went on vacation a lot in the summer and it's going to pick back up in Q4 when the sales guys go try and make their quota. So yeah, I'll give you, so you get a plus one on Anthropic versus Google. All right. The second one was, yeah, this one's, this is like a backdoor Anthropic one for you. So you picked major AI centric IPO in 2026, a$1 trillion valuation. So all indications are that'll be Anthropic. I don't know. No, SpaceX. Oh, it's right. You're right. I completely forgot about that. So all right, we could win that one twice then and then i picked nvidia is the second so yeah i don't know i don't know how you score that one has nvidia done anything noteworthy in the last four or five months other than just make tremendous amounts of money kind of no but it's kind of it's like they've been extremely profitable they've announced a couple more models but i can't say they come out with anything that's true but they have made a lot of money yeah also in the last six months spacex has gone from 200 down to $145, although they are still just above the trillion.
10:31No, they're at almost$2 trillion in market cap. So we can call that a push in terms of they're both on the positive side, but neither one of them really stood out over the last six months or so. So we'll call that a draw for all of our European listeners who enjoy a tie or a draw. So you're 1-0-1, and I'm 0-1-1.
10:57From the Global News Network, it's 2029. Breaking news. A hacker calling himself the Purple Yak may have used advanced AI to gain control of a Russian nuclear warhead. He's reportedly offering to launch it at a target of the highest bidder's choosing. get the news from the end of the world follow the clues unravel the mystery as civilization collapses 2029 the war for our world a science fiction news series from the future premiering october 30th follow wherever you get your podcasts
11:32all right and third here was looks like you picked tm tsmc always difficult for me to say and then I picked Broadcom. So again, I don't know if I really have a strong feeling on either one of them. I get companies that are just doing well, I would say. Yeah, I feel like Broadcom doing relatively well. They do have a little bit of a sort of negative sentiment around VMware, a couple of high profile left VMware, but not in mass. Yeah, that could be a push. That could be another draw. We could be, yeah, I don't feel like that one's necessarily jumped off the charts, good or bad. Broadcom, I'd have to look at their stock price over the last six months, but it's been fine, right?
12:06It fits in the it's been fine category. All right. I think we stopped there because one of the upcoming ones is family ask about AI. Yeah, we got to wait. We have to wait till December. The holiday is coming up here, at least in the United States. So we'll review that one in a couple of weeks or months after Thanksgiving to see what everybody had to, what questions everyone had to answer to their in-laws and maybe the older or younger people in their life. We've got a few nail biters on there. You had end of vibe coding, which, you know, software, apparently we'll talk about it. the score this last two weeks.
12:37Software is dead as far as we're calling it now. You have Sam Altman out as CEO of OpenAI. Still could happen. Still a possibility. Time's running out. That one's looking less likely. And I've got data center issues causing a significant change to human existence. So I do feel like it's becoming a big hot topic for the elections, but I don't know that it's caused like a mass extension event yet. I'm glad neither one of us predicted that. I feel like that would really be like, that's the one we don't want to win. Although it was funny. We can put a link in the show notes. Saturday Night Live, a popular comedy show here in the States, did have a segment on the weekend news about the big data center they're building in Utah and the pushback on that.
13:14So it is getting into the mainstream. Data centers are kind of getting there. So that one might get a point out of that one. All right. Let's talk about news of the month. Lots to talk about. Any one topic that jumped out at you more than any over the last two weeks that kind of has your feelers up or your antennas up as far as what's going on? I think there's really two things. We talk about both of them. I think obviously the rise of the personal agent and the return of Meta, they've been a huge press push around their new models, Muse. And we talked a little bit about that last time. So that's been interesting.
13:45And then more on, this is another one. I think you're the one that tracks this maybe a little bit more closely. But it's just the financials of all these situations. A couple of things that we've seen, right? It's anthropic growing at an unprecedented rate, but not quite as fast as people want, which is like a weird sentence. And then I think it's CoreWeave. Is that right, Mike? Their cost of capital, not to make this too boring, but anyway, basically how much interest, the higher the interest rate they have to pay to continue doing their business has gone up significantly, right? And at least an article I saw, it looked like some of the CoreWeave founders have cashing out some of the money.
14:21And it's like, and of course they've come out and said the market's a little irrational here. It's just not based on anything. But it's just canary in the coal mine, right? Right. That's what we've been talking about the whole time. It's like, and even at the top of the show, we were talking about, it's like, there is a lot of productivity here, but these numbers are huge. So I think those are like the two things I've been like following the last few weeks. It's like, are we seeing these valuations start to crack a little bit? And is that maybe a good position for Meta who has like unlimited cash and they just keep failing, but then they put out some new stuff that's like, looks pretty good.
14:55So maybe they figured something out. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. So obviously two very distinct topics. I think the canary in the coal mine one, last time we talked about Oracle sort of having this, what do they call it, force majeure, where they're trying to back out of some payments they have, back out of a big contract they have. And we were like, okay, that's potentially a red flag of one of the big five or six companies who is looking at their cash flow, looking at their timing and going, I don't know if this is going to necessarily work out. The Corvive piece is interesting because they're in that second tier of neoclouds that there's CoreWeave and there's a half dozen of them or so.
15:34And there's not only the CoreWeave piece, which is where the numbers came from, was they just recently took a, I forget what it was, it was a fairly large set of debt. So as opposed to taking equity funding, they took on a set of debt at seven or so percent, seven and a half percent. And because the economic conditions have changed, whether it's how they made their payments or whatever it was, it's dropped to the point where they're now paying the equivalent of 15 % interest as opposed to 7%. So it's a lot of people going, okay, the math was hard enough before to figure out how you guys were going to pay stuff back.
16:07Now, if you're having to pay back at a much higher interest rate, again, that just puts more pressure on companies that are saying, hey, we're still not profitable yet. When we start to talk about these little pieces of the Jenga model that might fall down and then one thing falling down leads to five or six other things falling down. Just the fact that we're seeing continued inflation in places and because of continued inflation, interest rates are going up in parts of the world, especially here in the United States. And that just leads to, it's going to cost you more to borrow money. Everything right now is about expansion.
16:38So you're borrowing money in one way, shape or form. And if you're not able to pay it back fast enough, then the people who want it paid back are like, okay, we're going to have to take some actions on that, whether that means going and reclaiming data centers or other sorts of stuff. I think it falls into your bucket of, is it a red flag? It depends on how devoted you are to the church of Ed Zitron, but I think it does add to the pile of, there's at least some yellow flags over there that are starting to pile up that might lead to some sort of deflation of this bubble that I think we all know we're in.
17:09So it's always interesting because it's like, on one hand, you do have all of that, but then the other thing that is always hard for me to reconcile. I'll just say this, the foundation labs. It's like, what have they seen that we have not seen? And there was this post this week by Andre Karpathy. He's of, now he's at Anthropik. He's, I don't know, one or two top person in AI. And he has a good follow. I think he's just very much like, here's what stuff is doing and here's some good ways to use it. But he says something like only 5 ,000 people have really seen what AI can really do. And which makes sense, right?
17:47When he thinks about, yeah, there's a bunch of people have done like the chat bot thing, but people haven't really gotten into it. And I bet you people listening to this have probably done some cloud coding. And like, we'd like to think that we're at least closer to the 5 ,000 than the other people. But then I always think to myself, like what, because you see announcements too, like OpenAI is like, they've been announcing, like they solved all these complicated math proofs, right? Right, right. And it's like, what are the things that they're seeing that are not released? What problems have these frontier labs solved that they've chosen not to make public?
18:19And so that's always the thing. Back to the financial side of it. It's like, on one hand, you're like, these numbers seem crazy. And I probably said that a hundred times on this podcast. On another hand, I'm always just like, but are these people that are building it, are they seeing stuff that we're not seeing? and because of course they come out sometimes and they make these incredible proclamations like we're all going to die in five years or something like that but just putting it more simple have they just seen something like oh yeah like it it can do this thing now this thing that we thought was impossible i don't know what the thing is but like right the thing that we thought was like never going to happen like it's actually happening right now and so well that's the thing is like investors as people working in this they're like i'm always trying to reconcile it's be open to good news.
19:02Maybe something really good could come out of this and all of humanity may benefit. I have no idea what it is, but I'm just saying it could happen versus always thinking it's doom and gloom. So I don't know. It makes it very difficult to figure out what's going on. Yeah. I mean, it does highlight the constant thing that we mentioned that there really needs to be a CMO of AI. Because if there's a CMO of AI, they would be going through there and be going like, look, hey, folks, it's that time of the month. We need to put out the newsletter for the month about what's going on. Give me some of your good stuff, right?
19:31Give me some of the things that aren't, you know, world ending things like, cool. You solve the math things, but have you made anybody healthier? Have like, whatever those sorts of things are that, that sound, yeah, you're like you said, on the positive side of things and don't just randomly put them out there in a blog post. Like, like Dario did three weeks ago where he's like, Hey, we figured out this like partial enzyme DNA thing. And okay. You're like, well, what does that be like? What does that mean? What does that do for people? It's, it is, it's again, it's the balancing of being like two years ago when you guys put out these long manifestos, you said that people were going to live to 150 years.
20:04And maybe that's not going to happen right away, but do you have a progress status report on that thing? Do you have, are you closer to solving a problem like a cure for cancer or something? And they, that whoever's in charge of that, that project manager seems to have been on PT. Well, that's why I just want to go back to this, this post after we, from Andre is like, Hey, say, listen, how about like, cause he's, he has a really good YouTube channel and And he explains, I was like, why don't you just show us? And to his credit, he shows a lot. But I'm like, I want to know. I'll watch. I'm sure many of us will watch.
20:34What are we missing? And I think to maybe answer my own question there, I think underlying this is what they really believe is they're very close to the recursion, the self-improving model. This is the whole, you're going to achieve liftoff. They're real close to getting the AI to build a better AI. And at that moment, that's the step change that, like, you could extrapolate from that. It's if this thing gets 10 times better in, like, whatever, once a month or some crazy interval that they then believe, then that's when the, whatever, the benefits to humanity really start to crack open. Which, I mean, could be right, or it could just be complete science fiction, what I just said.
21:16It's like, who knows, right? You're right. If only 500 people have seen it, it's very possible that it's like, we kind of kept all the benefits of those 500 people and they're accumulating super tremendous amounts of wealth. Maybe they're dominating the prediction markets or maybe they're dominating some other thing. And they're like, I don't really want to tell you guys because we kind of kept it to ourselves. Maybe that is the case. But then again, if that's the case, then it doesn't really help you guys much when you're trying to do these IPOs, which are supposed to have broad market appeal and showcase what you do.
21:44So I don't know. It does come back to the question, which I thought you were going to get into, which is like, it is weird that you have the core weaves of the world or oracles or whoever it is, the data center people of the world feel like they're really struggling financially. And then you've got basically two companies who are like, oh no, we're hoovering up money like you can't believe we're up 35x from where we were last year. We're at whatever billion per quarter. And you're like, how does that work? Because you've got enterprise CIOs who are like, I'm not seeing the ROI. You've got the other side of the market who's like, I'm struggling to make debt payments.
22:17And then these two guys in the middle are just hoovering up all this money. And at the same time, it's so what's the use case that's driving like the greatest growth of software of all time, like our use of software of all time. Like it just it does feel like a weird puzzle that you're like, there's more than one big piece that none of us can find anywhere. It's funny because you kind of the way you say this, like I would answer the question, be like, it's just because of the story. And it's almost inside of this, you have the two opposite storytellers. you have like Sam Altman, who's just always telling you that like, it's going to be bigger and better than ever before, right?
22:48And there's a long history of doing that. So he's like the showman style. And you have Anthropic, who's almost opposite. It's like, this is so good. I can't tell you anything, which in turn is a great story, right? Which is, what do you mean you can't tell us? They're like, this is so incredible what we're about to do. It's so dangerous. We can't even discuss it, which of course makes you want to know more. So it's like you have two opposite, but like inadvertent storytellers driving valuations. And it's like hard to prove them wrong in any meaningful way at this moment. Like I've tried to think of this analogy and it almost feels if we were to go back in time and you were the person who like invented sugar cane or figured out sugar cane.
23:26And you were like, come here, come taste this stuff. See how awesome it is. What if this was all, what if you use this all day, all the time? And you were like, God, that would be awesome. Everything tastes great. I feel like I have a little bit of energy when I have it. And then you're like, okay, so what was the result of that? The sugar people made ungodly amounts of money, but everybody who was using it is like overweight, has diabetes, whatever. And you're like, oh, so there really wasn't a use case. The use case was just like, I'm addicted to it, but it didn't necessarily benefit me in any way that I think of as positive, but I kept using it over and over.
24:01There is an easy analogy. Therein lies capitalism, my friend. That seems like we could probably say like prediction markets we can go on and on naming that same policy that's gone about a million different ways exactly so to your point about about meta and meta i keep coming back to being i'm there's part of me that's confused about meta and there's part of me like the meta piece of it you're like okay and we talked about this the last time you and i are both in agreement like there's no reason that they need to go into enterprise right like they they have literally i'm sure somewhere there's hey we have two billion users and there's only so many people on the planet.
24:36And so maybe if we can go into where their day job is, we could get, but you're like, but you already have literally billions of people that you monetize and you can keep monetizing them. Maybe they literally run out of time to look at your ads, but maybe you could figure out a way to get their agents to look at your ads as well. And you could monetize them. But it's weird to me how it's like, okay, we have this Muse thing and maybe Muse is going to turn out to be great. And I talked about it like, Hey, it's pretty cool. They figured out a way to like give you an agent that's in this isolated thing.
25:05You don't have to worry about it so much. But then they want to keep talking about the fact that, hey, we have this frontier model. And to me, if you end up having the application that gets people attached to the thing you're doing, the model doesn't really matter unless the only reason they talk about the model is, I got to figure out a way to keep recruiting engineers to want to come work on my model. But I feel like I'm like, but why does the Wall Street Journal need to write an article about that? Or why does anybody else? Because who cares? It's just the model behind the scenes. And if it works, great.
25:34But you're not going out and chasing the thing that... I don't know. I guess there still is a certain amount of there's only going to be one model that wins. And so you have to somehow be like, we're the leading model for that. But it feels like more and more people are like, the model doesn't really matter as much. We have to do the normal move up the stack. The application matters. The stickiness matters. The user experience matters. I guess I don't totally get why they make as big a deal about these new frontier models they have as what's going on with Muse. Because Muse feels like the story, that feels like the monetization mechanism, the engagement mechanism.
26:10I don't know. Do you have a thought on that? Alexander, excuse me, Alexander Wang has, he's the what, chief AI officer of Meta, and he was very young. He was like one of the big hires. And he and Zuckerberg have been making a pretty significant media push, right? They've been on a bunch of podcasts. I think they're on Cheeky Pints, which is like the Stripe Founders podcast and stuff like that. So just listening to them, not doing any analysis here other than what do they say is, especially Alexander Wang, they just, if we build it, they will come. I think they both, especially Alexander Wang, that's sort of where he's like, he's pretty open about the whole thing.
26:44It's like, he says, I've been AI pilled. This is the future. We've got to build this. If we don't have this, we won't be positioned for the next thing, right? Whatever that is. And so today I think Muse is the best, if you will, go to market or front facing thing that they've built on top of this thing. But I think the belief is when you listen to them is that they believe that we've got to be building this now because there is going to be something that we want to build. And if we don't have a great foundation model, we're going to be at such a, and maybe, maybe Apple is the contrarian here, right?
27:17Where it's like Apple has not built any of this stuff, right? They just license these models. And, but I think the, so maybe that's a good way to kind of juxtapose it, right? Is meta kind of builds it. We got to be building in anticipation. And if we wait till we see what we need, it'll be too late. Whereas Apple is done just the opposite. Maybe I said the opposite. They've tried to build something many times, failed, and now just ended up at a point where they're just like, why don't we just create another home view? Why don't we just create another device for the house? So that's kind of what I see going on there.
27:45It's always one of these things though. It's like in, at the moment it seems reasonable. We don't have to go too far back and just say like, we all live through the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg with no legs and like walking around a weird virtual world and be like, I don't think that made sense then. It didn't make sense now. And it lost, I don't know, 80 or a hundred billion dollars. So there are examples of where this doesn't work out, even though these quote unquote, very smart people say it's coming. So time will tell, but I think that's their push. And I think Zuckerberg is, it seems like he's pretty tight with Alex.
28:15And it seems like he's, at least at the moment, he's got the, if you will, the power to drive it. And that's what they're doing. I think they're just going to go build these models until either someone proves them wrong or that something big happens. Yeah. And I don't, yeah, I don't think, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to build the model and trying to stay up to date. And I just think it's weird at this point to be talking about the models, but I guess it, yeah, it, I feel like it's one of these where at some point, like Facebook wasn't necessarily talking about, this is the sharded database that we did in like super nerd conferences where they're like, Hey, we had this database problem with Facebook and we had to figure this stuff out.
28:50But I don't know, maybe it's literally just the egos of these frontier model leaders where they're like, okay, because you guys are so fragile and I have to pay you so much money and we have to baby you. Like, I got to put you out in front. Otherwise, up, you're going to go back and go work for open AI or up. You're going to go over and work at work for Anthropic in two months and then bounce around like you do. So maybe that's what this is. It's probably just trying to convince the market that they're still in it. That way they've got something for real. And whatever little uplift or stock evaluation they get out of that, and in hopes that, hey, they'll be taken seriously when and if these companies get revalued based on their AI capabilities.
29:25Right. Yeah, I guess that's fair. I think that that works. What else was interesting? There was a lot of just companies. Oh, the other thing I think that was talked about a lot, and you guys talked about it a little bit this week on Self-Defined Talk, it's not even like the saspocalypse it's and i've heard this from multiple people i know matt ray mentioned i've got another friend who mentioned it and they literally were like it feels like all of software has changed in the last two weeks and this is people who just said you know what i'm tired of whatever proprietary piece of software it was whether it was adobe or office or some gaming platform or whatever it was i guess the question about this is they threw claude at it and claude built a version of it it basically vibe coded it and this was this was the original premise of the SaaSpocalypse.
30:05Should we give this a lot of attention? Because having lived in the software business for a long time, you've lived around it a long time. It's one thing to write a piece of software. It's another thing to be like, and this is how I would destroy an industry or create a business out of it. Are you giving this last couple of weeks much weight in terms of software is really changing or it has changed in the last couple of weeks? I probably give it more weight than most people just because this is a place where because I've actually done some of this stuff a little bit myself. It's like, I've really, I basically built, I would think like professional apps.
30:37Maybe this is kind of back to one of my predictions, probably when I said like the end of vibe coding, it's like, I can't remember exactly what I said, but hopefully I said something like this was like, it's not so much like the end of vibe coming. No, the coding is just using LLMs. There is no, like, it doesn't matter who's doing it. Right. And it's like, you can be, that's how code is written. And I have personally taken things and like a one good barrier is like putting something in the apple app store that like looks like a an app like a fully functional app that you would consider professionally developed and i've done that now a couple times right yeah happy to like we can get into it i'll promote this later you've got the birthday app you have this new you have my birthday one i got this other one new podcast yeah i got a new pod editor.app people want to check it out so i'm going to be releasing that here soon enough but what i think is interesting about the whole thing is you can And I don't think anyone can do this, but I think a lot of people listening to this podcast, right?
31:28You can basically build something that is very professional and certainly at a minimum does what you specifically want it to do. And with a little bit more work in agents, you can put it actually in the app store and make it available to however many billions of people. And that's just one way to do it. Of course, you can build apps and just put them on the Internet. So this idea that for people that are motivated and that want to do, I have always wanted, like you were talking before, I want an app that tracks birthdays the way that I want, right? There's a whole group of people that can now do this that can't do before.
32:02I don't think it's billions, but I definitely think it's millions, right? And so when people kind of say, this is the end of software, what you do end up with, and I think Bending Spoons is an interesting, they're the Italian private equity type firm that acquires like popular old legacy, if you will, internet sites and internet applications. And they basically just come out and said, these apps are pretty much are good. I want to keep them going, but we're just going to use AI to keep them up to date. And we're going to run basically a skeleton crew. But the part that they do have, they have the brands and they have the customer basis.
32:36I think that part, and this is the part I think you spend a lot of time in your life thinking about is like, that part is still as hard as ever. You can put something in the app store. It doesn't mean, let me tell you, I have plenty of evidence. It doesn't mean people are going to find it, even if it's the greatest thing ever. The business side is still hard. Finding demands, selling products is still hard. The ability to create something that you personally like or a small group of people that maybe are really interested in something, want to use has never been easier. I personally think that is really good.
33:02I do think people that enjoyed interacting in the open source environments where every piece of code was written and you did pull requests and they can build a community and stuff. It's like, that part is kind of gone, right? Because it's really just agents doing that now. You don't have to have a community. You don't need to have a whole bunch of people doing it. You just have agents doing it. So I think there's a little bit of those people are sad, but millions of us can now develop our own apps. And I do think that will fundamentally change some part of the software industry, but it still has not solved the like, how do I build a business?
33:32That's still very hard. Yeah, yeah. Now, it's interesting. As you were talking about it, I was trying to draw some sort of analogy. And I think, and again, I apologize for the American analogy. It feels a little bit like Home Depot, where it was like, yes, there are people who want to make things at their house and they want to update things. And maybe they want to update their bathroom or they want to take on a project or something. And when Home Depot and there are other home improvement stores out there, I don't know the names of all of them around the world, but they could care less what you end up doing with it.
34:01But they've made it easy for you to be like, hey, if I need to go get wood and some tools and a few other things, like I can go to one place. It's pretty easy. I can do whatever I want with it. There are some things that are pre-built. There are some things that are totally do-it-yourself. But again, they're not, even for people that come to them as building contractors. So there's a sort of professionalized version of that thing, which is what you're talking about, which is like you got to build a brand. You got to go find customers. You got to find market fit. Like they don't do any of that stuff for you, but they made it really easy to have those building blocks.
34:31and yeah i totally agree with you like it's it is very it's become far easier for anybody to say like i could be a semi developer or even maybe not a semi developer i just figure out how to use the tools and i can build some things but yeah i don't think we've all of the other mechanisms that have to go on of like discovery of it and keeping it maintained and getting feedback from the market and then potentially at some point being like god i wish i had fifty thousand dollars because this would offload all these token costs that I have, as opposed to just eating them myself, then you're going to have the exact same problem, which is somebody is going to be like, how is this different than what else happens?
35:07How are you going to grow this? You have a profit margin. None of that's changed, but the barrier of entry has been completely wiped away, which I think you've shown that and proven that. But I think the bending spoons thing is an interesting, it's like the complete opposite end of the spectrum. The tools, the vibe coding is the beginning of the spectrum. The bending spoons is the end of the spectrum. And at some point, like they are just private equity for software, but it's, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see if it'll be interesting to see if like established companies look at the bent.
35:39So like, for example, let's say you're Broadcom or you're Red Hat or you're whoever, and you go, oh, so we've established this, this name brand in the market. People know who we are. We have a user base, but our market would like us to be more profitable. Do they figure out the use case, the best practices of the bending spoons, and that becomes the back end of how they run their businesses as opposed to it having to go through the private equity sort of felt like it went bankrupt, then it got re-bought and all that sort of stuff. So I think, yeah, I think bending spoons would be, bending spoons, if you want to come on the show and tell us how you do the back end stuff, we would love to know it.
36:12I think that's going to be a fascinating case study in the future for how these guys figured out what now you look at it and you go, God, that makes a ton of sense. But how did, how, how, what all did you have to do to run the back end of that business, which people know the brands, they like it, whether it was super profitable or not, or whether it was growing profitable, but people would still like those applications in their life. And they've got this big portfolio of stuff. It's like, it makes a lot of sense. All right, man, we've talked for a while. I think we've covered enough, enough big topics.
36:40There are dozens that'll be in the links to the show notes, folks, if you really want to dive into what happened over the last couple of weeks if you want to get caught up. But Brandon, with that, we're going to wrap it up and we will talk to you folks next week. Thanks for listening. Check us out at theenterpriseaishow.com for past shows, newsletters, and all things Enterprise AI.
Brian and Brandon open mid-October’s AI news of the month by asking whether a yes-or-no answer engine like Jev could have saved the Commanders from a clock-management meltdown, and why a binary classifier is worth a reported $7.5 billion. A six-month check-in on their May AI draft leaves the scorecard roughly even, with Anthropic the clear winner over Google. Then come the financial cracks. CoreWeave’s borrowing costs have reportedly jumped from around 7% to about 15%, adding to Oracle’s contract pullback as yellow flags for the neocloud and data center layer. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI keep pulling in revenue even as enterprise CIOs struggle to find ROI. Brandon weighs Andrej Karpathy’s claim that only a few thousand people have seen what AI can really do against the labs’ opposite storytelling styles. The pair also question why Meta keeps promoting its frontier models when its Muse personal agent looks like the real monetization story. They close on whether software fundamentally changed in the last two weeks. Brandon argues AI has put professional-grade app building within reach of millions, pointing to his upcoming PodEditor app, but says finding demand and building a business are as hard as ever. They see Bending Spoons’ model of running acquired apps with AI and a skeleton crew as a possible playbook for established vendors.
SHOW: 1072
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1072 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/Kp7AH_IdwIg
SHOW SPONSORS:
FIRST EPISODE DROPS OCTOBER 30!
2029: The War for Our...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
FEEDBACK?