The Way We Use AI is Changing

Today on the AI Daily Brief, the way we use AI is changing. Before that in the headlines, more White House level discussion about the government taking a stake in the big AI labs. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around 5 minutes.

Last week was a pretty interesting one when it comes to AI policy. Specifically in the fact that you had people as far apart as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump talking about frankly not totally dissimilar proposals for the government's relationship with big AI companies.

Now heading into this week, President Trump has confirmed reports that the government is looking to take an equity stake in major AI labs. Notice first reported on the topic late last week, and while the reporting was well-sourced and from a very well-known Washington insider type of reporter, it was unclear how far along the plans were, certainly seeming a lot more like a concept of a plan than a full executable plan itself. When reporters asked about the plan on Friday, however, Trump responded, "There's a concept out there where pieces could be given to the American public. There's something very interesting about it, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies. I've spoken to all of them. We're talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI. And by doing that, they're going to like it better." Trump added that he is potentially meeting with, quote, "all the big ones" at the White House this week.

Now some reporters even straight-up asked him about Bernie Sanders' call to tax 50% of AI company equity to form a sovereign wealth fund. Trump said, "As far as the economics is concerned, we have certain things that aren't that far apart. People are surprised."

Now OpenAI appears to be actively pushing the concept in Washington. CNBC reports that Sam Altman met with Bernie Sanders on Wednesday to discuss the idea, with sources saying that OpenAI is pitching the idea of donating equity to the US government to seed a public wealth fund. OpenAI views this as a way for the public to benefit in the upside of AI growth, possibly through dividend distribution from the fund. They've also suggested that the fund could be allocated to individuals such as through the new Trump accounts for children.

Now, for anyone who's been watching this president closely, his interest in this probably isn't all that surprising. First of all, there's been talk of a sovereign wealth fund since early in the term, and the government has taken stakes in multiple companies including Intel over the past year. He also understands the PR power of cutting a check to the American people with his Friday comments suggesting that part of the plan is AI dividends directly attributable to OpenAI and others participating in the fund.

Now, as you might imagine, there are a lot of cynical responses to this. Former Microsoft employee and tech commentator Darrell West writes, "The groundwork is already being laid for a government bailout of OpenAI."

Now, I don't want to dismiss the cynical take out of hand, and maybe some of you will find this even more cynical, but at this point, if you don't think the government already views our leading AI labs as too big to fail, you're not paying attention.

In other areas though, there is a bit more of a nuanced debate forming around the concept. Grappling with the issues, former AI's R David Sacks wrote, "While I'm no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders' proposal for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies resonates including with many on the right." Sacks argued that as public benefit companies, OpenAI and Anthropic could maximize their benefit by using a portion of their profits to pay down the national debt. Alternatively, he said he could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax for the AI job apocalypse narrative stoked by AI leaders over recent years.

"There's just one problem," Sacks continued, "nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate government fusion we're already sliding towards. Conservatives rightly fear a central bank digital currency. They ought to be even more concerned about central government AI, a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior. America won't win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the US. And that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control."

Now, to be clear, Sachs was commenting on the Bernie proposal, not the later news about Trump, so make of that what you will.

Investor Brad Gerstner took both sides of this, arguing that it's all about the mechanism. He wrote, "When government owns or controls the means of production, it is socialism. I don't trust shares in the hands of some future politicians that can coerce or liquidate and spend on whatever their political beliefs. If purchased or donated, the shares should be directly held by American citizens through their Trump accounts or in a pooled to trust or Trump account that will be divided among citizens in the future."

In a later tweet, he said, "I'm against government taking or nationalizing AI labs or other AI business. Terrible slippery slope, crony capitalism, etc. But, I'm encouraging founders and companies to donate shares for the direct benefit of all citizens through a pooled private account or ideally in their Trump accounts."

Look, this is just the headlines, so we're not going to go much deeper today, but this is a topic where the Overton window has become a flapping Overton door, and it is going to get even weirder before it resolves. The optimistic take, as Ras Rax put it, is "This is how you make the AI revolution something the whole country can support. Let Americans share in the wealth of the most important technology boom in human history."

Next up, Elon's role as Earl of Compute gets its second major customer as Google signs a three-year deal with SpaceX. In an SEC filing, SpaceX disclosed that Google had agreed to pay 920 million a month to rent compute. The deal will run from October of this year through June of 2029, and grants access to at least 110,000 Nvidia GPUs. The deal is structured in the same way as the landmark Anthropic deal last month, which granted access to the entire Colossus 1 supercluster. SpaceX will ramp up delivery over the summer at a reduced fee, but Google has the right to terminate the deal in October if SpaceX fails to deliver on the full capacity. Both parties also have the right to terminate the deal early on 90 days notice. The filing didn't specify which SpaceX facilities would be used to fulfill the deal.

A Google Cloud spokesperson said, "This is a short-term timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected. Now, as always with the Elon deals, this one is amounting to a Rorschach test for one's personal opinion of Elon Musk. Certainly heading into the SpaceX IPO later this week, both parties have a strong incentive to puff up the company. For Google's part, they own a 6% stake in SpaceX that could be valued at a hundred billion dollars if the IPO hits its target."

To some, the early termination clauses suggest the deal is all about boosting the stock over the short term. Prominent short-seller Jim Chanos posted, "This 9-month contract has more easy outs than a kids T-ball game." The other interpretation, however, is that Elon's pivot to cloud kingmaker is succeeding. Boring Business wrote, "This is absolutely insane. Elon Musk's xAI reportedly spent 40 billion dollars to build their data centers. Based on public disclosure of the Anthropic and Google deal, xAI will get paid 26 billion per year to license the compute from these data centers. That's a payback period of 18 months for all the data center spend from just two customers. And you still think AI infrastructure CapEx is a bubble?"

Now, to the extent that you're thinking this is Elon's cloud strategy playing out according to plan, it's fairly unclear if there actually was a plan. In September of last year, when xAI was in the middle of scaling Colossus 2, Elon posted, "Step one, buy a shitload of GPUs. Step two, {question mark}. Step three, profit." And it now appears that step two is simply to have GPUs available during a compute crunch. Maybe that was Elon's plan all along, but I think people are wildly discounting how much. Just in advance of this IPO, Elon figured out how to make SpaceX make sense.

Yuchen Jin remarked, "SpaceX has accidentally become the largest neo cloud on Earth. 550K GPUs, more than double Coreweave. Starlink is doing 15 billion ARR, so GPU rentals is SpaceX's biggest business. Elon may not need xAI to beat OpenAI."

Speaking of compute crunch, Jensen Huang has secured Nvidia's memory supply in a new multi-year deal with SK Hynix. The two-year deal will deepen ties between the two companies. SK Hynix will continue to be Nvidia's largest memory supplier as we head deeper into the shortage. And in addition, Nvidia will join as a design partner on new memory chips for physical AI, personal AI, and AI infrastructure.

The deal also secures Nvidia's supply of high-bandwidth memory as they begin to ramp production of next-generation Vera Rubin chips. Announcing the deal at a press conference in Seoul, Huang said, "We procure and buy from SK Hynix already billions and billions of dollars each year, and it's going to grow substantially." Now, a big part of Nvidia's story this year has been Jensen traveling the globe to secure a supply chain, taking a very face-to-face approach to critical deal making. Last month, he was in Taipei to shore up his fab allocation with TSMC. And Reuters wrote that in his trip to Seoul, you could find him dining on grilled pork belly and local spirits soju with the company's top corporate bosses, throw a baseball pitch, and meet with a well-known gamer.

Last week, a video went viral of Jensen sitting down at the Nvidia booth during a Taipei conference sipping a beer with executives. And while of course there's an element of marketing to the candid moments, it is also very clearly a critical part of Jensen's supply chain strategy. This new deal was reportedly sealed over a chicken and beer meeting with SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won at a local restaurant. And while the dining is casual, the stakes of the moment for Nvidia are very high. As he exited the restaurant on Sunday, Huang told the press, "Demand is enormous. Everything in the entire industry supply chain, from wafers to silicon photonics to cable connectors, is in a state of supply shortage."

Now, if a lot of the headlines today were about the infrastructure side of AI, the main episode is all about some shifts in how we actually use AI, and that is what we turn to now.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. There was a story this weekend about some planned updates to the ChatGPT app that I think many are completely misreading, and which the accurate read of tells us a lot about the future direction of AI user experiences.

Now, for those of you who are watching, just to be clear, the mock-up that is on your screen right now was generated by the person who is tweeting it just as a way to have a visual alongside their tweet. We haven't seen any mock-ups or leaks of a potential OpenAI super app. What we did get was this article in the Financial Times, OpenAI plots biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch.

And certainly the thrust of the article was that a super app is coming. FT writes, "The company intends to transform the chatbot into a {quote} super app that combines coding tools and AI agents, adding products that executives believe will generate more revenue."

Now, none of this is a surprise or exactly secret. OpenAI employees, leadership, et cetera, have used these super app term extensively on Twitter/X. And last week during the Codex events for enterprise, we even heard more about Codex and ChatGPT blending, although exactly what that meant remains unclear.

Now, for the Financial Times, this is about business strategy. They write, "The changes are part of a broader reorganization at OpenAI as the San Francisco company shifts resources into trying to win lucrative business customers and compete more fiercely with rival Anthropic." The role of ChatGPT in this ecosystem looks like it might be a little bit different. Again, FT writes, "OpenAI executives increasingly view ChatGPT, which has attracted nearly a billion users since its launch, as a gateway to introduce users to higher value products. The majority of consumers use the chatbot for free."

FT says the overhaul is going to begin rolling out in the coming weeks and will initially appear as changes to the ChatGPT website and mobile apps, which encourage customers towards using coding, image generation, and apps from external partners.

Now, for FT, this is all about the IPO. The changes, they write, "underline how OpenAI's strategy is moving closer to that of Anthropic, whose focus on developing products for businesses has stoked its blistering growth and will be at the heart of its pitch to investors in an IPO this year." They quote Leona's Capital partner Jenny Shaw, who writes, "Approximately a year ago, OpenAI's strategy was swing for the fences, whereas Anthropic's strategy is make money first. Now the two are converging because both of them are trying to aim for an IPO, and investors care more about money than dreams. As evidence, FT points to the shutting down of Sora as an example of their commitment to this new business focus, which is obviously something that we've talked about here as well.

Now, not everyone is sold on the idea of a super app. David Gewirtz writes, "Super app usually means we couldn't find the next big thing, so we're bundling everything we have." Hedge Markets, which you can guess their focus from their handle, certainly thinks this is about the IPO as well. The overhaul, they write, "Shifts resources towards enterprise clients with 2 million businesses already at 40% of revenue and expected to hit 50% by year end." Altman said last year that apps would become obsolete because of AI, and now he wants to build a super app. 900 million people use ChatGPT every week, 50 million pay for it, and OpenAI still loses $14 billion a year. The super app is supposed to change that. OpenAI has shifted hard towards enterprise with 2 million businesses already at 40% of revenue and a target of 50% by December, but those are the same enterprise customers who discovered last week what AI tools cost and whether they produce anything. Putting the slightly cynical take even more bluntly, nobody builds a super app because users ask for one. They build it because a chatbot is hard to put a multiple on. This is a feature for the S1, not for you.

Now, one other take which I don't think is exactly right, but does deserve some discussion, is summed up by Yoshik who writes, "One thing I've learned from tech, the best technology doesn't always win. The company that owns the user usually does." That's why OpenAI is trying to turn ChatGPT into a super app before the IPO. Every model eventually gets copied. Getting millions of people to open your app every day is the hard part. Although on the flip side, Anan thinks that consumers might be in for a shock with these changes. They write, "It's going to be interesting to watch how casual ChatGPT users react to this. Most people have only used it as a chatbot. A full redesign into super app is going to feel like a completely different product to them."

So, is this all just about money and the IPO?

The answer is yes, but. And I think it's worth pausing to note how frequently the investor class cannot imagine that anything that any company does is not specifically and primarily about impressing them, the investor class. What's actually going on here is the embodiment of a much bigger trend and the instantiation and extension of what we have discovered are the most valuable categories of use cases for AI, which are simply put not about chat.

Now, what's very clear is that there is a major difference between power users of chat GPT and regular users of chat GPT. In a recent interview, Open AI CFO Sarah Friar said, "Our free users do about seven turns or seven questions a day. Our first paid tier does double that, about 15. Our real paid tier plus, which is $20, is about 3x and pro is about 11x over a free user."

In other words, the power users are using AI more, but they're not just using AI more, they're using it differently.

It's clear at this point that Open AI views Codex as their most successful product. At least their most successful product with the type of success they want. And anyone who's living on the AI side of X can attest to the fact that there has been a major vibe shift towards Codex over the last few months. Developer Ben Holmes recently did a poll on Twitter asking how people use coding agents right now with 51.1% of nearly 2,100 votes going to Codex app with the next highest 30.9% being CLIs in the terminal.

We are in the midst of a widening AI advantage gap. The gap between the value that power users are getting out of AI and that casual users are getting out of AI is increasing fairly dramatically. Now, for most of the early history of post-chat GPT AI, while there was a differential between the value that power users were getting versus casual users, I'd argue that the space between them was relatively consistent. Over time, casual users got more value and power users got more value as they learned better and more use cases. But then agents actually became a viable thing. And specifically, people figured out that coding tools weren't just for software engineers, but for any knowledge worker who could use code and bespoke applications to solve their problems and create opportunities, which is all knowledge workers. This inflection point, which really happened around the end of last year and the beginning of this year, basically between November 25 and January 26, shift the advantage gap into overdrive. The people using agents are seeing compounding value while the people using regular chat continue to see linear gains only.

Now, when it comes to the business model side, it is absolutely the case that the people who are using agents are spending far more money than those who are using regular chat. The difference between seat-based pricing and usage-based pricing is the difference between the $3 million run rate that Anthropic had last year and the $47 billion run rate that they're currently on.

If you've been listening to this show at all over the last few weeks, the number one most dominant and most important theme has been the shift from the token subsidy era to the token scarcity era where the business models are all shifting to sell people the tokens that they're actually consuming with lots and lots of consequent changes.

What I think though is a mistake in just assuming that this is a business model question and an IPO question, is to think that the thing that primarily these companies care about is the revenue scoreboard. That obviously matters, but the reason that I think you're going to see a major change in the interfaces and user experiences that OpenAI and Anthropic put in front of their customers is a recognition of the fact primarily that the people using agents are getting more value and a desire to use interfaces and user experiences to bring more of that to everyone else.

If you were watching closely, there is even a gap between the power users and the power power users, reflecting just how quickly user experience patterns are evolving. Open Claw creator and now OpenAI employee Peter Steinberger wrote, "Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents. On CNBC recently, Claude code creator Boris Cherney told the host that about 6 months ago, he shifted from writing code by hand to prompting Claude to write all of his code, but it turns out that even that isn't the limit of how things are changing.

Here's a snippet of a conversation with Boris from just last week.