Hi everyone, it is Thursday, February 5th and I'm Jad Msad with another Tech Check live stream. You might remember if you tuned in a few weeks ago, we sat down with the Replit CEO. I'm Jad Msad and talked about this AI coding revolution, how people like me and producer Jasmine with zero technical background are suddenly building and shipping real apps. I'm not saying they're any good, at least mine anyways, but we are building them. That itself felt like a big moment. But this week's even this day makes that feel like it was just a warm-up. Since then, the software selloff, it has only accelerated and it has spread. It started with project management tools and CRM. Now it's hitting legal tech, video game developers, financial data companies. JP Morgan out with a note this week and they put it this way. It's a broad sweeping mass exodus of software stocks. And I might put it another way. It has been mostly a blood bath. Now, also over the last few weeks, we've had OpenClaw. You might have heard of it. It's an open-source AI agent built by just one guy, and it has gone absolutely viral. Essentially, you hook it up to your computer and give it full access and just let it do things, act, build, book things on your behalf. OpenAI, meanwhile, has launched Codex, a new version of it, its answer to Claude Code. Altman says that Codex is the company's most loved internal product ever. But somehow, at least it feels like to us, it seems like it's still struggling to get the same kind of buzz that Claude Code has been able to achieve, especially over the last few weeks. And by the way, nobody seems to be talking about Gemini 3 anymore. But as we know, that could change very quickly. What else has happened? Anthropic has really pounced on this moment yesterday dropping that Super Bowl ad which I hope everyone has seen taking direct shots at OpenAI for putting ads in ChatGPT. You had Altman firing back on X calling Anthropic authoritarian and this whole debate over elitism in AI. And then today guys both companies they have dropped major announcements. Anthropic released Opus 4.6 their most powerful model yet. It can work directly inside PowerPoint. It can pull together regulatory filings, run teams of agents in parallel. OpenAI countering with Frontier, new enterprise platform to build and manage AI agents. The pitch for them is that they can do real work across your entire business. Okay, so that's now, but a year ago, ChatGPT felt untouchable. Now it is a full-on war for the enterprise, for the developer, for the consumer. So we wanted to go deeper and Guillermo Rauch he is co-founder and CEO of Vercel one of the most important infrastructure companies in tech right now last valued at more than $9 billion. If you have used ChatGPT you have used Vercel. He's been building the AI tools that are changing how developers work and he works with both OpenAI and Anthropic. So he is really the perfect person to help us make sense of it all. Guillermo thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here especially this week. There's so much happening with AI.
The last week, the last few weeks. I mean, Jasmine and I were kind of just like bystanders. We're onlookers. I can't imagine what it's been like to be on the inside. We had Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, on our air yesterday, and she said that she's also been blown away by the last 60 to 90 days. You couldn't be more of an insider as well. So, what are you seeing? Is this acceleration? Is the hype all real?
Yeah, to just give you a picture, right? Vercel is a place where developers host a lot of the new applications they build and deploy to the cloud. So whenever you have an idea, Vercel makes it so easy to just make it real. And increasingly, you know, when we started 10 years ago, you needed to have hard programming skills. What happened during the Christmas season like just like the week of Christmas and the week of New Year's every person that I know was playing with Opus 4.5 vibe coding and bringing new applications live. We saw a massive spike in new deployments on the platform which happened at a time where you don't expect a ton of activity like people are you know going home for the holidays but what ended up happening is everyone went home to vibe code and we saw a 14 times larger growth from November to December than we saw last year. So what's happening is software is now effectively free and you know we can sort of like link that back to what we're seeing in the stock market but all software that we're we've used to been buying installing configuring is now being automated is being generated by these models.
And Vercel is in this awesome position where you have to deploy it somewhere. So, you know, there's work and you're seeing it and benefiting from it. And Guillermo, I'm with you on this, right? I'm one of those people. I would say it was a few weeks after Christmas that Jasmine and I started really getting into it. First with Claude Code, then Replit, Lovable. We're, you know, plans to test out Codex as well. It's funny you say that. Maybe next year everyone's going to be asking for Claude credits for Christmas. But this moment now, I mean, I've been posting about this, experimenting about it myself. Jasmine and I just a few days ago, we created our version of monday.com. We woke up and we're like, wouldn't it be fun if we could just try and do this? And an hour later, we didn't have something great, but we had something usable and we just thought like, wow, if we could do this and we have no coding experience, what could someone who does or someone who knows enterprise software actually do? That said, I have been getting a lot of push back, right? People say, 'No, you're not about to go in and do this. It's not secure. You don't have the database. SaaS is not dead.'
Yeah. And I'll tell you why. Right. So, every week these models are getting better and better and better. It seemed like vibe coding was going to be a temporary thing because a lot of what you could build looked like prototypes. But I'll say ever since the release of Opus 4.5, there's emerging consensus that you can go further. Each time a new agent or a new model drops, we can go from prototype to production grade applications. And the image that I want to paint for people is when you deploy something that you've vibe coded with an agent like Claude Code or v0 on Vercel, you're actually using the same cloud infrastructure that serves some of the largest properties on the internet. It's using the same frameworks like Next.js. It's using the same global cloud infrastructure, same security layer. So vibe coding is sort of going through its teenage years into adulthood very very quickly and now truly everybody can create software.
So I guess I asked this question directly of Amjad a few weeks ago. I'm going to do the same for you. Is software facing this existential crisis? That's interesting what you brought up. You're saying that it actually is maybe more secure than people think. Do they all not all of them but at least some of them or how many of them go to zero? These public companies that have you know 5 billion plus market caps that you know people can now vibe code.
Yeah. I want to be as extreme as saying that you know all software will like all software stocks are going to tank. But what I'll say is there's going to be a lot more just-in-time software. There's going to be a lot more personal software. There's going to be a lot more throwaway software. And this is basically enabled by the fluidity of platforms like Vercel because anyone with an idea within the enterprise. The data already exists. It's in the sources of truth, right? It might be in Salesforce. It might be in your Snowflake data warehouse. And now the UI layer with Vercel technology can be fully generative. You can bring an application to life for the problem that you have that very moment. So you don't have to buy this like sort of static and turnkey software that you have to configure to your needs and tends to be really expensive. So I do expect a downward pricing pressure of and you know this idea of like month-long procurement cycles for what is now effectively legacy software when you can just prompt it into ChatGPT and deploy it on Vercel with basically two prompts.
And certainly if you don't think it's going to go away that's going to have an impact on pricing power the way I like to describe it because I'm one of those people that have just been experimenting with it Jasmine as well and we can't believe that everyone's not doing this but it like the AI race has gone from talking to your chatbot to your agent doing things for you. And like maybe that doesn't get across because we've been talking about agents for a year already. But what I'm seeing and I think what you're saying is that like ordinary people are now able to use it. So with that, talk to me about Opus 4.6 if it's a game changer. I know you've been texting with a bunch of founders and CEOs in the AI space and OpenClaw too. One of the most viral moments of this new era.
Yeah, the really special thing about Anthropic's models is just how good they are at these agentic loops. When models can use tools, they gain superpowers. The reason that that agents are getting really good at programming is not because they're like these geniuses that immediately spit out the perfect code. It's because they actually can hold tools just like us human engineers do. For example, take the Next.js framework which Vercel has created. It can go back and forth and read the errors and iterate through it and basically work like a human being would. And so you kind of can extrapolate this from you know every expert human job every knowledge worker there's a series of steps and tools that that we use that can be replicated by these agents and I think Anthropic has really run away so far with this idea of how to automate instead of coding you can think of as automating the operating system. Imagine that under the hood the agent is using a computer just like your engineer would, your designer would, your marketer would and then it gives you the output which is what you want, right? And I think it's slightly different from how we typically think about coding models. Codex by OpenAI is an extremely powerful coding model. In fact, you were mentioning Claudebot. This project sort of seemingly has come out of nowhere and now is giving everyone their own Jarvis assistant is how I explain it is automating computing and it's created by one guy.
Iron Man reference right.
Tony Stark Iron Man reference okay making sure.
Yeah yeah go take care of my laundry hey go open the door for me hey do this cook me a meal so we're kind of approaching this world or the holodeck of Star Trek right where there's just ambient computing everywhere and you can use the conversational interface to literally do anything.
Okay. And it's interesting looking into I want to get more into OpenClaw, but first I just noticed that you talked about Anthropic being really special and then you talked a little bit about OpenAI's Codex, but I mentioned this sort of at the top. It feels like Anthropic has stolen all the buzz not just among developers but it feels like among media maybe mainstream. Can you compare for me Claude Code versus OpenAI's Codex and is OpenAI on the back foot right now?
Yeah, I'll say look, Anthropic is really good at this task of automating your computer tool calling. Codex and OpenAI seem to be really good at expert software engineering tasks. So clearly they both have their strength and weaknesses. Within Vercel, I'm seeing that our most capable agentic engineers use a combination of models and tools. You might have the first idea, you go to v0, you might go to ChatGPT, you might when you're doing research, you go to ChatGPT Pro. So the reality is that we are in a world where the winners really are the developers and end users. I'll say this too, Anthropic was winning in the hearts and minds of developers. I think when it comes to that ad, you know, was it necessary to bring the comparison back to a consumer product and ads, I'm not sure. And at the same time, OpenAI is realizing that nailing coding might be the most I believe coding is the killer app of AI. I believe that's how we get to artificial super intelligence. So, it's a good time for both companies, I believe.
By the way, we're reading the comments, so keep sending them in on YouTube. But okay, you just said something like why did Anthropic have to go after OpenAI sort of on their strength right on the consumer side? But if you believe that coding is like the killer use case, does that make sense for Anthropic to do? Is Anthropic fighting OpenAI not just in the enterprise, but could you see that happening in consumer as well?
Well, I think Claudebot is a good example. Like imagine that every assistant and every magic AI tool that you're talking to under the hood, it actually has to use something like a coding model which is actually kind of interesting to think about, right? Like it's almost like...
Can you explain OpenClaw? Can you explain it to people that might not be familiar?
Yeah. It really is a huge disruption in how we interface with computers because every time I need to automate something, write a document, etc., I go to my computer and I launch applications and if I'm more technical I run commands and I write some code. Now take a step back and imagine that you're not going to use the computer directly. Let's let the agent use the computer and I interface to the agent over WhatsApp or Telegram. So this is how Claudebot or it got later renamed to Moldbot works. You talk to it like you would talk to a friend or your assistant over text message and you tell it what are emails I should pay attention to. I'll give you an example that I used because I built my own little Claudebot agent like this on Vercel. I wanted to unsubscribe from every spam newsletter. We have all this amazing AI and I keep getting spam and things that I didn't sign up for. So I told my assistant just go through all my email and hit unsubscribe for all the spam. This is what technologies like Claudebot can use for the user is the most user-friendly computing device in history because you just talk to it. Under the hood, believe it or not, is using these really advanced coding models. It's almost like having a super intelligent engineer at your disposal that you're talking to over text message and understands everything you want to do.
Right? I've heard it been called AI with arms, too. Just in the sense, you're right, you don't need to be at your computer. You can give it directions. That is also, to me at least, a very scary thought. I'm already uncomfortable giving...
So we launched a product called Sandbox and as the name implies we can put these agents in little sandboxes where we give them freedom because I'll tell you one of the secrets of AI is the more power and tools that you give these models the better they get. It seems really obvious but I've seen a lot of engineers...
That's why you want to connect everything.
That's right. Give them access to email, give them access to calendar. But you're going to need technologies like a firewall. You're going to need virtualization so that you know if it goes wrong, you can shut it down or you can snapshot it and restore it. So a lot of these workloads are going to move to the cloud. So there's reason to be bullish on cloud infrastructure and the large platforms that are going to run millions or trillions of these digital workers, which is how I like to think about them.
So okay so one guy created Claudebot which became Moldbot which is now OpenClaw. One guy created that and this was basically enabled by what Claude Code and Opus 4.5 was able to do you said it was very very sophisticated under the hood. My understanding correct me if I'm wrong is that Anthropic kind of put the brakes on it and so people started using a Chinese open source model Moonshot's Kimi to do all the work in the background and it's cheaper and more efficient. And I just saw a stat that Kimi is now, this is amazing, top of the leaderboard in terms of token usage on OpenRouter. How much of that is because of OpenClaw and was it wise for Anthropic to put the brakes on it?
