Exploring Capabilities of Enhanced Codex

**Jayden Schafer** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast, I'm your host, Jayden Schafer. Today on the show, I want to talk about OpenAI fighting back against the giant onslaught of features Anthropic has been pushing. Some negative PR Anthropic has been getting, but at the same time, an incredible new tool called Claude Design that just came out. I also want to talk about where some VC dollars are going in the AI space, some surprisingly interesting things there, and a new term called Token Maxing. In addition, OpenAI just massively beefed up Codex for desktop control, memory, and in-app browser, and over 100 plugin integrations. Basically, this is them swinging directly at Anthropix Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and I think it matters a lot for where editing agents is going to be going in the future. So let's get into it. Before we do, I wanted to mention AI Box. The thing I keep hearing from people is that they're paying for Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, even Mid Journey. And by the time you get all of that added up, you're likely $70 or $80 a month across a bunch of different logins. AI Box gives you access to over 80 different AI models in one interface. All of this is just $8.99 a month. If you want to get access to it, there's a link in the description to aibox.ai. And in addition, we have something called the AI Box Builder, where you can essentially link together multiple AI models. We build up the entire workflow for you, and you via build tools without needing to know any code at all. I'm not a developer, and I built this for other people that are not developers. If you want to check it out, there's a link in the description to aibox.ai.
Okay, the first thing I want to talk about is a company called Factory. So this is an AI coding startup. They're focused specifically on enterprise engineering teams. They just closed $150 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation. Koshla Ventures, Lead the Round, Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Blackstone all were participating in this. The founder is named Matten Grinberg. He was a physics PhD student at Berkeley. He basically cold emailed Sequoia partner Sean Maguire in 2023, and they apparently were good friends. They bonded over physics research. Maguire convinced him to drop out, and Sequoia seeded the company. Their customer list already included Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks. So obviously, this is a very enterprise focused. They're not targeting individual developers in any way. They're focused on the enterprise. Grinberg's pitch is why factory, I think, has differentiated their model flexibility. They basically can let you switch between Claw, Deepseek, whatever makes sense. Although honestly, Cursor does that too, as do I think most of the serious players at this point. What I think this does tell us is that even with Anthropic and OpenAI and Cursor already in the market, enterprise AI coding still has room for some category specific players. Morgan Stanley isn't going to let some random developer tool run inside their network unless it's built with their compliance and security posture in mind. I think that's basically the gap that factory is filling. And I think $1.5 billion in their current valuation says that VCs are believing there is a real gap here. Of course, Cloud Code is trying to get in there as well. And you can look at things like Cognizant just getting, you know, all of their employees, 350,000 of them on to Cloud and all the Anthropic tools. So I think there's probably competition from a lot of players, but it's interesting that they're carving out a niche there. OK, the next thing I want to talk about is a brand new tool from Anthropic called Cloud Design. It's a research preview right now. It's available to Pro, Max, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers, and it's powered by Cloud Opus 4.7, the model that just came out a day or two ago. So this is what Anthropic just shipped.
And basically, you can describe what you want, a pitch deck, a one-pager, a landing page prototype, and Cloud generates a first draft. You've probably seen it kind of make web pages before.
So it's interesting because you actually can use Cloud Design to kind of come up with the mockups ahead of time. And then you can refine it by either directly editing it or just talking to it. I actually appreciate both of these options as I've used a lot of tools. Like, I mean, I don't want to throw too much shade at Lovable because I know they do have some direct editing features. It actually never worked super good for me in the past. Maybe they're better now. But in the past, Lovable would have something where you could describe the website or whatever you're trying to build. It would generate the design. And then you're supposed to be able to click on it and edit directly.