Navigating the Nuances of Anthropic's IPO

**Jayden Schafer** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast, I'm your host, Jayden Schafer. Today on this podcast, we have some wild stories. One of them being that Mark Zuckerberg, while many people have called him a robot for many years, is officially creating an AI version of himself that's going to take questions at meetings. Apple is reportedly testing four different designs for smart glasses that they're gonna launch with AI embedded in them. Versel's CEO went on stage and said that the company is ready to IPO because AI agents are basically deploying 30% of the apps on their platform. Anthropic temporarily banned the creator of OpenClaw, and the Trump administration is apparently encouraging major banks to test Anthropic's Mythos model. There's a ton going on, including all of the drama with Sam Altman's home being attacked by a Maltav cocktail. Oh my gosh, this is a wild timeline. Let's get into all of it. Before we do, if you're someone who works with AI regularly and you're bouncing between different tools, you should absolutely check out AI Box, my own startup at AI Box.AI. We give you over 70 models in one place. And the part that I think is really underrated is the automation builder. You just describe what you want in plain English, no code, no workflow, no diagrams, and it will build the tool for you. It's $8.99 a month to get access to all 80 of the top models. That's image, audio, video, text. You also get our no code AI app builder. This should save you a ton of money compared to paying for all of these different tools separately. I've been using it and it's becoming one of the things I cannot live without. There's a link in the description to aibox.ai. The first story I want to talk about today is Apple testing new diagrams for smart glasses. You know, I'm a huge sucker for smart glasses. I'm not even a huge meta stand throughout my life, I would say, but I think that their smart glasses are phenomenal. I think a lot of other players in the industry are noticing that according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is actively testing four different frame designs for smart glasses that they're gonna, they're like their goal is to go sell these in 2027 I mean, obviously this is a good play. They have the technology because they have the Apple VR headset, which I honestly forget it exists until I have to go to the Apple Store to get something done with my laptop recently. I had to do that. And I saw them on display and people were trying them on. I just feel like those were a really big flop as far as a product goes. Meta might have kind of baited them into the industry, but the glasses are not a flop. I know a ton of people that will actively wear Meta Ray bands around with AI and cameras embedded in them. And so I think Apple knows that this is a good play. According to Tim Cook, there are two oval or circular options. There's a bunch of different sizes. They're also looking at black, blue, light brown. And I think what's interesting is these aren't going to have displays. There's no AR overlays. There's no kind of like mixed reality. Even though they have the VR headset, they're going to basically let you take photos and videos. You can answer calls, you can play music, and you can interact with, of course, their new upgraded AI series. So functionally, I think it's a lot closer to what Meta is doing with their Ray-Ban glasses today than anything like the Vision Pro or what Meta is going to be doing in the future, what Google is working on in the future with augmented reality and glasses. I think this is Apple basically accepting reality. The Vision Pros did not land the way they hoped, and so they're going to hopefully move into something that has a lot more market appeal and people are a lot more excited about. Something else that I thought was very fascinating right now, Vercell's CEO is Guillaume Rauch, which if you don't follow him on X, by the way, he's a legend and drops some really great insights into what's going on with AI. So I highly recommend giving him a follow. He recently said at the company's annual recurring revenue has gone from about $100 million at the start of 2024 to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February this year. When he was asked about an IPO, he basically said that Vercell is quote, very much a working public company and that it's quote, ready and getting more ready every day. Personally, I don't think any of this is surprising. In the last two weeks, I think I've spun up five different projects where I've moved them off of other hosting providers and put them on Vercell because it integrates so well with Cloud Code. And if you ask Cloud Code, like where should I host my, you know, Cloud Code app, it's gonna say, well, why don't you try Netlify or Vercell? And Vercell is, you know, a slicker looking company than Netlify. So it's a no-brainer, right? Like what features should they have? I don't know, but Cloud Code recommended it. So I set up five of my websites on Vercell. In all seriousness though, I'm on their free tier. I'll probably get bumped up to their paid tier here soon, but I put so many projects on there. Vercell is an absolute legend. And because it has a API, integrates with Cloud Code very easily. I don't go into Vercell and set up anything. I don't know what the inside of it looks like. I don't know how to, you know, point my name servers there. I don't have to do any of that. I just tell Cloud Cowork, hey, you know, I'm building an app. Go to my domain registrar, point it at Vercell, get everything set up for me, and it does it all. So, Vercell is a huge winner in this AI race, and it's kind of interesting because obviously, Anthropic is coming out of the gate and just killing a bunch of software industries. There's also a bunch of, I feel like they're infrastructure, right? Like servers and databases, right? You have like Superbase. There's a lot of these companies that I think integrated with AI are just phenomenal companies. And I mean, look, 30% of the apps running on Vercell's platform right now came from AI agents, not humans writing code. 100% of the apps that I have on Vercell are coming from agents, not me, because there's no way I want to do that. So I think this is definitely the direction that the market's going in. And Vercell has really, you know, I think they've phenomenally captured that in particular. The next thing I want to talk about, speaking of Anthropic, is their temporary ban on the creator of OpenClaw. So Peter Steinberger, he created OpenClaw, basically, you know, open source AI coding tool. It went super viral. He recently posted on X and he said that Anthropic had suspended his account for, quote, suspicious activity. Basically, this happened shortly after Anthropic changed their pricing so that Claude subscriptions no longer covered usage through third party tools like OpenClaw. And of course, he created OpenClaw. I was kind of hired or acquired by OpenAI.