The State of AI: Macro, Apps, and Consumer

**Jen Kha** (0:00)
For the last few years, the biggest question in the AI was which model would win. The next phase may be less about the models, and more about what gets built on top of them. In this episode, Jen Kha sits down with Anish Acharya to unpack where AI goes next. From an increasingly competitive model landscape, to the explosion of applications turning raw intelligence into products people actually use. They discuss why AI models aren't becoming commodities, where open-weight models have an advantage, and why Anish believes the application layer can capture significant value even as frontier labs continue to grow. Then they turn to consumer AI, where personal agents are beginning to shop, manage inboxes, and take action on our behalf.
Anish explains why this could be a renaissance for consumer builders, and why a new generation of founders may need to think much bigger about what AI makes possible.

**Jen Kha** (0:58)
To help me break down all things around this incredible abundance, I'm going to bring up Anish Acharya.
Awesome. Awesome. Hey, Anish. Anish and I were at GP offsite earlier this week, and he shared with me that he's already running Grokbot and has purchased a bunch of jeans for him. So Anish, do you want to drop what you purchased?

**Anish Acharya** (1:20)
True story. True story. Yes. I'm going to reveal an important secret, protected IP, which is that I mostly wear Frame Jeans. Frame is a great brand. And Grokbots is an awesome product, actually. I'd say the kind of defining characteristic of Grokbots is sort of resourcefulness. I went to bed a few nights to go and said, hey, buy me a pair of jeans that are inspired by these. I took a photo of my current jeans. I said, don't spend more than $500 and get it done. I woke up in the morning and it had researched, found a pair, same fit, different wash, used my credit card, purchased them and they're on the way. So I think that is going to be something that we see more and more of. We already have the capabilities and now a lot of the kind of unlock will come from resourcefulness and also the kind of product architecture delivered in a way that most consumers can understand.
Awesome.

**Jen Kha** (2:04)
Awesome. Awesome.

**Anish Acharya** (2:04)
Yeah.

**Jen Kha** (2:05)
I told my team that I'm going to set my bot to finally take care of the pile of things I've been promising my husband that I've run a cell for the last two years. That is the project for this weekend. So Anish, we had asked the question earlier, which one of today's AI leaders will be the clear winner in three years from now? What's your take?

**Anish Acharya** (2:22)
I'm a many winners guy. I'm in good company with many of you. If you look at what's happened in the last two weeks, XAI went from not even being a real contender on the model side to being one of three. So we extraordinarily went from a two-horse race to a three-horse race, and even more broadly over the course of the year, we went from Anthropic feeling like they were so dominant, they could do no wrong, to OpenAI who's just had an excellent three months. The new models are exceptional, the new Codex harness and Chad GPT desktop app is very well done, and we're seeing this sort of specialization in different directions of these labs. They're both growing like crazy despite each other's continued successes, XAI and is open-weight as well. So I'm definitely in the many-waters camp.

**Jen Kha** (3:04)
Yeah, it's interesting to see the sentiment also on X, which is not always a perfect weather rain for the future, but oftentimes, a early indicator of at least where developer sentiment is. And there's been a lot of pushback from Claude, it seems like, recently, on people in terms of token usage, etc. And so developers tend to be fair-weather friends on these things. They will go over the latest and greatest and very best model, isn't in particularly the last six to eight weeks. I think we're going to see some very interesting traction in terms of the flow of activity. But obviously, Anthropix is going public later this year, and also there's a lot of keen interest on this. So with that, that actually brings us straight into the topic of discussion today. Where and what is next in the next frontier of intelligence?

**Anish Acharya** (3:45)
Amazing. Thank you, Jen. So let me tee this up for everybody, and please hop in if you got questions. So let's first cover the kind of macro and what's happening at a market level. Then we're going to hop into the application layer broadly and talk through why applications are the productization of the intelligence primitive. Then finally, let's talk about consumer. The launch of GrockBots and a few other products, it's actually been a very fun couple of weeks in consumer.