Nathaniel Whittemore

But they're not just using AI more, they're using it differently.

It's clear at this point that OpenAI views Codex as their most successful product.

At least their most successful product with the type of success that 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're 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 in 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 billion 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 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 are 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.