Speaker
Ben
45 bits across the podcasts they've appeared on
Disney signed a $1B, 3-year deal with OpenAI in December 2025 to use Sora with 200+ licensed characters, then canceled it 90 days later when OpenAI shut Sora down.
Anthropic confirmed three separate product-layer bugs ran simultaneously from March 4 to April 16, silently degrading Claude's performance for users.
The cost of one million AI tokens fell from $60 with GPT-3 DaVinci to 6 cents with open-source Llama 4 — an 850-fold decrease in roughly five years.
A developer using AI for coding burns 60 to 100 times more tokens than a casual ChatGPT user, meaning the compute shortage is driven by a tiny fraction of users.
On a coding benchmark, Anthropic's Mythos model scored 78 while GPT-5.4 scored 58 — a 20-point gap that suggests a potentially different underlying architecture.
Over the past three months, Claude's search volume grew 120% while ChatGPT's grew only 15%, signaling a major shift toward Anthropic among developers.
Kennen Frost sold his previous company Skio for $105 million in cash before founding Icon.
Ben noted that Block's layoffs represent the largest percentage-based job cut of any S&P 500 company ever recorded.
Roughly 5% of top Anthropic users account for approximately 80% of all token usage on the platform.
Kennen Frost reportedly spent $12 million to acquire the domain icon.com.
Mythos preview discovered a 27-year-old security vulnerability in OpenBSD, one of the most hardened operating systems ever built.
One user was reported to have consumed 865 million tokens in a single month, costing approximately $2,500 in API fees.
Ben pays $200/month for a Claude Max subscription but consumes roughly 500 million tokens — equivalent to $12,500 at API pricing — demonstrating how broken subscription economics are.
Claude Code's default reasoning was quietly downgraded from 'high' to 'medium' for an entire month without users being informed.
OpenAI was reportedly spending $15 million every single day to run Sora, totalling roughly $5.5 billion per year for a social app generating no revenue.
