AI Power Grab: $25B Revenue, $250B Deals & the Vibe Coding Boom | 441

Dan Hafner: Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Dan Hafner here. I know it has been a minute since we came out with a new episode, but I wanted to come on here and talk a lot about ⁓ some very interesting news articles that have come out, some very interesting topics. I used to do this type of show, ⁓ or this type of episode a lot more often.

And I was like, man, I haven't done a done an episode in a little while been very, busy with a lot of things going on. ⁓ But I came across like a set of about four different ⁓ news articles that we're going to dig into today. Kind of be like a little bit of a throwback to those old episodes where I would kind of go through different stories and just kind of give my thoughts and opinions on things. ⁓ So we're going to get into that.

So the stories I want to cover today are the mythos or mythos, however you say it. model that was recently launched and then locked away by Anthropic. Very, very interesting story going on there. ⁓ OpenAI hit a very interesting milestone.

We're not going to just pick on one. We're going to go with both. So OpenAI hit 25 billion in revenue and they're eyeing an IPO possibly later this year, early 2027, who really knows. ⁓ Very interesting ⁓ story there.

The Vibe coding market. ⁓ has now neared a estimated value of around $5 billion and almost 63 % of users are not actual developers or a lot of people kind of like me when we got into this in this whole no code space. ⁓ Very interesting ⁓ market story there. ⁓ And then another one with ⁓ just another AI company going on out here is that ⁓ Elon Musk's company SpaceX has now XAI for a quarter of a trillion dollars, which is wild.

And I think that there's a lot of ⁓ very interesting things going on there. also acquired, I'm sorry, they didn't acquire, but they made a deal to potentially acquire a very big vibe coding tool called Cursor. ⁓ And they got some very interesting moves going on there over in the Elon Musk world. ⁓ So those are basically the big four stories that I wanna cover and talk about today.

So I'm very interested to dive into these, kind of give my thoughts and my opinions on these as someone kind of, just like you, just kind of in the trenches, building things, trying to build businesses, help other businesses with AI, with coding. And it's just a very, very exciting time to be alive and be in this business. So ⁓ as always, thank you all for joining this show. Please like and subscribe to the channel if you find value in this and share this episode.

with someone you think might also find value with it. So let's dive into it right now. So back to the first story, Anthropic came out with this model, and this is a little bit of a stale story. I realized that, ⁓ called ⁓ Claude Mythos, or Mythos.

I think it's Mythos. I'm gonna say Mythos. I don't really know the correct pronunciation. ⁓ This came out in early April.

The time I'm recording this, it's late April, but they're not going to publicly release this because it triggered a safety protocol that they set internally. ⁓ It's reportedly the first at the time of this, it was the first AI model to cross the 10 trillion parameter threshold, ⁓ which is, I can't even wrap my mind around the threshold, the context that goes into that. ⁓ Now, why does this story matter? Why did I want to talk about this?

The big significance of this is this is the first time a major ⁓ AI lab or AI company is building something supposedly so powerful that they voluntarily pulled the brakes on releasing it. ⁓ So one, that's either the most responsible thing that a tech company has ever done ⁓ in the history of ever or It's just the most effective like hype machine in history. Or there could be some computing issues and considerations to come into play there as well. Which one of these three was it?

Was it, you know, them just hyping themselves up too much and causing, you know, kind of putting whispers out there in the telephone game to make, you know, to make this sound like it's something that's very powerful? ⁓ I don't really think so. I think that there was there was other stories I was reading about banking executives. even people like Jamie Dimon, like kind of going into this being like, hey, we need to think about this and kind of look at this model because that was the big news story about it, right?

It was breaking through years long ⁓ unnoticed vulnerabilities in browser tools like Firefox, for example. And it was just like, holy crap, this thing is finding ⁓ vulnerabilities in things that were absolutely wild, right? I know this was a big shakeup in that kind of cybersecurity type realm, right? So either they were hyping the living crap out of it and it wasn't actually true.

⁓ Maybe it was an actual responsible move on their part where they saw it they're like, I don't think the world's ready for this kind of thing yet. I'm a little bit skeptical of that. I think I was talking with a colleague of mine and a friend of mine and I think it was really more of this third possibility. ⁓ which is, you know, the better these models get, the more expensive they get.

And maybe there was just literally not enough computing power to be able to like put this out there in a profitable way or in a way that made sense financially, ⁓ which is kind of another very interesting, you know, kind of way to look at it. What's the truth? I don't know, ⁓ but it's very, very interesting to see that I mean, does it validate, know, the whole big story, why Anthropic blew up and was going crazy was like the government contracting story that we covered a while ago.

That was kind of the moment when they kind of came out as this, we're a hero because we're not allowing the government to access all these things. I've recently, I'm not a big ex guy, I'm not on ex, I can care less about what goes on on ex. But apparently, I was talking to my friend as well and he was saying that, There's another side of the story that I was completely unaware of that was talking about how, know, enthrombies actually people saw that as, ⁓ as an act of almost treason of saying, why wouldn't you allow those things?

Or there's, there's tech oligarchs that are, that are controlling this stuff, right? That that's like, what if there is an AI out there like mythos or something even more powerful that only ⁓ the elite get to use that only the ultra rich get to use the Jeff Bezos is the the Elon Musk's the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world the the Dario, know the Sam Altman's whatever I mean, that's that's a whole nother topic in and of itself, but You know is this responsible safety? ⁓ Is this just trying to is this is this an AI Cold War right?

Remember how we won the Cold War over the Soviet Union we literally spent our way and hyped up what we were doing, even though we were actually building cool stuff, ⁓ the USSR was trying to keep up and trying to do this and they just literally couldn't do it and spent themselves into collapse, right? ⁓ Side note, I think that's starting to happen to America in and of itself, but I don't wanna get into politics right now. ⁓ But could that be something that's going on? These companies are starting to actually come out with ⁓ different models and different tools that are forcing the competition to look at things differently.

Remember when this happened with DeepSeek, right? That was a whole big shakeup in this thing is, hey, these models are super expensive, this stuff is super expensive to run. And then DeepSeek comes out and it's like, not really. That like shifted a ton of things.

People were like, why, are we getting ripped off? Like what's going on? So this was a very, very interesting story. If you have not looked into this mythos, pullback and this whole story, I encourage you to do your own research on it.

Very, very interesting thing. ⁓ Okay, let's go to the next one. OpenAI hits 25 billion in revenue, eyeing an IPO, the AI industry is now grown up. So OpenAI crossed the $25 billion mark in annualized revenue and is reportedly taking early steps towards a public listing, potentially as soon as late this year, 2026.

⁓ Anthropic is closing in at 19 billion, so they're hot on their heels. know, chat GPT 5.5 just dropped, I believe, about a week ago or so. And it's really combining all of these tools of the chat, of codecs, and the browser capabilities, kind of in an all-in-one tool.

It's pretty interesting, pretty wild for it to see that coming up. You know, why this story matters, I think is, These aren't startup numbers anymore. These aren't like play numbers. mean, 25 billion in revenue, that's a serious, serious ⁓ level of actually ⁓ growing and making some real caching.

You know what I mean? ⁓ The AI industry is maturing. It's maturing at an exponentially fast rate. But the tools that small agencies, individuals like you and I are building on top of are being backed by companies with these Wall Street expectations, right?

So this is going to change how they're pricing things, which features they're going to prioritize like ads and who they actually serve, right? We've already seen the kind of going back to the other story is me is mythos only meant for the super high level spenders inside of Anthropic is 5.5 or, or is there going to be a super secret, ⁓ you know, model that Chachipiti only gives to their highest ad spenders? Potentially, I don't know, it's very, very interesting.

⁓ But the question to ask is like, what happens to this world once these companies are public, once Anthropic, once OpenAI ⁓ are publicly traded companies? ⁓ When the platforms that you and I build on are answering to shareholders, what does that mean for our tools, for our pricing, for our methods of building business. ⁓ Instead of it just kind of being this black box of like there's a CEO and a board and it's just a privately held company, to now it's an openly traded, publicly audited ⁓ company that you and I can own stock in.

We can literally put our money into something like Robinhood or whatever, just buy stock in these companies. It's gonna be very, very interesting. Very interesting to see how all of this goes, but... ⁓ You know, these companies, would think at some point, at least in 2027, we're gonna see an IPO for OpenAI and Anthropic, I would believe.

And I know we're gonna get to that story here in a second, but SpaceX, I believe, is going with an IPO later this year, which is supposed to just be like, absolutely bananas. I don't know a whole lot about that game, so I'm not gonna get into that, but it's pretty wild. Actually, let's skip down to that. I'll come back to the Vibe Coding Store.

That's a good segue into this. ⁓ SpaceX has bought and acquired XAI for about $250 billion. That's pretty wild, which is even more wild considering that the company SpaceX, which is controlled by Elon Musk, purchased the XAI company, which is also owned and controlled by Elon Musk. He literally bought his own company for billions and billions of dollars.

I mean, for me, I was thinking about how to buy one of my specific apps that I built inside of my own business under the umbrella of my business. And we're talking like, you know, nowhere near billions of dollars. And I was just like, how do I make all this work? And how is this logistical?

Like, this is huge big boy stuff, right? But this story caught my eye because this is a very, very, if you really think about the moves that are being made at these levels, especially with what Elon's doing here, this is, pretty nuts of like kind of consolidating this block. And then this isn't even included in the story, but then the story came out about the deal where they are going to potentially acquire Cursor, which is a very, very powerful AI coding agent model, right? And I think that deal was they have the, I think by the end of the year, can either, they have the option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion.

or pay them $10 billion for work performed, right? It's nuts, but like they're consolidating all of this for, you know, have OpenAI, you have Anthropic, you have Google, and now you have, excuse me, you have the Musk SpaceX XAI conglomerate, right? Which, you know, Grok is their big model and tool. So.

And then I haven't even mentioned the Starlink infrastructure that's all tied in with this. Like if you really sit back and look at Elon's master plan of this stuff, it's kind of wild how all of it ties together. And I'll be very interested to see it, where it goes in the next 20 to 30 years. ⁓ But it also makes me nervous that there are...

The control of all of these is being consolidated in the hands of a few unelected people. It's never a good thing in history when you look back on this kind of stuff. know, like there was a big time back in the, know, around over a hundred years ago when you had families like the Rockefellers and Carnegie's ⁓ that were, that just got super ultra stupidly wealthy. ⁓ Which is a great thing about this country that you can, you can use the systems of capitalism to do so, right?

But Is there a certain point where ⁓ monopolies need to be broken up? ⁓ I think this can get a little political in some regards, but I would also, I've been very clear about this on the show, I'm very clear about my personal feelings towards a lot of things. I ⁓ have become a person just through my life experiences and things that I have independently researched and done on my own. ⁓ I tend to be a very, ⁓ libertarian minded person, I tend to be very, very skeptical of ⁓ governments and media and take it for what it is.

That's just my independent thinking. That's an entrepreneurial type of mindset ⁓ of trust, but verify, right? ⁓ When you really sit back and you look at, know, the... act the acquisition of, you a space company buying a social media slash AI company slash a coding ⁓ company and like where it's all going.

⁓ You know, it's really cool to think about if in just the logistics of things. But, you know, does it pose a huge risk in terms of, you know, power consolidating in the ⁓ in the in the tech oligarchy? Yeah. Yeah, it does.

that worries me. That worries me. ⁓ Is there anything I can do about it? No.

But I can talk about it and I can give my honest opinion on my show just like this for someone, whoever's listening to think about this as well. There is this famous saying that power corrupts. Power absolutely corrupts or something to that nature. And I'm not saying that these guys are are already corrupt or becoming corrupt or will become corrupt.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. ⁓ I'm very interested to see where this game goes. It's becoming game of Monopoly and that inherently, inherently worries me a little bit. ⁓ Okay, final story for today.

And this is where I wanted to go with this whole thing. is gonna be very fun to talk about. The Vibe Coding Market just... hit 4.

7 billion, almost 5 billion, in valuation, and 63 % of users aren't developers. I would probably guess that number's low, to be honest. So what's happening? The VibeCoding slash AI app builder market hit $4.

7 billion in 2026 with tools like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt leading the charge. Over 138 tools are now on the market, which I've also think is low. A notable trend, 63 % of users are non-developers, meaning clients, founders, and business owners are building things themselves. ⁓ I mean, yeah, this is what I've been preaching about ⁓ from years ago.

Like this is what's happening and it's the most exciting ⁓ time to be in this business and in this world. ⁓ Anyone with an idea can actually bring something to life. I will say I've noticed more and more that that's not necessarily true. I'm actually working on a new ⁓ service offering here at Dapper No Code that is hoping to ⁓ kind of fix that issue because I see more and more people building things on their own, but not really succeeding in managing them all that well.

And I get this too because we're managing over 50 client projects simultaneously built on all of these tools and it's a lot. Like there's a lot to keep track of. So I'm not gonna get any more into that. That is something that's coming down the line I might have ready hopefully this year, ⁓ but it's a new product.

It's gonna be a new tool. It's gonna be very, very, very useful. So that's just a little teaser for you guys still listening in here. ⁓ But this flood of non-development builders.

just creates this massive opportunity for people like me. If you're thinking about getting into an agency type of deal like Dapr No Code, where you can build tools for people, manage tools for people using these tools, there's never been a better opportunity. But there's also a threat, and I've worked through this as well, where people don't really need you anymore because they don't need a software development team. They don't need an entire coding department in their team.

Now we've proven that that's not quite the case. There's probably a gray area depending on the size of the business, what your needs are, how all those things are going. ⁓ I don't think that software development is dying. I think it's only growing, but you gotta know how to use these tools.

You gotta know how to think through them. I call it thinking through the machine. ⁓ And it's a blessing and it's a nightmare all at once. I was just reading an article this morning in a newsletter about the inherent security risks that are coming with all of these.

And that's one thing that we've been getting into and going through all of our client projects on of, you know, going through and figuring out what can we do to, you know, harden these apps because it's one thing to go through and be like, build me this awesome, cool thing that has all this client data and all these API connections and da da da da da. And then boom, you end up exposing your API keys, which is like really the biggest you know, issue and then all of a sudden someone steals your open API key or your anthropic key.

And the next thing you know, you got a $5,000 bill the next day because somebody used it to run their tool on and just racked up an insanely high bill and then you're screwed. Right. So that's one thing that we've kind of gone back on and been trying to like harden and figure out with our client apps. How do we make them more secure?

How do we make them less vulnerable? How can we, ⁓ you know, restructure them, give them performance updates? And that's all part of the new service offering and the different thing that we're actually working on building here. Hopefully by Q3, hopefully maybe Q4 of what we're doing here inside of Dapr NoCo.

I mean, I think this vibe coding market, think it's vastly underestimated at 4.7 billion. I think it's probably a lot more in the 138 tools now on the market. I think there's probably a lot more than that.

I think somebody just counted and stopped counting when they got that high, because they were just tired of it, or asked AI and he only found 130. I think there's a lot more. I've probably used over that in the five years that I've been doing this, six years I've been doing this. But it's a very exciting time to be alive.

It's a very exciting time to be in this space. I mean, the amount of things that... One of the things we've been doing recently also has been actually migrating legacy tools that we built on other no code platforms into these new platforms, into a tool like Lovable or Cursor, right? ⁓ Which has been a very interesting, very exciting, ⁓ I mean, it's a kind of a difficult process, but it's unbelievable.

Like we were literally able to take a client app that we built ⁓ you know, in like an old no code drag and drop builder tool and rebuild it with the same functionality, but 9,000 times better using an AI app code coding builder, right? I mean, it's just been without the data loss too, like actually mapping over the data and mapping over the functionality. And then being like, okay, here was version A, your version was cool, right? Now we have version B, which is just not only looks and functions the same way and looks better.

But then we can add on top of that ⁓ just very, very easy, right? Client comes to us and say, hey, we wanna be able to do this in the app. used to be very more, that used to be a lot more involved over here on your other platforms. Now we can just literally take that email, copy paste it, get the prompt ready, send it off, boom.

Two minutes later, three minutes later, we have that feature live and published. and their app. It's unbelievable. And then you can do this yourself too.

You can go in and say, hey, I need this to look different. need whatever you wanna do. So learning these tools is definitely paramount. I think this is where the world of software development is going.

I'm glad I got into this early. I'm glad I got into this hot and heavy, I call it. Like we went all in on this early this year and it has absolutely exploded the Dapper No-Code business. It's just, you're start seeing So many new things all over the place.

Like I'm teasing this new service offering we're having later this year. ⁓ Just an awesome, awesome time to be alive. So yeah, so those are the four stories I wanted to dive into today. We're about about 24 minutes.

⁓ So I thank you all for listening and tuning into this episode. I really appreciate all of you as well. That's it for today's episode. If you wanna learn more, you connect with me.

can find me on LinkedIn. Just search Dan Hafner, Dapper NoCode. That is me. Or you can go to dappernocode.

com. You can send a message directly through the chat icon there at the website. I read everything. ⁓ Personally, it goes right to my Slack notifications and we'll be in touch very, very soon.

All right, guys, that is it for this episode of the Tech Bytes podcast. I'm Dan Hafner. See you next time.