Is something big really happening & is the leaked OpenAI ad real?
And, who really won the Super Bowl?
It’s Episode 15, which just so happens to be our Valentine’s Day special (and, coincidentally, the week of my 15th wedding anniversary—Feb 8th, to be exact). While I scramble to get flowers, Austin and I sat down to unpack a massive week in the world of GTM, AI, and ad-tech.
If you missed the live show, we went deep on the viral “Something Big Is Happening” post, dissected the Super Bowl’s $8M commercials (and the leaked ones that didn’t air), and looked at why independent ad-tech is having a panic attack while AppLovin prints money.
Here’s the recap of the conversation, plus a few massive headlines that we didn’t have time to cover live.
1. “Something big is happening”
We started with Matt Shumer’s viral post claiming that since early February, AI has crossed a threshold where it’s no longer just a chatbot—it’s an agent capable of doing real work. Austin validated this with his own experience shifting from Cursor to Claude Code. He built an entire SaaS application in a few days by prompting teams of agents.
The Takeaway: The gap is widening between those using ChatGPT in a browser and those using agents in their terminal. Austin put it perfectly: if you understand the “grammar” of the web (APIs, HTML), you can now act as a senior engineer or data analyst. If you don’t, you risk being left behind.
2. The Super Bowl: 25% AI and a “sexy Raspberry Pi”
The stats are in: Viewership was down slightly (avg 124.9M) but hit an all-time peak of 137.8M during the halftime show. But the real story was the tech. 25% of all commercials involved AI in some capacity, up 400% from last year.
We talked about the weirdness of the OpenAI “Codex” ad, but the internet was obsessed with the leaked OpenAI hardware ad that never aired. It showed a Alexander Skarsgård using a mysterious device—which Austin hilariously described as a “sexy Raspberry Pi”. OpenAI claims its a fake ad!
The Glitch: Despite the hype, I looked at Google Trends for Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude during the game. Result? Flatline. Zero movement. It’s a reminder that “brand awareness” doesn’t always equal immediate search intent. The winner? Instacart. Their “Bananas” ad actually moved metrics because it tied directly to a product feature (ripeness selection) in the app.
I wonder if this was a distraction tactic from one of their competitors. So strange!
3. Top news that we discussed live
We covered a lot of other items live and skipped a few which I’ve summarized below. Here is what you need to know:
YouTube Overtakes Reddit
We mentioned this briefly, but the data is official: YouTube has surpassed Reddit as the most cited source in AI answers. Video SEO is now critical for AI visibility. If your product isn’t explained in a transcript on YouTube, the models might not know you exist.
AdTech Valuation Chaos: Liftoff vs. AppLovin
We touched on Liftoff Mobile shelving their IPO due to “AI valuation uncertainty”. It’s a stark contrast to AppLovin, which is now valued at $150B. The market is effectively saying that if you don’t have a defensible AI moat or a platform-level advantage, the exit window is closed.
Databricks Genie
Databricks hit a $5.4B revenue run-rate, driven largely by “Lakehouse Genie”—a natural language interface for data. This is exactly what Austin and I were doing manually with Claude Code: asking plain English questions of complex datasets. The difference? Databricks is productizing it for the enterprise.
MarTech Budgets are Back
According to the Stensul Report released this week, 79% of marketers plan to increase MarTech budgets in 2026. The focus isn’t on buying more tools, but on “AI reskilling” (57% of teams). This aligns perfectly with our conversation about the need for non-technical marketers to learn how to wield these new agentic tools.