The AI Race Just Got a SpaceX-Sized Twist

Today on the AI Daily Brief, not one, but two main episodes crammed into one. The first story is that XAI is being acquired by SpaceX, with the second main being all about OpenAI's new codex app and the shifting paradigm of how we work with agents. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Assembly, Robots and Pencils, Blitsy, and Superintelligent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe directly on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show or pretty much anything else regarding the show, you can go to a idailybrief.ai. That's my vibe coded command center where I keep everything with frequent changes, frankly. Right now, the thing that I would like to point you to, which I have been pointing you to all week, is this January AI pulse survey. I'm gonna leave it open for probably just a couple more days. I basically wanna give people better access to actual data around what people are doing in aggregate. It's things like which AI models are being used most and for what use cases. Give you a little preview right now, Anthropic is cleaning up in the most used model use case. In any case, anyone who fills this out will be thanked with access to the results a week before I share it with anyone else. Mostly though, you're just contributing to better overall knowledge of what's happening in the world of AI. Now the last thing that I wanna point out today is that we have the rarest of AI Daily Brief episodes, which is the double main. Simply put, there were two stories which were too big to be shoved in the headlines, and I'm pretty convinced that we have some more big stories coming down the pipeline later this week, so I didn't wanna wait on them either. The first is about xAI and SpaceX merging. The second is about the codex app. And with that said, let's dive in. When I was doing my twenty twenty six predictions, one of the things that we were looking at was the competitive race between the big foundation labs. In a lot of ways, it was kind of easy to see where all the different players were relative to one another coming into this year, Anthropic ahead on coding and had started to use that to get ahead on enterprise, OpenAI still having the best consumer recognition by far and seeing pretty steady gains in how consumers were switching, for example, from Google search to ChatGPT search, but at the same time really losing out on some of the momentum on the enterprise encoding side to Anthropic and on the more general side to Google's Gemini, meanwhile as Google Gemini was coming into the year with the wind …