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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Monday, February 9, 2026. I'm Brad McCullough. Today, Sam Altman assures staff that OpenAI had a good week, but is Anthropic definitively growing faster at this point? Is the CapEx spend about to eat all of Silicon Valley's free cash flow while Apple sits out the party and the crypto.com guy runs the same playbook? But now with AI.com here's what you missed today in the world of tech. CNBC has seen internal Slack messages where Sam Altman is telling staff that ChatGPT is, quote, back to exceeding 10% monthly growth and OpenAI plans to release an updated chat model this week, quote in his message on Friday, Altman said OpenAI's coding product, Codex, grew about 50% from a week ago. Codex competes directly with Anthropic's Claude Code, which has seen a wave of adoption over the last year. OpenAI launched a new codecs model, GPT 5.3 codecs, last week, as well as a standalone app for users with Apple computers. Altman said Codex's growth is, quote, insane, according to the internal message. This was a great week, altman wrote. It was also a contentious week. Altman and other senior executives took to social media to respond to swipes from Anthropic, which ran super bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI's decision to run ads within ChatGPT. In a post on X, Altman said that the commercials were deceptive and that OpenAI would obviously never run ads in the the way Anthropic depicts them. Today, OpenAI will officially begin testing ads within ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Last month, the company said the ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot's answers, and will not influence ChatGPT's responses. In private meetings, company executives are highlighting OpenAI's strength with consumers, growing enterprise business and access to compute, according to one person who asked not to be named because the talks are private. OpenAI has been circulating charts as part of the discussions. One chart shows that Codex, based on internal data, is eating into Claude Code's market share, according to a screenshot seen by cnbc. End quote. The information says that this year's projected CapEx ramp up for all the big tech behemoths will all but wipe out free cash flow for the likes of Amazon, Google and Meta, potentially forcing stock buyback cuts or more bar borrowing by them. Most of the big tech companies in recent years have begun returning cash to shareholders through dividends and buying back stock. Google and Meta platforms, for instance, do both. But that could be difficult this year, with capital expenditures aimed at expanding computing capacity for AI almost entirely absorbing the cash their operations generate. Google and Meta have already started to scale back their stock buybacks. Cutting off the dividend, though, could be tricky, as both companies only introduced the payouts in 2024, which made their stocks more appealing to investors. Amazon won't have the same, as it hasn't bought back stock since 2022 and has never paid a dividend. But its projected capex this year of $200 billion is higher than the $178 billion in cash from operations analysts estimate it will produce, according to S and P Global Market Intelligence, which means, unlike the other companies, it will burn cash anyway. Amazon issued $15 billion in bonds in November, beefing up its cash position, so it had $123 billion in cash on hand as of December 31st. That gives it a sizable cushion. Still, it is in talks to invest tens of billions in OpenAI, the information has reported, which will reduce that cash pile meaningfully. On Friday, Amazon signaled its intention to borrow more money, filing a registration statement with the securities and Exchange Commission that gives it the ability to quickly sell bonds, end quote. Funny enough, as I was writing that segment, Bloomberg was reporting that Alphabet plans to raise around $15 billion from a US high grade dollar bond sale as it seeks to finance $185 billion in 2026 CAPEX spend Alphabet raised $17.5 billion in a this past November, but remember, who isn't participating in this capex party yet anyway? Apple. Apple, whose capital expenditure is just a fraction of its peers, is the only big tech company that actually saw its capex decline year on year in Q4, decreasing 19% to a mere $2.37 billion. Quoting Sherwood Amazon expects its 2026 capex to surge to $200 billion. Google is aiming for 175 to 180 billion. DOL estimates it will spend between 115 and $135 billion. All of those figures came in well above expectations and for the most part have weighed on their stocks. Microsoft didn't give a formal 2026 CAPEX outlook, but if its peers are any indication, spending will likely exceed the roughly $114 billion Wall street expects for the calendar year. For better or worse, Apple has stuck to its own path with AI. As we've argued before, it's embracing AI, but is not an AI company. Instead, it's chosen a hybrid model relying on both first and third party data centers, a move that keeps a infrastructure spending off its balance sheet. And while Apple has said it expects Capex to increase as it invests more heavily in AI, particularly to support its private cloud compute, those outlays remain minimal compared with its peers. You can see that approach reflected in Apple's decision to use Google's Gemini rather than an in house model to power the next generation of Siri and Apple Intelligence. The Google deal, reportedly worth about $1 billion a year, gives Apple access to a top tier AI model for pennies on the dollar compared to what other big tech companies are spending to build their own. Of course, it also means Apple won't fully own a technology that some see as powering the next industrial revolution. But if that revolution fails to materialize or takes longer than expected, Apple won't be left holding the most expensive bag in Silicon Valley history. End Quote. ByteDance has debuted Seed Dance 2.0, a new version of its AI video generation model that can produce multi shot scenes. And let me tell you listener, if you search around socials for for examples of this, it is mighty impressive. Click through in the show notes to see some examples. Quoting PetaPixel it may have just lost control of TikTok US, but this weekend ByteDance released Seed Dance 2.0, an AI video generator that is turning heads. CNBC reports that Seed Dance's headline feature is something called multi lens storytelling. AI video is often short, but this model will create several scenes while keeping the same style and characters. The AI can reportedly generate 2K video 30% faster than other models. It can be prompted with an image, a short video, text or audio audio. Beijing friendly newspaper South China Morning Post reports that the release of the beta model and subsequent buzz has sent the stock prices of Chinese AI firms upwards. SCMP notes that seed dance v2 is currently only available to a few select users of Jemeng AI, which is ByteDance's AI video platform. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Seed Dance 2.0 provides precise camera controls and editing tools. With its reality enhancements, I feel it's very hard to tell whether a video is generated by AI. Wang Li, a programmer from China's southern Guangdong province, tells CMP that AI video is getting good is no surprise. It was always obvious that video would eventually catch up with still images and text generators. But where AI video will lead to is an intriguing question. Last week Petapixel reported that famed director Darren Aronofsky has released a series of AI generated short films called on this Day, 1776 that marked the semi quincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution. Aronofsky's project has been met with widespread derision, yet the two videos released so far have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Whether those numbers come from people who are morbidly curious about a respected filmmaker apparently damaging his own career, or they're generally popular remains to be seen. End quote. I'll tell you where I think this is headed. You know that thought that someday instead of watching a movie, you're just going to prompt AI to give you the exact scene you want to see? Right now I feel like we're going to have that by the end of this year. 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