Anthropic vs. Microsoft, vibe coding cools off, perplexing Perplexity

Welcome to Zero Shot, The Ken’s podcast where Rohin, Praveen, and Brady connect from Bengaluru and Hong Kong to cover the big ideas and latest developments in artificial intelligence. This week, Brady discussed how even though Claude Sonnet 4.5 caught attention by autonomously building an application similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams in 30 hours, an overlooked aspect of the model’s rollout was the way it works with and creates documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It isn’t far-fetched to expect Anthropic wooing users in non-tech roles—people whose toolkit comprises Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and therefore have to live with Copilot—giving Microsoft a run for its money.Praveen covered how vibe coding may be losing its shimmer, since these platforms’ annual recurring revenue and web traffic are in a nosedive. One reason could be the changes in pricing, which was a response to counter power users who are getting way more out of their subscriptions than any service provider had anticipated.Finally, Rohin muses about Perplexity’s strategy of giving away its Pro subscription for free via telco partnerships around the world. Perplexity needs to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to use their models. It pays telcos to distribute its product. And it now pays publishers through a revenue-share scheme. But who’s paying for a Perplexity Pro subscription (aside from Brady), and what is the company’s endgame?This episode of Zero Shot was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, The Ken’s resident sound engineer.Send us critiques and ideas, or just say hi by dropping a note at [email protected] *Fancy yourself joining the Zero Shot team?Praveen, Brady, and Rohin are looking for a researcher-producer to join Zero Shot. You’d have to be super interested in AI, business, and tech. You’d need to be incredibly intellectually agile. You should be comfortable working with all three of us, each with our own interests and idiosyncrasies. You’d be expected to help us research, schedule, produce, and even publish columns and podcasts. You’d need to forecast the puck even better than us.We’re looking for young and ambitious people with 1–3 years of experience. Write to [email protected] with a note introducing yourself and why we should email you back for a conversation. If you don’t hear from us, it’s because we weren’t convinced.The role will be full-time and based in Bengaluru.*Bonus Reading:Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5 in latest bid for AI agents and coding supremacyThe Rise and Fall of Clippy: From Microsoft’s Bold Vision to Internet LegendAI vibe coding tools may be going from boom to bust, new data shows. Here's why.Perplexity launches AI subscription revenue-share scheme for publishers Clip from My Best Friend's Wedding