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Snowflake’s CEO says software giants risk becoming a ‘dumb data pipe’ to AI models

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The biggest software companies might be reduced to mere data sources, says Snowflake’s CEO.

“The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them,” Sridhar Ramaswamy said on an episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s “Big Technology Podcast” published last week. “Everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

Prior to becoming Snowflake’s CEO in 2024, Ramaswamy was a partner at Greylock Ventures and cofounded AI search startup Neeva, which was acquired by Snowflake.

Ramaswamy added that Snowflake needs to operate with a “fear” that people would stop using AI agents developed by software companies and instead want an all-inclusive agent that has data from Snowflake, for example, and everywhere else

He said his solution was to let customers take the lead and decide how they want to access their data — directly through their own agents, or through a product like ChatGPT.

In the last few months, AI labs have evolved from being sources of AI infrastructure to becoming software providers themselves. OpenAI has entered the sales, support, and document analysis market, threatening incumbents such as Salesforce and Oracle.

On a podcast released last week, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya said software firms were being unnecessarily punished by Wall Street over fears that AI could take over their industry. The VC said that legacy software could not be replaced so easily, because it would not be worth it to use AI for every business function.

He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company’s expenses, so vibe coding to build the company’s resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Instead, companies should focus on big-ticket items, like developing their core businesses or optimizing other costs.

Ramaswamy and Acharya’s comments follow a brutal start of the month for software stocks, which dragged down tech and broader markets. The sell-off started when already-wary investors panicked about Anthropic’s new AI tool, which can perform a range of clerical tasks for people working in the legal industry.




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Katherine Li, West Coast breaking news reporter at the Business Insider.

Anthropic and OpenAI release dueling AI models on the same day in an escalating rivalry

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The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic intensified this week.

The two companies released dueling new AI models on Thursday and had back-to-back podcast appearances on “TBPN.”

On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model that the company says would improve performance on office productivity and coding tasks, with an expanded “context window” that allows it to work through longer documents and more complex projects in a single session.

Meanwhile, OpenAI punched back with its own new coding-focused model called GPT-5.3-Codex, which the company says runs faster, uses fewer computing resources, and can generate and manage complex software from English instructions. The new version also comes alongside a stand-alone Codex desktop app.

Both Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, and Sholto Douglas, one of Anthropic’s leading researchers, appeared on the “TBPN” podcast in back-to-back chats with show host John Coogan and Jordi Hays.

“I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they’re managing a team of agents,” said Altman. “And as the agents get better, they’ll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction.”

Douglas, who appeared in the subsequent timeslot, told Coogan and Hays that users have been comparing previous Anthropic and OpenAI models, and they have noticed some key differences.

“The OpenAI models were a bit better at trying really, really, really hard on tough problems, but the Anthropic models were much faster and so forth,” Douglas said.

“And so they worked on speed while we worked on making the models much, much better at really, really tough problems,” Douglas added of the Opus 4.6.

The latest release is part of a long-running competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, dating back to 2021, when a group of OpenAI researchers left to form Anthropic, aiming to develop safer and more controlled AI systems.

A big week for Anthropic

This week, Anthropic’s launch of industry-specific plugins triggered a stock market sell-off as Wall Street worried about AI’s impact on software.

Anthropic also took a subtle shot at OpenAI with a series of ads released this week, including one that will air during the Super Bowl.

The ads feature unnamed humanized AIs dropping ads in the middle of their advice, alongside the promise that its model, Claude, will remain ad-free.

OpenAI announced in January that ads are coming to ChatGPT for users of the free version.

Altman subsequently hit back, calling Anthropic “dishonest” and defending ChatGPT as a product that brings AI “to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.” He also clarified that the ads will be “clearly labeled” to differentiate themselves from the chatbot’s answers to queries.

“We are not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product,” Altman told the “TBPN” podcast on Thursday.

“Our first principle with ads is that we’re not going to put stuff into the LLM stream,” Altman added. “That would feel crazy dystopic, like a bad sci-fi movie.”




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