A Thousand Songs to a Trillion Answers - Your Own AI, Someone Else's Doors.

Ah, yet another big week in AI. This is The AI Exhale, hosted by Vibe CFO with Jez and Cam. Five minutes, one thing that matters, or maybe two. We ignore the rest so you can too.

Jez: Welcome to episode 12 of the AI Exhale. You might have heard in previous episodes that we do like to compare and contrast the adoption, usage, and all things that come with it between the frontier models and proprietary models. We've had a lot of news this week, from Apple putting an AI server on the desk with their latest Mac mini. Throw a little nice piece in here, given we are coming up to the 25th anniversary of the iPod. A thousand songs in your pocket, a trillion answers on your desk.

Cam: If you had a Mac Studio earlier this year, they were like $10,000 to $15,000. And on the black market they skyrocketed to like, I think they were topping $60,000 or something. Because we had the memory shortage, Apple wasn't selling the Mac Studio. Everyone was selling them, trying to get their hands on it. Well, unfortunately, that's now closed. I love the idea of this Mac mini, because you know what the sell is? Remember how we always talk about cheap? Getting access to AI for cheap is what everybody wants. Whether you're an enterprise or you're in small business, we want that cheap AI, right?

And so you can get these little Mac minis that you can put on there. Just think about that compared to running frontier. Frontier is obviously smarter, right? But you get bang, bang, you're going, you're burning through tokens, you've got limits on how much you can do.

This, once you buy that Mac mini and you put that open source LLM on there, it's unlimited. Like, all of a sudden you've got a Mac, you've maxed out your cost. Then you say to your staff, hey, $800 per staff member, but go nuts, do whatever you want. I love that. It's quite powerful. I love the move by Apple. I really think for the white collar world, that's where the SaaS sort of IT service provider is going to give cloud-based access to servers.

You run these local LLMs through servers that are still joined up to your business. It's still your proprietary IP, but it's not run where everyone gets their own little Mac mini box. I think it's only going to be the techie nerds that go and buy them.

Jez: So has Anthropic cocked it up?

Cam: I think Anthropic's cocked it up with upsetting enterprise, with the Claude Design and Figma story. Which means that, like our last episode, they've all gone off building proprietary models, and then they just tick a box, put the MCP in, but they don't actually give you all the access.

So then all of a sudden they're struggling to be the central hub, because everyone's got their own proprietary model.

Jez: I'm going to rip a weird analogy here, but it is that time of season in the footy. Sorry for those overseas listeners, but is it kind of like the MCG and their licence to host the grand final till 2200 or something ridiculous? That's big fat Anthropic waiting for every path to run through them.

Cam: So I think that's the point. What's really getting thought out right now is, does most SaaS become headless? And if we bring this back to accounting, right, like Xero at this point in time, I think that they're doing a bit of a play here where they have an MCP, but it's like a box ticking exercise. They don't want to expose all of their information to Anthropic, because what does that mean?

That means they lose the relationship. They don't want to lose the relationship. They want control. Otherwise, you know how quickly we moved off HubSpot. It lost its value. We didn't care about it as much, right? We started thinking, all right, now it's just a data story.

CRM and where we send our emails. How do we get rid of it? How can we get rid of it cheaper? It lost its value. So I don't think that the SaaS providers want to give the MCP full access. I think they want to try and keep control of the relationship. And this is the beautiful opportunity for the startup. In comes Prosaic, who we're watching, who we spoke about recently as a ledger system. And they're going, okay, well, you guys play that game.

We'll open our doors and be full-blown AI native, open MCP, doing everything. And all of a sudden, there's the question that users start weighing up between the two.

Jez: You're saying, Cam, that the incumbents there, like Xero, can't really hedge, though, in terms of offering a bit with the MCP, sort of keeping walls. Do you foresee anything, any bold claims here about where this is headed for the incumbents and what they might be able to do? Or maybe they just have to roll with the tide?

Cam: Well, I guess every SaaS business that's large enough is hedging in some way, and everything keeps changing. We didn't see open source getting that good. We didn't see the Claude Design and Figma story coming. All of these stories are still playing out, and there's more stories to play out right now. The best answer at board level for some of these SaaS players is just hold on. Let's just watch. Let's just keep moving forward.

Jez: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

And that's your five-ish minutes back. Vibe CFO, Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium businesses, out of the box, governed and secure. vibecfo.ai. Now you know.