Five Tickets Left! + Other News // BRXND Dispatch vol. 69
BRXND LA is 48 hours away.
You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BRXND Dispatch, a newsletter at the intersection of brands and AI. BRXND LA is happening this week, February 6, and, as of writing this, there are five tickets left.
Luke here. Today’s note is going to be a bit shorter than usual because we’re getting ready for the BRXND LA conference. We’re looking forward to welcoming marketing and technology leaders from some of the world’s best-known companies to Hollywood this Thursday (2/6) for an inspiring day of practical insights, thought-provoking discussions, and deep dives into AI’s impact on brands. If you haven’t booked your tickets yet, this is your last shot to do so. We have five spots left.
On tap, we’ve curated a dynamic lineup of speakers and sessions—check out the full schedule on the site.
The format will be similar to last year: a select few keynotes, a strong focus on demos, some fireside chats highlighting real-world case studies, and a strict no-panel policy. Here’s who you can expect to hear from:
Airtable CEO & Co-Founder Howie Liu on high-impact AI workflows
Amazon Creative Director Mike Houston on implementing AI programs inside large organizations
Zillow CMO Ravi Kandikonda and Canvas Worldwide CEO Paul Woolmington in conversation about the huge opportunities AI offers brands and marketers
Getty Images CPO Grant Farhall on navigating the legal landscape of image generation in a commercially safe way
Gatorade’s Rob McCutcheon and Work & Co’s Christina Kalsow-Ramos on making generative AI feel familiar for consumers
The Brandtech Group’s Ciara Schoenauer demonstrating a text-to-image tool for rapid ad creation
Langchain’s Lance Martin on the reality (and lack thereof) of agents
Bloomberg Beta Partner James Cham on AI investment trends and the outlook for agents
Jellyfish CSO Jack Smyth on share of model and the most important audience you will never meet
Amy Baynard of S&P Global and Anna Vander Broek of Airtable on the power of AI in large-scale event operations
Springboards CEO and Co-founder Pip Bingemann demonstrating an AI-driven creativity enhancement tool
McKinney Executive Director of Strategy Anita Schillhorn and Blue Diamond VP of Marketing & Innovation Maya Erwin on using AI to analyze a brand’s potential to capture attention
Steve Kazanjian of the Social Dept. on accelerating social content for entertainment marketing
Justin Wohlstadter of Waldo.fyi on empowering brand strategists with faster insights
The New Consumer’s Dan Frommer on how consumers are thinking about (and using) AI
And, of course, a big thank you to all our 2025 sponsors, without whom we couldn’t do this. Airtable is pioneering digital operations for the AI era. Getty Images is a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace that offers a full range of content solutions to meet the needs of any customer around the globe, no matter their size. The Brandtech Group is the #1 gen AI marketing company. Canvas Worldwide provides innovative marketing solutions for brands looking to challenge conventional thinking, and is the world’s second-largest independent media agency. Springboards is a suite of AI-powered tools built to turbocharge the creative process. McKinney is a creative, media, and influencer agency, named an Ad Age Best Place to Work, A-List Agency Standout & Fast Company Best Workplace. Ride AI is a media and events company focused on the intersection of autonomous vehicles, robotics, and artificial intelligence in transportation.
What else caught my eye this week (Luke)
Last week, I (and everyone else on the internet) wrote a bit about how OpenAI’s strategy of spending staggering amounts of money to unlock massive computing power is being challenged by DeepSeek’s ability to be incredibly thrifty yet still put out powerful models. As a postscript, Sam Altman appears unfazed by the threat, offering no sign that his company’s fundamental strategy has changed since last week: “More compute is more important now than ever before.” Make of that what you will.
Also, there’s a noticeable rift between trade hawks and open-source evangelists in the wake of R1. On one side, you have Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for the US to impose stronger export controls on chips to China, contending that trade barriers are needed to maintain democratic nations’ AI leadership. In opposition, there’s Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf arguing that technologists should champion open-source models as critical infrastructure for a more resilient digital future—a direct contrast to proprietary LLMs like Claude. (Interesting side note: In the same essay, Amodei pushed back on the notion that DeepSeek is significantly more capital efficient than the rest of the pack, noting that Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s training costs were in the “tens of millions” compared to supposedly $6M for R1.)
Alright, last thing about DeepSeek: The Chinese lab’s rise is particularly troubling for Mistral, Europe’s leading AI contender, whose entire strategy was built around proving you could create state-of-the-art open-source LLMs without massive Silicon Valley budgets. Now that DeepSeek is beating Mistral at its own game, the implications for Europe’s position in the global AI race could be dire.
Simple AI released a bunch of customizable, copy-and-paste AI agent workflows, inspired by Anthropic’s very edifying article about how to build effective agents.
One datapoint in favor of AI investment not slowing down: Eaton forecasts capex on data centers will grow by 30% in 2025.
Supabase signups provide further evidence that AI will mint more new developers than it replaces.
OpenAI shipped o3-mini early, giving free-tier users their first access to a “reasoning” experience. Notably, o3-mini costs less than half as much as GPT-4o and has a higher output length limit (100,000 tokens compared to 16,000).
OpenAI also debuted DeepResearch, a ChatGPT Pro feature that the company says can function like a research assistant. The early reviews are glowing, like this one from Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah: “I asked it create a detailed research report including competitive analysis, positioning, growth, product strategy and AI vision for the industry. What it produced was an 11,000 word report. With data. And citations. And tables. And genuinely great insights -- including some I hadn't really thought of before… What has me excited is that we’ll be able to use this kind of output as *input* to a subsequent step in an agentic workflow. Because the future is about agent composability. Being able to pull together pieces and put them together into a larger whole. The same way we build teams to work together to tackle higher order missions and goals.”
As always, if you have questions or want to chat about any of this, please be in touch.
Thanks for reading,
Luke