Big Creek Briefing

Smart Founders Working with AI

Welcome to this week's Big Creek Briefing.

This week in AI handed small business owners a split-screen view of where things are headed. A landmark PwC study confirmed what many have quietly suspected: a small group of companies is capturing most of the economic value from AI, and the gap is accelerating. At the same time, Meta threw a curveball by abandoning open-source AI and launching its first proprietary model, while Anthropic dropped new capabilities that are already reshaping what's possible. For founders right now, the story isn't about whether to use AI. It's about whether you're using it to grow or just to cope.

Let's jump in!

Big Stories of the Week

Meta Abandons Open Source, Launches Muse Spark: Meta unveiled Muse Spark this week, its first new AI model since bringing in Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI overhaul. The launch marks a major strategic pivot: Muse Spark is proprietary, breaking from Meta's longtime Llama open-source approach. For founders, the implications are real: Meta will eventually offer third-party API access and is already rolling Muse Spark into Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and its AI Ray-Bans, meaning the ad tools you use every day are about to get smarter.
PwC Drops a Sobering Report on Who Is Actually Winning at AI: PwC's 2026 AI Performance Study, released this week, found that 74% of AI's economic value is being captured by just 20% of companies. The top performers are generating 7.2 times more AI-driven revenue and efficiency gains than the average company. The differentiator is not access to better tools; it's strategy. The leaders are using AI to pursue new revenue and market opportunities, while everyone else is focused on cutting costs within their existing business.
Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7 and Confirms Classified Model: Anthropic confirmed the release of Claude Opus 4.7 this week with stronger task performance and improved vision capabilities. More striking was the formal acknowledgment of Claude Mythos, a cybersecurity-focused model so powerful that Anthropic delayed its public release after it discovered thousands of high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities in existing software systems. Only 50 organizations have gated access under a program called Project Glasswing. This signals just how fast frontier AI capabilities are pulling ahead of mainstream products.

Main Insights

A new data point puts the AI adoption conversation in sharp focus

The PwC study is worth sitting with this week. The finding that 74% of AI's economic value flows to just 20% of companies is not a story about resources. It is a story about intent. The companies capturing the most value are using AI to go after new markets and revenue streams, not just to automate what they already do. For small business owners, this is both a warning and a playbook: the founders who win will be the ones who stop thinking about AI as a cost-savings tool and start treating it as a growth engine. With 82% of small businesses now using at least one AI tool and industries fully embracing AI seeing labor productivity grow 4.8 times faster than average, the window to act is open but it will not stay that way indefinitely.

Founder Insights

There is a quiet but significant shift underway in how successful founders are thinking about their role. The framing moving through founder communities right now is the transition from "manager of people" to "director of agents." Instead of hiring for every function, founders are deploying AI agents that handle operations, research, customer support, and outreach in the background. This is particularly relevant in 2026 as Anthropic's Model Context Protocol recently crossed 97 million installs, making it dramatically easier for AI tools to connect to external data, APIs, and workflows. The founders who are building with this infrastructure now are setting up leverage that will be very hard to replicate later. You do not need a team of ten to operate like a team of ten anymore.

Quick Hit: One Prompt to Simplify Your Week

"I run a [type of business] that serves [target customer]. List 5 ways my competitors might already be using AI that I am not, and for each one, suggest a specific tool or workflow I could start with this week. Focus on growth and revenue opportunities, not just cost reduction."

This prompt works best when you are specific about your business type and customer. It forces the model to give you actionable gaps rather than generic advice.

AI Tool Spotlight: Muze AI

Most founders running paid ads know the pain: you either pay an agency a significant retainer, hire someone who specializes in Meta and Google campaigns, or spend hours learning ad management yourself. Muze AI is built to eliminate that choice entirely. It is an autonomous ad platform that analyzes your brand's website, product catalog, and historical ad performance, then creates, launches, and continuously optimizes your Meta and Google campaigns without requiring you to become an ad expert. The platform uses models trained on more than $10 million in real ad spend and tens of thousands of proven winning ads to guide creative direction, audience targeting, and budget allocation.

For founders and small business owners, the use case is straightforward. If you are spending time managing ad campaigns yourself or paying an agency $3,000 to $10,000 per month, Muze is designed to do the same work autonomously. The platform handles creative generation, campaign setup, and real-time optimization, and because it runs continuously, it is adjusting your campaigns around the clock rather than waiting for a weekly agency check-in. This is the kind of tool that used to be accessible only to brands with dedicated marketing operations.

Muze AI offers a 7-day free trial that includes up to $1,000 in ad spend and full platform access, which makes it low-risk to test against your existing approach. You can find it at muzecmo.com. It is best suited for e-commerce brands, product-based businesses, and any founder running paid social who wants to reclaim the time and budget currently going to campaign management.

What We're Watching

Vertical AI replacing entire job categories

The shift from selling software features to selling outcomes is accelerating, with AI platforms in insurance, legal, logistics, and finance beginning to absorb entire functions rather than just supporting them. Founders in service-heavy industries should watch this closely.

The Muse Spark advertising integration

Meta rolling its new proprietary model into its core advertising products will likely change targeting and creative performance across Instagram and Facebook campaigns in the next 90 days. Worth monitoring if paid social is a meaningful part of your growth.

OpenAI's IPO timeline

Reports this week suggested OpenAI is moving forward with its IPO plans, which will have downstream effects on valuations, enterprise contracts, and the competitive posture of every major AI lab. A public OpenAI changes the dynamics significantly.

AI and fraud liability for platforms

A California court ruled this week that AI platforms exercising ultimate authority over assembled ad content may be considered liable for fraudulent statements, affecting Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and others. This regulatory thread could reshape how AI-generated ad content is governed across the industry.

The Wrap(TLDR)

This week's big theme is the growing gap between AI leaders and everyone else: PwC confirmed that 74% of AI's economic value flows to just 20% of companies, and the difference is strategy, not technology. Meta launched Muse Spark, its first proprietary AI model, signaling that even the biggest open-source advocate in tech is locking things down. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 and quietly confirmed a classified cybersecurity model too dangerous to release publicly. For founders, the practical move right now is to shift from using AI to save time to using it to generate new revenue. The tools are available; the question is whether you are asking them the right questions.

If you want help designing AI workflows or understanding how these new models fit into your business, Big Creek Growth can help. Reply to this email and we will walk through it together.