AI model mania and the new chip gold rush
Just when you thought the artificial intelligence model race might slow down, it starts up again double-time.
This week alone brought new models and related services from OpenAI (twice), Meta (also twice), SpaceXAI, Anthropic and a raft of Chinese companies. And Microsoft, which released a flurry of seven models last month, intends to ditch OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models in some cases in favor of its own to save costs in a variety of its platforms.
But this is today’s world: the Token Economy, as John Furrier puts it. “The bet is no longer on whether the technology works,” he writes. “It is on how fast an economy can be rebuilt around the assumption that intelligence is cheap — and on who is left owning the pipes, the factories and the knowledge when the price of thinking falls to the price of electricity.”
Not surprisingly, the competition is getting even more fierce, including on price, as Meta vows to undercut other models by a lot. And that competition centers squarely on the enterprise business that’s currently the most lucrative market. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, for instance, late the previous week went off on the AI model providers, which he says are trying to control enterprises’ own data — though it’s just as clear that he’s worried about Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others deploying their engineers inside enterprises in a bid to copy Palantir’s successful model.
