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Slate Auto's $24,950 customizable pickup truck & Thinking Machines' Apache-2.0 Inkling model pursue the same strategy: ship a deliberately unremarkable, general-purpose base cheap & let customers build value through customization. That business model ...

The harness, the software wrapping the model, is becoming the strategic asset. It decides what data flows in, what gets logged, & what gets used to train the next model.

AI customer retention sits between mobile games and social networks. Frontier models keep the crown for about 41 days, and the price of a given level of intelligence falls roughly 10x per year, giving buyers more leverage every cycle.

How AI reshaped the software stack, venture stage definitions, and the firms that win over three years.

Ollama makes open models effortless to run locally on a laptop or in the cloud with the same experience. 8.9m developers, 67,000 integrations, & partnerships with every major model lab & hardware vendor. Theory led the Series B.

A working memory architecture for AI agents : preflight retrieves the right skill from a long-term library, a local model executes, & a watchdog reads the trail overnight to update the library.

AI companies have committed $9.75b in 12 months to build forward-deployed engineering teams. The post analyzes three structural models, the talent math, & whether FDEs create a moat or a toll booth.

The Economist scored 25 frontier AI models on the World Values Survey. Lab of origin is a weaker predictor than training & alignment choices : Gemini & Qwen are neighbors, GPT-4o & DeepSeek R1 are near-twins, & DeepSeek R1 & DeepSeek V4 Flash are ...

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Prioritize routing over model choice. Most AI work runs on cheap local models.