Big Technology

It’s time to delete the assumption that the frontier AI labs will always license their best models and not hoard the intelligence for themselves. Just because the labs have, until now, sold their top-line models to all takers via an API, metered by token usage, doesn’t mean they will inevitably sell it that way going forward. Instead, it may be in their best interest to sell the products they’ve built with these models, and not the models themselves.

Moonshot’s newly announced Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter multimodal model that’s performing on par with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 across many benchmarks — is already so popular that Moonshot temporarily paused new subscriptions Sunday. Kimi K3 is just one of a growing number of open-weight models making life interesting for OpenAI and Anthropic.

Anthropic and OpenAI have been raising and spending vast amounts of cash to build the world’s most powerful AI models, assuming that owning the frontier will generate a massive return. But just as their IPO window is opening, the competition is releasing new, competitive models at a fraction of the cost, setting the stage for an AI price war at the worst possible time.

Apple doesn’t sue often. When it has, it’s usually gone after companies like Qualcomm and Samsung that are already shipping competing products. But now, it’s suing a pre-product rival with a complaint against OpenAI. The lawsuit, filed by Apple on Friday, alleges theft of trade secrets and a months-long campaign to accelerate OpenAI’s hardware business.

OpenAI finally released the first version of its long-promised Superapp this week, combining ChatGPT, coding, and internet browsing into a single application, while adding a new ChatGPT Work mode akin to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. Soon after the product debuted, I spoke with Andrew Ambrosino, OpenAI’s lead for the Codex and ChatGPT app, about how the company is thinking about its unified product, and where it goes from here.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the big monolithic model era is over, and the battle over AI product has just begun. In an extended interview on Big Technology Podcast this week, Bosworth claimed that while frontier AI models are valuable, the way they’re implemented will create the most value. “There’s a strategic construct of having a model, and having it be a truly state-of-the-art one, that’s super important. But having that alone doesn’t mean you win,” Bosworth said.

An epic World Cup has been marred by an overreliance on technology and automation. In this year’s competition, FIFA has used cameras, sensors, AI systems, and other automated tools to make the game more precise. But these tools, and the accompanying video assistant referee, have taken the soul out of the game. FIFA’s tech tools have tipped the scales over touches and technicalities that would never be caught by the human eye, and exposed what’s lost when we hand too much to the machines.

An epic World Cup has been marred by an overreliance on technology and automation. In this year’s competition, FIFA has used cameras, sensors, AI systems, and other automated tools to make the game more precise. But these tools, and the accompanying video assistant referee, have taken the soul out of the game. FIFA’s tech tools have tipped the scales over touches and technicalities that would never be caught by the human eye, and exposed what’s lost when we hand too much to the machines.

OpenAI is discussing providing an equity stake to the United States government, Meta is considering selling its excess compute, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp just called out the frontier labs for competing with their customers. Though the U.S. may be slowing down ahead of a holiday weekend, and the globe may be settling in for the final stages of the World Cup, the AI news keeps coming at a rapid pace.

There’s a flawed yet oft-repeated narrative that AI adoption in the workplace will inevitably lead to layoffs and job loss. The narrative’s been propagated by some of the most visible leaders in tech, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Block CEO Jack Dorsey, the latter of whom used AI as a rationale for laying off 40% of his staff. But a new study from Ramp and Revelio Labs finds the opposite: The most enthusiastic adopters of AI are actually adding employees, not subtracting them.