Platform Wars
Platform Wars & Industry Reads brings this topic into one place so the full arc is easy to follow. Start anywhere, or move through the pieces in order to build a cleaner read on platform wars. The Series The Developer Tools Land Grab: IDE WarsCustomclankerThe Developer Tools Land Grab: IDE
Platform Wars
DeepSeek did something in January 2025 that the entire Western AI industry told you was impossible. A Chinese lab — operating under US export controls that were supposed to kneecap Chinese AI development — released a model that matched or beat GPT-4 on major benchmarks while reportedly spending a fraction of what
Platform Wars
The AI industry is consolidating. Not slowly, not quietly — at a pace that should concern anyone who depends on a tool built by a company with fewer than a thousand employees. Since 2023, the pattern has been consistent: big tech companies buy AI startups for their talent, their technology, or
Platform Wars
Governments are regulating AI. Not "considering" it, not "exploring frameworks" — actually passing laws that change what tools can do, how they work, and whether they're available in your country. The EU AI Act is being enforced. The US has a patchwork of executive orders
Platform Wars
Every AI tool you use runs on GPUs. The price you pay, the speed you get, the rate limits you hit, and whether the tool exists at all — every one of those things traces back to how many graphics processors a company can get its hands on and how efficiently
Platform Wars
The cost of calling an AI API has fallen roughly 95% since early 2023. GPT-4's launch pricing — $0.03 per 1K input tokens, $0.06 per 1K output — now looks like highway robbery compared to what the same tier of intelligence costs today. This collapse is not an
Platform Wars
The AI discourse on Twitter — or whatever we're calling it this week — would have you believe that every company on Earth is either deploying AI agents across their entire operation or is two quarters from irrelevance. The reality inside actual enterprises looks nothing like this. Adoption is real,
Platform Wars
The phrase "open source AI" gets thrown around like it means one thing. It does not. When Meta releases Llama, when Mistral releases Mixtral, when Alibaba releases Qwen — each of these is "open" in a different way, with different restrictions, and with different implications for what
Platform Wars
Every time a new model drops, the announcement comes with a chart. The chart shows bars going up and to the right on benchmarks you've never heard of, beating the previous state-of-the-art by some percentage that sounds impressive. Then you use the model, and it feels about the
Platform Wars
Every few months someone publishes a "state of AI" chart with logos arranged in quadrants, and it tells you absolutely nothing about which tool to use tomorrow morning. The five companies that matter most in AI right now — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Mistral — are not interchangeable competitors
Platform Wars
This is the capstone of the Platform Wars series, so let's skip the preamble. The AI industry in early 2026 is simultaneously more useful and more overhyped than it was in early 2025. The tools are better. The business models are shakier. The user base is larger. The
Platform Wars
Every major AI company says it's building toward AGI. None of them agree on what that means. This isn't a philosophical quirk — it's a strategic choice. The way each company defines AGI determines when they can claim they've achieved it, how they