Latest / YPO Technology Network AI Brief
Models Got Cheap. The Switch Got Expensive.
Three companies said the same thing in five days, without coordinating. On Thursday Hugging Face published its State of Open Models report. On Monday Meta gave a capable 30-billion-parameter model away for free. On Saturday Bloomberg reported that Stripe has finalized its acquisition of OpenRouter, a company that builds no models at all, for more than $7 billion.
One consistent verdict: the weights are becoming the cheap part of the AI stack. The strategic question inside a company quietly changed from which model to pick to who controls the switch, and what it costs to change your mind.
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