Latest / YPO Technology Network AI Brief
Frontier AI Got Cheap, Open, and Chinese
The story of the year was supposed to be who controls AI. The real story this week: control and cost split in opposite directions, and your business lives in the gap.
The market already switched. US labs fell from 72% to 33% of model traffic on OpenRouter in a year; Chinese models now hold six of the top ten spots. One startup, Lindy, moved 100% of its traffic to DeepSeek.
The capability gap closed. Zhipu's open-weight GLM-5.2 landed within a point of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on a key agentic benchmark, at roughly a fifth of the cost — and you can run it on your own servers.
The theft question…
The skinny
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