Azeem Azhar

You know, I have a lot of respect for the quality of thinking in the senior team in OpenAI, and they will have seen data much deeper than I have.

So as an outside observer, you know, it's just a simplistic mantra, which is, you know, find a thing that you can do really much better than other people and do that thing and use that to grow out.

And I think that's what, you know, a company like Eleven Labs or a company like Anthropic has chosen to do.

But, you know, the market is a complicated beast that's got lots of other levers that are moving around.

And frankly, they are flying with quite poor quality data.

You know, it's not like they have really, really great sources of analysis.

These are leaks in the trade press.

I can't really tell you why it didn't react that way.

I mean, I would also just add that I simply wouldn't count that team out and I wouldn't count a short wobble over the last two weeks and turn that into a long-term trend.

I think the sensible thing to do as a boss is to see that and say, I'm not going to be lackadaisical about this.

I'm going to prepare for the worst and sort of drive the team as if this really, really is real.

where do I think value will accrue in the value chain?

And, you know, the mantra this week, Mark Benioff said it as well, has been, you know, if you own the workflow, that's great because you can always swap out the model.

And I'm definitely seeing stories of companies preparing to swap out models and building the tools they need.

So it may be interesting, your firm may have this, if any of your companies are building this, just say so in the chat.

But the, you know, a model routing layer within your company, Company X,

that allows them to switch models in and out alongside all of the other prompt changes and guardrail trade changes that you might need based on availability or cost.

So in some sense, there's a downward pressure on models that don't differentiate themselves.

And I think that's where you see HSBC, which is a reasonably sized European and UK bank,

doing an enterprise deal with Mistral earlier this week, which makes the open source models out of France.