Benedict Evans

And we'll probably spend something over $300 this year.

And so that's basically more than doubled.

almost tripled, I think, from a couple of years ago.

So there's enormous surge in capex, in investment in this.

And we've got these stories about like, well, Meta bought half 49% of Scale.ai for $15 billion, apparently looked at both of the other recent OpenAI spinouts, SafeRoot, SuperIntelligence, and what's the other one?

Thinking Machines, which are both basically pre-product, pre-revenue labs with somebody from OpenAI at multiple tens of billions valuations.

And he apparently, like Sam Altman, complained that Mark is offering people $100 million to join.

So Mark's in beast mode.

Microsoft has this kind of weird situation in that its own models aren't actually very good, but it's got this very kind of weird relationship with OpenAI.

OpenAI, Sam Altman is, I was going to say polarizing figure, but actually opinions about him tend to be fairly unanimous and tend to be fairly negative.

Like everybody who's ever worked with him quit.

OpenAI itself still kind of sets the agenda.

but much less so than it was two years ago.

And I wouldn't want to do like a detailed, like calling the scores on whose models are good and whose labs are good.

But, you know, objectively, Google is clearly like firing on all cylinders now and is making great models.

Lama seems to have been an embarrassment.

And so Metro is kind of scrambling to catch up.

Apple is in a slightly different position in that

they have always sort of taken the position that they don't want to be first, they want to do it right, and that they don't need to be doing whatever the latest consumer internet thing is.

Like, they don't have a YouTube.