@adlrocha - How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I thought intelligence is becoming a commodity. The idea is quite straightforward, and widespread now: when everyone races to build the best model, the models get better, but so does every other model eventually. Every dollar spent on a bigger training run makes the previous one cheaper. The distance between frontier, second-best, and open-source alternatives is collapsing fast (actually Gemma4, Kimi K2.5 and GLM 5.1 are becoming my bedside models these days). Even more, as models become better, the unit of intelligence that can be deployed in local hardware with lower hardware capabilities increases significantly.The irony of this situation is that this commoditisation of intelligence is benefiting the company that everyone was framing as the “AI loser”: AppleThe company that “lost”There’s a version of the last three years where Apple genuinely failed at AI. They had Siri before anyone had a serious voice assistant, and then watched how ChatGPT ate…