One signal

Scott Wilson, chief investment officer at Washington University’s endowment, says OpenAI and Anthropic may be in serious trouble after committing to enormous spending while cheaper Chinese and open-weight models catch up. Business Insider reports that Wilson’s portfolio companies are moving towards lower-cost alternatives, with OpenRouter data showing DeepSeek handling more text-model requests than OpenAI or Anthropic on that platform.

Why it matters

It is an investor’s bearish view, not a verdict on either company’s finances. Vinod Khosla, an OpenAI backer, takes the opposite position and argues that control of chips, data centres and inference infrastructure could give closed-model companies a cost advantage. The useful question is whether AI value sits in the model, or in the expensive machinery underneath it.

Discuss: Will cheaper open models break the frontier labs’ spending model, or will control of the full computing stack prove more important than headline model prices?

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