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‘Selling coffee beans to Starbucks’ – how the AI boom could leave AI’s biggest companies behind


The competitive landscape of AI is changing in ways that undermine the advantages of the biggest AI labs.

Instead of a race for an all-powerful AGI that could match or exceed human abilities across all cognitive tasks, the immediate future looks like a flurry of discrete businesses: software development, enterprise data management, image generation and so on. For startups, it no longer matters whether their product sits on top of GPT-5, Claude or Gemini, and they expect to be able to switch models in mid-release without end users noticing the difference. Most uncertain of all, the race toward general intelligence could pay off with new breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals or materials science, radically shifting our ideas about what makes AI models valuable.

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