Is Elon Musk winning AI right now?

(She writes begrudgingly...bemoaningly)

But some piping hot Tech Tea is brewing in Silicon Valley. And it’s MF Tea Time:

OpenAI just said it plans to cut off its direct model relationship with Cursor now that Cursor is owned by SpaceX.

And suddenly, the AI dynamics appear to be shifting. It's starting to look like a stack game. 

[As always, a companion video if you have a minute and a half 👇]

Let's start with Elon's stack, because, as mentioned above, it's annoyingly good: he's got Colossus for compute. Grok / xAI for the model. X + Cursor for distribution. Not to mention an unlikely, perhaps parasitic, alliance with Anthropic, which pays $1B+ monthly for compute.

OpenAI is frantic to catch up: infrastructure partnerships, a massive new Ohio data center, and its own Jalapeño inference chip underneath existing models.

Here’s how I see it: up until now, the frontier model alone was enough to build a business. Hell, it was even enough to take that business to IPO.

But that tide is now turning. A model is becoming an input to the larger, more critical stack.

To truly win, AI businesses will need to start moving towards vertical integration. It’s giving Carnegie Steel for the AI era: own the mines, the railroads and the mills if you want to sell your steel.

We saw NVIDIA make moves in this direction last week with its acquisition of Hugging Face. Elon seems to be running on that same track.

My question is: where does this race leave frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic?

(Because I fear they're very much on the bleachers rn)

Something to brew on ☕️