The Low-Cost Provider
Intelligence just hit parity — five frontier models inside five points of each other — and a 3.8x gap blew open on price. When the product is identical, the only thing left to compete on is the cost to serve it, and that's won by whoever already owns the chips and the data center to run them, assembled and plugged in. Character.ai is the first to get marked to market: the product as engaging as ever, the equity wiped — because you can't rent a frontier token to sell a commodity and keep the lights on.