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AI Got Cheaper, Meaner, and More Paranoid — AI Brief July 16
Description
Good day, humans. Two things are happening in AI at once, and they don’t agree with each other. On one side, everyone’s racing to make models cheaper and more open — Mira Murati just gave away a 975-billion-parameter model, and Sam Altman is threatening to sell GPT at a quarter of the price. On the other, the same labs are getting scared of what those models can do: OpenAI built an AI whose only job is to hack OpenAI, and Anthropic is hiring people who know how to build weapons so its chatbot never does. Cheap, powerful, and paranoid. Let’s get into it.
Murati’s Thinking Machines Open-Sources Inkling
What happened: Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines Lab — the roughly $12 billion venture she launched after leaving OpenAI — released its first model, Inkling, and made it open-weight, meaning anyone can download and run it for free. It’s a 975-billion-parameter system that reads and reasons across text, images, audio, and video.
Why it matters: “Open-weight” means the model isn’t locked behind a company’s paywall — developers, researchers, and hobbyists can take it, tweak it, and run it on their own machines. Every time a lab gives away a frontier-grade model, it drags the price of “good enough” AI closer to zero.
What everyone’s saying: The framing is a shot at both OpenAI’s closed models and China’s open-source lead. Murati’s pitch is that one-size-fits-all AI is over; Inkling is built to be customized and to balance cost against performance rather than chase a benchmark headline.
My read between the lines: A company literally named “Thinking Machines,” founded by OpenAI’s former CTO, just did the most un-OpenAI thing possible and gave the store away. When your edge is “we’ll hand you the keys,” you’re betting the whole industry is about to stop paying for the model and start paying for everything around it.
📖 Further reading: Thanks to Apple, Your Favorite AI Tool Is a Dead Tool Walking — the case that models are becoming interchangeable commodities, and Inkling just poured gasoline on it.
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Altman Threatens to Sell GPT at Quarter-Price
What happened: Sam Altman posted that OpenAI’s new flagship, GPT-5.6 Sol, is already half the price of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 — and said OpenAI would be “happy to deliver at one-quarter of the price.” Translation: a price war just went public.
Why it matters: AI is one of the few products where the thing you’re buying keeps getting cheaper and better at the same time. When the CEO of the most valuable AI company brags about undercutting rivals by 75%, everyone’s margins — and eventually your bill — are about to move.
What everyone’s saying: Earlier this week we covered how GPT-5.6 Sol beat Claude fo