# AI Infrastructure Consolidation and Model Competition

**Podcast:** The AI Engineer Podcast
**Published:** 2026-09-04

## Transcript

Welcome to the podcast.
We have some big news from basically every single one of the major AI model providers, the biggest being that OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, and they're calling this the start of AGI.
Of course, they're trying to hype up everything going on.
everything that they're coming out with with Astra and the new model but I think it's actually really impressive I've been looking at a bunch of demos we'll show some of them on the show today we'll talk about a few others Chachupiti Claude and Grok also all went down within 90 minutes of each other today there's a lot of conspiracy theories about this and we might actually have some clarity into what took them all down secret A spoiler alert, it could have been Elon Musk.
Then we also have OpenAI that recently walked away from a $1 billion cursor deal.
This happened a couple of days ago, but there's been some really juicy texts about this that I just had to bring up.
This is all because SpaceX bought cursor and OpenAI and, you know, obviously Sam Altman and Elon Musk have a lot of beef.
Meta is offering a 95% discount on MuseSpark for users that share their training data.
I think a lot of people are kind of...
shot like you know they're doing like the shock factor like this is just meta again stealing all of our data but this is actually something that I've personally been doing with OpenAI for almost a year now we also have NVIDIA that is going to acquire Hugging Faces we'll talk about some of the details there and Jensen Huang has a personal note on that that we'll get into before we do I wanted to mention if you haven't tried all of the best AI models in the world I would love for you to go check them all out on AIbox.ai.
I have a platform with over 90 of the top AI models.
That's everything from audio, video, image, and text.
And you have a playground inside of AIbox that you can ask any question, and then you can ask it again to any of the other models.
So Gemini, Llama, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, you ask the same question to all of them and see which one gives the best response.
And then you also can mix in audio, video, and image inside of that same chat thread.
So imagine one chat thread, but it has every single model and every single modality inside of the thread.
And if you want to bring all of that capability over to Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work, whatever is your preference as far as using, we have an MCPU.
So basically a connection where you can get images, audio and video generated inside of Claude or any of these other models inside of any other model.
So if you want to go check it out, it's $8.99 a month.
and you can get started over on AI Box.
Let's talk about what's going on with OpenAI first.
So the GPT-6 release is obviously exciting.
There's obviously a ton of hype on it and it's definitely trending over on X.
It's I think one of the top trending things today.
Apparently they trained this on over a thousand GPUs.
They did it at the Texas Stargate site.
Brockman called it a generational leap towards artificial general intelligence and the model is doing really really well on a bunch of different benchmarks.
Specifically it got 98.6% on the ARC AGI 3.
And I got a perfect 100% on exploit bench.
I kind of I think I covered that yesterday.
Basically, it's really good at hacking.
And it's good at coding science and computer use computer use being one of the big things that they've highlighted.
And I think one of the winning categories for AI models today, the things that I personally care about are basically computer use, because today I'm using both Claude and chat code.
Claude co-work and ChatGPT work and I'm just telling them to go do things on my computer so that computer uses basically everything.
If it's not good at that, it's not something that I'm going to try.
I've heard that GrokBot might be good at this.
I haven't given it a lot of work.
I'm never usually like the first early adopter.
I'll wait till it's getting a little bit of traction and I know it can handle things.
I feel like I've been burnt.
I think a lot of people might be in that same boat where we feel a little burnt trying things for the first time with a lot of over-promising and under-delivering.
But apparently this is rolling out to a bunch of selected organizations that have quote unquote daybreak access.
That's specifically, I think, for the model that's really good at hacking.
Then subscribers are going to get it.
And Sam Altman had a tweet where he said, we hope it will begin to enable a new generation of entrepreneurship, scientific discovery and building.
We believe it is the best model in the world for computer use, professional work, science, coding, cybersecurity, and more.
I mean, obviously talking up his own book.
He also said it took us some extra time to ensure that we could meet the safety and alignment standards required for this capability level, but we think you'll find it worth the wait.
And then he just talks about some of those benchmarks that it scores high on.
I actually watched a demo video, which I was really impressed with, where they essentially have a person sitting down in a room.
They're pointing at a screen and they're like, in this one particular use case, they were like, draw a yellow circle.
It goes in and draws a yellow circle.
And then it says like, and turn that into like a rocket ship.
It turns it into a rocket ship.
Anyways, they have a whole bunch of different, you know, use cases that they're showing what it's able to do.
I think there was, this comes from a very famous demo in 1979 where someone was showing off a computer and it could kind of follow his finger while he was pointing the remote at a screen.
And so they kind of, replayed the same is the same kind of demo idea so honestly i think it's a good ad and in this one they had the guy just like talking to chat to be voice which by the way i think is a big unlock if you haven't used it already you don't need to sit there typing you can just have voice enabled and you can talk to it and it can take feedback and make changes live while you're going so in any case then a person in chair looking at ginormous projector screen in front of them he's like draw a yellow circle it draws a yellow circle Then he's like, OK, turn that into the window of a rocket ship.
It makes it into the window of a rocket ship.
He says like, OK, go open Blender and turn that rocket ship into a 3D rendering of a rocket ship.
It goes and does that.
And they have a whole bunch of different people doing different things of some celebrities and stuff.
You know, people saying like, go schedule me a tennis appointment.
And right.
They got all these different use cases.
The Blender one I did like because he turned into a 3D rocket ship.
And then he turned it into a video game where he explained what the video game was doing.
They have like lawyers and a bunch of other people using it.
They're trying to show a bunch of cool use cases for the video game one while it's making this video game for him.
He's like, hey, also go order food from that restaurant I ordered from last week.
And then it's like, OK, look at what you ordered last week and it's going to get in it.
They're obviously using like the the DoorDash plugin and all that kind of stuff to get it.
And then he said, OK, take that rocket ship video game that I made.
It like shows him playing his own video game, which obviously is not very realistic because this is a boring use case.
You can make really exciting video games.
This one's pretty boring.
But then he's like, hey, go make a 3D, you know, make the right file that I can make a 3D print of that rocket ship.
And it does it.
So kind of cool, right?
Shows a bunch of cool use cases.
This thing's very.
powerful.
The thing that a lot of people are talking about with this and this entire demo I've just explained is the low latency instantaneous work.
So as you talk, it's doing things very quickly.
If you've used the ChatGPT co-work, you know that this thing is very powerful.
I think it's on par with, with, with.
Claude co-work or maybe a little bit better in a few areas.
I've had a couple glitches with using my browser that Claude doesn't always have.
So I'm not sure what the pros and cons of that are.
Usually if I restart my computer and restart software, it works.
So a couple glitches perhaps if I'm being 100% honest, but otherwise a really powerful piece of technology.
I use it.
I would use it more often if it didn't have that one particular glitch.
A lot of people are tweeting about what they're actually doing with it.
Some of the things that I've been excited about is Someone had like they they told it to go to Blender and make like an entire 3D replica of like a world and have all of these like characters that it pulled in and they're all talking to each other and they have to like make it like a you know it's like kind of like a video game but they're like making their own world and they have to work together to build like houses and stuff and they're like doing it and talking and it's like pretty impressive some of the things that it can do.
In addition I saw some people well one of the big funny ones is.
Bojan Tungus said, where were you when AGI was released to the public?
You know, it's, you know, hyping up that this is the, this is AGI and that it has arrived.
Now, I think what is an important element of all of this is the fact that all of the big models, I guess switching gears slightly to a new story, all of the big models, Chai Chupiti, Claude and Grok, all went down within 90 minutes of each other today.
at the same time.
So on the one hand, we have this big, huge release from OpenAI and then everything kind of crashed.
Now, I think with the OpenAI crash in particular, maybe it was just a coincidental timing that, you know, it crashed and went down because they have their big model release.
Perhaps that pushed a lot of traffic over to Anthropic.
And then what I think happened, because we had SpaceX come up with a tweet a couple hours ago where they said, we are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following the outage at our Memphis Compute Center this morning.
We'd like to also apologize to our impacted compute partners, aka Anthropic, who pays them almost a billion dollars a month to use that same Memphis facility.
They said all systems have now been restored and are functioning normally.
So I think it could kind of be like this domino effect where...
There's so much usage that if ChatGPT goes down, perhaps because they have a big model that got released, maybe it was more popular, whatever happened.
Maybe it was a big marketing stunt by Sam Altman to like make ChatGPT go down right after they launch a big model just to say that's how many people are using it.
And I know you are rolling your eyes, but like I remember distinctly when he, distinctly being the word, when Sam Altman put a tweet out, I think it was maybe around ChatGPT 5 when it came out, or maybe it was ChatGPT 4.5 and he...
put a tweet out where he's like, there's a distinct smell when you when silicone is melting or something after they like released a new model to say like their servers were like melting.
And obviously, it's just a marketing thing.
And it's like funny or whatever.
But so anyways, I haven't I haven't forgot that and wouldn't put it past that moment to crash them a little bit on launch.
Okay, I don't actually think that happened.
But basically, we're having this domino effect where one model probably went down.
And then we had probably a lot of traffic go to Anthropic.
Potentially that took down the Memphis data center.
I'm not sure.
But one way or another, the Memphis data center went down and took out Anthropik and Grok.
A couple things, right?
If you look at a lot of the comments on this, people are like, that just proves that like you can't bet against SpaceX because all the infrastructure runs on them.
Okay, I also think it proves that like putting all of our eggs in one infrastructural basket is probably not a great idea.
I would probably diversify the data center portfolio pool here.
But it is true.
It's really hard to get new data centers built.
SpaceX has taken a very aggressive.
approach, right?
They're spinning up new data centers really quickly.
And they're, you know, sometimes they'll like this Memphis one in particular, they spun the whole thing up, they got a bunch of gas turbines.
I mean, they did some really incredible things to get this whole thing spun up, they like rented all the gas turbines in America brought them all the all the mobile cooling in America, they rented it all brought it all to one place and spun up this whole data center.
And everyone said they're kind of crazy.
And you could conceptually say this cost them a lot of money, maybe it was a big waste, they're getting a lot of lawsuits, because of all the gas, yada, yada.
But at the same time, they turned around and are selling that compute back to Anthropoc for a billion dollars a month.
So undoubtedly, they're making some money off of this thing, but I do think we need some diversification in the market.
Okay, OpenAI, I can't get away from the OpenAI story without talking about something that happened a couple days ago, but so much juicy drama came out of it, which is that OpenAI walked away from a billion-dollar cursor deal.
The reason why I say it's a billion-dollar cursor deal is because this particular partnership, having OpenAI on cursor, was projected to bring over a billion dollars annually.
But rather than servicing that, rather than letting Cursor have OpenAI models on there, they decided to cut contact with the company because obviously they don't like Elon Musk and he owns SpaceX, so they don't want to help them out.
Getting into the actual tweets, it came from OpenAI who had a tweet that they said, we're ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX under our...
proposal cursors direct access to our model would end on November 12th.
I think a lot of people talked about this.
And then they're like, we know the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on opening models in cursor.
We care about their experience in this transition and we're ready to go above and beyond to support them.
Blah, blah, blah.
I mean, basically, they're like, look, come over and use our platforms.
And if I'm being honest, I don't think it's as bad for open AI as a lot of people are making it out to be.
They're like, look, they're going to lose a billion dollars.
But I think there is a percentage of people that maybe do like open AI models.
I'm one of them.
I like I really do use open AI like their model.
They have a couple more glitches than Claude.
I'm going to be honest, but I do like their models and I get more done.
I actually think you might get a little bit more usage out of open AI for the same intelligence level.
And I really like.
chat gpt work so i think they'll have some percentage of people move over there if you really like it but honestly at the end of the day i don't think a lot of people maybe there's a percentage but a lot of people don't have loyalty you just switch back and forth between whatever model gives you the best bang for your buck especially if you're a developer so In this regard, I'd be curious.
The one thing that I do think they're going to be losing out on is there's a ton of enterprise customers.
Like I have a lot of friends that work at companies where they have licenses to cursor, right?
Their company wants to be able to access all of the top AI models, not just one.
So just go get a license to cursor.
And so if opening eyes getting ripped out of cursor, like your company isn't approving you for a new thing.
They're just like, just keep using cursor that we've always been using.
You have all of your workflow and stuff set up there.
So they are going to lose like a big chunk of customers and users by doing this.
Okay.
All of that out of the way, I just really liked Cursor's CEO's response to this.
This is Michael Truel.
He's kind of a gangster, if I'm being honest, because in building Cursor, like the OG team, all of them are multi-multi-millionaires now.
A lot of the early people that joined the company are like 100 million.
Some of them made $100 million.
Some of them are making tens of millions of dollars on this whole sale to SpaceX.
So he had an incredible outcome for his team.
This is what he said.
He said, we're starting to see the open AI.
put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months.
OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic.
And we're speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this.
Cursor was one of the very first users of OpenAI.
We've worked closely with their team for years, and we've trusted their platform to be neutral infrastructure for our business.
It's kind of true.
It's kind of shady just because you don't like Elon Musk.
You can't like work with.
a company that's owned by a company that's owned by a company that he owns like i mean it's just like at some point i don't know like sam altman's still tweeting this and open he's still posting this on x so they can they can post it on x which elon musk owns but they don't want to service their customers through cursor i don't know i think it's kind of ridiculous and i think that michael threw a little bit of shade at them being like opening i model serve only about five percent of the traffic on cursor so you know he's like look it's not the end of the world we have lots of other models obviously anthropic is goaded in this regard but yeah so kind of funny hopefully they get it all sorted out meta is offering a 95 discount on muse spark for users who are going to show their training data this is i mean the the new model that meta came out with is genuinely impressive i like alexander wang he was tweeting about it on x but there's a a tweet also that came out from artificial analysis that's the number one benchmark i use if you haven't if you don't know much about benchmarking artificial analysis publishes the results of a lot of different benchmarks but they also have their own benchmark specifically they'll have like a benchmark where you get free access to ai models but it asks you two questions side by side and you pick the response you like the most and then they basically make this benchmark where they're like And it's blind.
You don't know what model said what.
You just ask a question, see two responses, pick your favorite one.
And in that blind test, they're able to say, look, users prefer responses from this model over that model.
So it's kind of a, it's a cool blind test benchmark that I really do like.
Anyways, artificial analysis said, Meta has released MuseSpark 1.3, their fourth MuseSpark model, release in five months.
MuseSpark 1.3 max, which is in limited preview for Meta partners across.
scores 62 on the artificial analysis intelligence index behind only Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.
The variant gains come primarily from improvements in agentic work and scientific capability.
Okay, so basically they're saying in this particular artificial analysis intelligence index, it's scoring number three, just slightly behind Claude Opus 5.
And, you know, it's four.
points behind Claude Fable 5.1 max, which just came out.
So I mean, we have the brand new model from Anthropic, which is it's like right behind there.
And so they're really at the frontier.
I've seen a lot of people talking about the fact that people kind of were betting on meta to fall behind.
And it seems like they were able to pull through because they have a really incredible talent pool, say whatever you want about meta, they have incredible engineers, they obviously have a lot of money coming in from Facebook ads and Instagram and all that kind of stuff.
And then they have a lot of money they invested in compute and they've invested a lot of money into researchers for AI from the very beginning of this.
So yeah, I'm not surprised that they're able to pull ahead of even Claude Fable 5.
And they were able to pull ahead of GPT 5.6 and Grok 4.6 and Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 and Gemini 3.8 Flash.
They're able to pull ahead of all of those.
So great work to everyone over at Meta.
And the other thing that I was mentioning earlier in this news story is that they're offering a 95% discount.
Look, and that's if you're sharing your like whatever you're talking about as training data.
Look, this is a great way to get more data.
And lest you think Meta is the only person doing this.
It's interesting.
They're offering a 95% discount.
I get a 100% discount on a lot of my, on some different projects.
I have different chats and API chats for OpenAI.
They've been doing this for over a year.
So I have certain things that I work on that I get free OpenAI access.
And it's honestly a good way to go, especially if you're offering like freemium models for tools and stuff.
Nvidia is going to acquire Hugging Faces.
This has kind of been in the news for a day or two, but it looks like it's all official now.
The rumors have officially happened.
Jensen Huang posted on LinkedIn.
He said, I'm excited to announce that Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face.
Over the past decade, the Hugging Face team has built something remarkable, a vibrant home for the open model developer community.
More than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use its platforms to share models, data sets, and applications.
while companies around the world use it to discover, evaluate, and customize and deploy AI.
Together, we will scale Hugging Face's platforms, strengthen its infrastructure, and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.
This is a big, I mean, this is a great move for NVIDIA.
They're getting a lot of goodwill in supporting a project like Hugging Face that has open source models.
And they've been quite vocal.
Jensen's been very vocal over the last couple months when everyone's talking about regulating AI that he thinks open source models.
need to be publicly accessible and available.
He kind of signed this big open letter on X and had a bunch of other big industry leaders get in on this.
In his note, he said, Higging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.
Developers will continue to choose the models, frameworks, cloud, inference providers, and compute platforms that best fit their work in video.
compute will not be required to build on or deploy through the platform.
This is probably an anti-monopoly, you know, clause that got put in there.
I mean, it's goodwill for everybody, but it's like they're not going to force you to use NVIDIA.
However, it's probably going to be the default.
It's probably going to be encouraged.
It's probably going to be easily linked and easily accessible and set up to kind of like be like a very seamless integration.
However, you don't have to use it.
And I think at the end of the day, if they're going to buy it, like they got to get some value out of it, they're going to try to get some usage out of it.
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm happy for all of this.
Closing out, he said, AI advances fastest when people can build together.
We can't wait to build the future with this extraordinary community, yada, yada.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft commented on this acquisition.
He said, looking forward to this ecosystem with open models continuing to flourish and grow with NVIDIA and Hugging Face and the continued partnership.
It's kind of cool.
Elon Musk also tweeted.
kind of in congratulatory or saying like you know he appreciated that jensen huang was you know coming out and and helping with some of the open source projects going on hugging faces so i think overall people have been pretty positive a lot of the big tech companies it doesn't feel like they feel threatened by this and nvidia obviously is a supplier to every ai company so they all want to be in his good great in jensen's good graces so everyone's going to congratulate him and i think kind of support this moving forward Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today, guys.
Make sure if you haven't already to go check out AIbox.ai where you get access to over 90 different AI models, everything from audio, image, video.
It is all linked in the description.
Tons of cool features.
I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.