Last week in AI: Price cuts, open weights, and interviews

Hey there,

I thought everyone being on summer vacation would mean a slow week, but agents never sleep. Lots to cover. Let's get into it:

OpenAI is starting a price war and cut GPT‑5.6 Sol from $5/$30 to $4/$20 per million input/output tokens, following July cuts of 20% for Terra and 80% for Luna.

Vercel’s 50% promotion brings Sol’s price down to $2/$10 through September 18th, 60% below its launch price for input tokens and 67% below it for output tokens. And it appears to be working. Guillermo Rauch says Sol is now Vercel AI Gateway’s fastest-growing frontier model.

I've got a working theory that ChatGPT's large consumer user base gives them more incentive to improve cost to serve compared to Anthropic. This would show up as worse gross margins now as OpenAI gives away more free usage but builds up things the balance sheet can't capture like good will. Will write this up soon.
Nvidia is paying $6 billion for Poolside’s technology The shape of this one is a bit different than the other recent pseudo acquisitions. The reported agreement is a non-exclusive technology license, accompanied by another $1 billion invested in Poolside at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. Poolside remains independent, although more than 100 employees could move to Nvidia while the founders stay behind.

It's nice to see Nvidia put even more money behind the open model thesis after pushing the open weights letter back in July.
Sam Altman goes on David Senra. You're going to be seeing clips of this one across social media for awhile, just go watch the full interview now. Sam comes across very level headed in this interview & seems to be very in touch with reality while

Two quick plugs from me:

Chroma shipped Foundation which I'm thrilled to try.

From the Chroma website: "Foundation learns from your agent sessions and maintains a self-improving wiki of everything you and your team know."

I'm obsessed with the idea of capturing implicit/revealed knowledge from work your team is already doing. This approach will print whether you're building platforms or your own agents in house.

Quoting an old piece of mine on knowledge bases:

"One recent company that seems to get this is Chroma. Chroma has recently shipped WebSync as well as GitHub sync, which are doing exactly as I'm suggesting here. Batteries included indexing plus trivial query advice.

If Chroma continues to build out these connectors, I think it's a very compelling offering. They'll have to figure out how to price value correctly here without being too expensive, which could be tricky, but these premium integrations and add-ons could give them a great way to segregate customers by propensity to pay."

Glad they kept going down this road!
Vercel launched is-agentic.com. Go see how ready you are for serving content to the infinite number of agents browsing your site and product. Then copy the prompt and give it to Codex or Claude and one shot your AEO problems away.

As for this week, there are rumors that Hugging Face is exploring a $13 billion sale and lots of speculation that we'll see a first model from SSI and new models from OpenAI.

LFG,

Drew

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