OpenAI is no longer just a model company. They raised $4 billion to enter the consulting and services layer, with McKinsey and Bain among the backers. Anthropic is doing the same through a partner ecosystem. The question isn't whether this works technically; it's whether the lock-in holds when switching an API key is easier than switching a SAP implementation.

This week, Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino also dig into Cerebras, the chip company targeting a $26 billion IPO that might be the most credible challenger to Nvidia yet, with an OpenAI compute deal of $20 billion already signed. And Gary Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, who builds personal AI until 2am every morning: thin harness, fat skills, fat data, and an open-source skill that turns any book into a personal reflection on your own life.

There's also a practical tip going viral inside Anthropic: stop asking for Markdown outputs, ask for HTML instead. The model takes slightly more tokens, but you absorb the output in a fraction of the time. A small change with a surprisingly large impact on how you interact with AI day to day.

And a harder question to close: is AI making us more productive or just busier? Employee disengagement is at a three-year low in 2026. Meta got caught installing tracking software on employee computers to train replacement models. And trust in AI in the US is now lower than trust in ICE. The edge users are having fun. Everyone else is worried.

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