The last year of AI tooling has felt weirdly split in two. On one side, frontier cloud models are still impressive, still useful, and still setting the pace for a lot of the industry. On the other side, they are getting harder to treat like stable infrastructure. Prices move up, limits get tighter, availability gets noisier, and the feeling of building on top of someone else's quota policy keeps getting stronger. At the same time, the supply side is changing fast. Chinese model labs and open-weight ecosystems are shipping at a pace that would have felt unrealistic not long ago. The gap with the biggest frontier models is still real, but for a lot of practical tasks it is getting smaller, and sometimes smaller much faster than the market narrative suggests.…