One of the biggest unlocks for our engineering velocity has been moving all coding agents to running in the cloud - everyone gets their own VM to run agents on.
Tests run faster, agents work overnight, and there's no bottleneck on parallel agents.
Thinking Machines just released their open weight model, trained on GB300s with an NVFP4 checkpoint on day 0: https://t.co/fBvpcge4qp
NVIDIA themselves are probably the most prolific American provider of open source models (878 models and counting), all of which are optimized for the CUDA stack. Fast training cycles on the best chips, optimized for cost-effective inference, ready for enterprise customization and control.
America is not only running the frontier capability race.
America is also leveraging its hardware strengths to compete in open source!
The public narrative around American vs. Chinese models is misleading.
Winning on benchmarks and X/LinkedIn mindshare doesn’t last very long, and more importantly, it doesn’t resonate with those outside the realm of tech elitism.
Having spent the past 6 years closing gaps between AI research and product deployments across verticals like manufacturing and cybersecurity, I firmly believe the real battlefield is product design and change management.
Researchers can and should continue pushing the frontier, but the rest of us should shift our attention towards designing products that the whole world loves. That’s where the economic victory is.
Took me a while to understand how Factory/Devin compete with the Anthropic/OpenAI $200/month Max plans. Regardless of product quality - per token pricing is too steep for any cost minded person to justify against the Max plans. On token pricing our team would regularly spend $5000+ per person per month.
The reality is - they don't. They compete with enterprise plans once Anthropic/OpenAI move customers to per token pricing plans (at ~150 users). Then the token savings from the third party harnesses become extremely compelling.