How the AI ecosystem works: from power plants to the apps on your phone
AI is often seen through chatbots, but it rests on a five-layer stack of energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications, each with its own economics.
AI is often seen through chatbots, but it rests on a five-layer stack of energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications, each with its own economics.
The first model in the Claude 5.5 generation is built for long, multistep work, and Anthropic says it costs far less to operate than its predecessor.
Google introduced three Gemini Flash models on July 21, priced for speed and volume, and said its largest pretraining run yet is underway for Gemini 4.
The Alibaba and Tencent backed startup says its largest model yet rivals OpenAI and Anthropic systems, and will release the weights publicly on July 27.
OpenAI says its GPT-5.6 family delivers better results at lower cost, adds an Ultra mode that runs four agents in parallel, and ships with its strongest safety stack yet.
Google released Gemini 3 Flash on December 17, replacing Gemini 2.5 Flash as the default in its app and AI Mode, with frontier-level benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.
From its 2021 founding to a $350 billion valuation in November 2025, a look at how Anthropic built Claude, what Constitutional AI means and where it differs from ChatGPT.
Anthropic's new flagship model leads coding and agent benchmarks a week after Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, though rivals keep an edge in some reasoning tests.