How the "AI Loser" May End Up Winning

2026-04-13

An interesting irony has emerged as everyone races to build the best AI model: Apple, framed as the “AI loser,” may ultimately become the biggest winner.

Intelligence is Becoming a Commodity

The author previously argued that “intelligence is becoming a commodity.” As everyone invests heavily in training larger models, every dollar spent makes previous models cheaper. The gap between frontier, second-best, and open-source alternatives is collapsing fast (Gemma4, Kimi K2.5, and GLM 5.1 are becoming the author’s bedside models of choice).

Apple’s “Failure”

Over the past three years, Apple has been widely considered the “loser” in AI:

Apple launched Siri before anyone else, yet watched ChatGPT eat their lunch
No flagship frontier model, no $500B compute investment commitment
While other AI labs and big tech burned cash racing for the next SOTA benchmark, Apple sat on piles of undeployed cash

OpenAI: The Money-Burning Machine

OpenAI raised at a $300B valuation, then shut down Sora—the video product costing roughly $15M daily against $2.1M daily revenue. Disney had signed a three-year licensing deal and was finalizing a $1B equity investment. Sora’s death meant that investment evaporated.

Apple’s Optionality

While other companies burn money at rates that would make sovereign wealth funds uncomfortable, Apple sits on massive cash reserves with maximum optionality. The commoditization of intelligence may ultimately benefit Apple—they can integrate the best open-source models at the optimal time and lowest cost.

Read the full article at https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-how-the-ai-loser-may-end