What's this about?
Mollick: the big change in the past year is that for general individual use — including individual use inside firms — OpenAI and Anthropic have run away with the game. They keep trading leads; you can pick either and know they will keep up. It has been ten months since there was another player.
What does "for general individual use" exclude?
A great deal, and the qualifier is load-bearing. Open-weight models from Chinese labs are competitive and in some cases ahead on price — GLM-5.3 and Hy4 were both released in the past week to strong reception. Gemini leads on several multimodal benchmarks. The claim is specifically about the default choice an individual makes for general work, where switching costs are low and the deciding factor is confidence that your provider will not fall behind. On that narrow question the observation looks right.
Why is it worth noticing?
- "Ten months since there was another player" is a specific, checkable claim rather than a vibe.
- Read against today's releases: two labs, same day, both announcing frontier capability — that is what a two-player race looks like.
- The tension with the open-weights story is real and unresolved; both things are true at different layers of the market.