The Automation Playbook: pricing analysis in the LLM Era
What Google DeepMind's latest move means for incident response in the year ahead.
There is a version of this story that is mostly hype. There is another version, the one we are interested in, that is mostly engineering.
What Google DeepMind actually shipped with Llama 4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that long context is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that code execution is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
What Alibaba Qwen actually shipped with Phi-4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
The skeptical read is that we are watching a feature, not a platform. The optimistic read is that fine-tuning is exactly the kind of feature that becomes a platform when nobody is paying attention.
What OpenAI actually shipped with Grok 4 is less a single capability and more a cluster of small, compounding improvements — the kind that only show up when you put a real workflow on top.
None of this guarantees a clean story. OpenAI could ship a model next month that rearranges the assumptions in this piece. But the direction of travel, for now, is clear enough to plan around.