334 | AI just got 50x cheaper 🤯, Buy any AI model from anyone (Coming soon), “The world should accept some bad things happening” (Sam Altman), and more important AI news for the week ending October 9, 2026

Isar Meitis (0:00)

Hello, and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host. And this was another week in which a lot of small things happened. And it's another week that shows several very clear trends. And we're going to focus on two of them or two and a half of them. In this episode, we are going to talk about how companies, leading companies, are now letting you run other companies' models through their platform, and how critical an aspect that I've been predicting for a very long time now is actually coming to fruition where you can run multiple models through a single subscription or even on an agent platform and use whatever tools you want in the backend, or sometimes maybe not the tools you want, but other tools and not just the owner of the platform. We're going to talk about how America is currently competing on the cheap end of the model scale and not just on the frontier. And that has been very, very clear this week that this is the direction. Again, it's not a new direction. It's just the first time that the focus of the US has been on that. We are going to talk about AI safety again and what's actually happened in OpenAI with a few people departing and a few people getting fired. And how does that impact safety and what people are saying about it? We're going to talk about the top 100 GenAI consumer apps. It is the seventh edition of this report. We're going to dive into who's in the lead, what changes, what happens and what does that actually mean? And then we have a lot of new releases of models and of new features within models. And we're going to also talk about how AI currently makes novel discoveries in science in two different aspects of science and how that may impact our future. So, lots to cover. Let's get started.

The first topic I want to talk about that again is a trend and not really a topic is the fact that it is becoming very clear to everyone that the competition is not something you can ignore. And the fact that you're OpenAI or Anthropic or SpaceX or Gemini does not mean that the people who are willing to pay you will pay just you and they will go and look at other options as well. And the fact that you need to give them options. Well, we started seeing lots of new routers this year and how successful it's becoming. I said multiple times that the large labs will have to follow suit. They will have to follow suit because they don't have an option. And this is now happening and it is happening from multiple directions. So, this week Elon Musk announced that his AI agent tool Grokbot, which I really, really like and I'm really enjoying using, will also run third-party models to give you the best bang for your buck. The exact quote from his post on X said, important note regarding Grok at bot, going forward, SpaceX will use the best back-end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, Mid Journey, Suno and other leading APIs, whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome. This is a post from Elon on October 7th, which is basically saying two things. A, he's saying that they will try to give you the best results and not necessarily to force their own model, and B, that they're integrating stuff beyond just the large language model. So the fact that he chose to mention Mid Journey and Suno by name, which are more creative kind of apps, tells you the direction that they're going. They want their model to be good at everything. They understand their model will never be good at everything, better than all models for each task, and they're allowing other models in the back end to provide the solutions for that. Now, he also said that they're going to focus simple tasks on answers that are going to come from the small model or for the next variation of Grok, but that does not change the fact that they're going to also route some of the needs to other models, either cheap or expensive or better or specific to specific things like mid-journey in Suno. Now, the other interesting in this statement is that the first model he chose to mention is Claude Opus 5.5. If you remember, not too long ago, Elon said that anthropic are evil, a thing short of that, but it's not going to be the first time that Elon makes very aggressive statements about somebody and then changes their mind and decides to work with them. Now, the other interesting thing from Elon that relates to this is if you follow the money in how SpaceX is making most of its money right now. So SpaceX, AI units, so just the AI part of it, did $2.56 billion in Q2. That's up to 147% year over year. Most of it, 2.19, so almost 2.2 billion, came from selling AI infrastructure, basically selling compute. Only a small fraction of the revenue came from actually selling the usage of Grok.