Tom Smith retweetledi
Would you choose one software over another because it has a proprietary model with better performance?
Two companies shipped custom AI models today (three in a week counting Cursor!), raising that question. Intercom launched Apex 1.0, a model for answering customer support tickets. Chroma released Context-1, a model for multi-hop agent search.
Apex 1.0 beats GPT-5.4 & Claude Opus 4.5 on customer service tasks. Context-1 scores 97% on agent search benchmarks. One Intercom gaming customer saw resolution rates jump from 68% to 75%.
History suggests these gains may be temporary. As general-purpose models improve, today's specialized advantage erodes. But with GPU shortages, inference costs will spike, perhaps this will be the moment for built-for-purpose more efficient models.
Intercom built Apex to differentiate in a competitive market. Chroma's bet is different. Context-1 is open-source under Apache 2.0. Anyone can use it. The model isn't the product. It's marketing rather than sales. Distribution & brand building for their vector database infrastructure.
Two philosophies. Proprietary model as differentiation versus open-source model as adoption mechanism.
"As features become ~free to build, the technology factors that will differentiate the players will be the AI under the hood. If you're using the same general-purpose off-the-shelf model as everyone else, you have no durable differentiation." - Eoghan McCabe
AI models offered by software vendors have become a new axis upon which to compete. In the marketing arena, models drive attention & distribution. At the bottom of the sales funnel, they serve as competitive differentiators in performance.
tomtunguz.com/a-new-axis-of-…
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