New Delhi, Oct. 1 -- The year is three-quarters over and it is looking like the most consequential one of the artificial-intelligence boom so far. Agents went mainstream for enterprise users during the first half of the year, and if Meta Platforms' Muse is any indication, consumers aren't far behind. At the same time, cheap open-weight models-which anyone can download for free and run on any capable hardware-have gotten quite good. They are putting pricing pressure on the two leaders in AI model-making, OpenAI and Anthropic, even as they have rapidly pushed the AI frontier forward this year.

As the last 50 years of technology development have taught us, software eventually wins. AI is proving to be no different. For example, early PCs we...