New Delhi, July 16 -- The AI industry appears locked in a race to build the smartest, agentic model. Ever since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, big tech companies have been releasing frontier models, sharper large language model chatbots, new benchmark records and announcing multibillion-dollar investments in chips and data centres every other week.

The assumption is that whoever builds the most intelligent model will dominate AI.

The postulation, however, is being revisited. While frontier models remain remarkable achievements, open-weight models have narrowed the gap with proprietary systems. Chinese company Z.ai's GLM 5.2 is a case in point. Inference costs continue to fall.

To be sure, AI firms are comfortably emulating ea...