Where the Margin Moved

Four major labs moved list prices up in April. Two open-weight shops moved prices down in the same eight days. Capability commoditized at the top of the leaderboard while unit economics diverged in three directions underneath. DeepSeek V4 shipped as the first serious frontier-class open-weight model trained without CUDA as a required dependency. SpaceX and Cursor announced a compute partnership with a 60-billion-dollar acquisition option attached. This episode walks where margin is actually being defended (subscription and scope, not per-token rate), why monthly release cadence is now possible (sparse-RL consensus across four independent research groups), and what the week changes for Monday-morning procurement — plus the debut of the AI Feature Tracker recurring segment.AI Disclosure: This episode was produced with AI assistance. Research synthesis and script writing used Claude (Anthropic) under human editorial direction. Audio narration by Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewNeural voice).