18 Hot Takes On Where AI is Headed Next

by Peter Yang, Behind the Craft Today, I want to share 18 hot takes on where I think the AI market is headed. AI is in a weird place right now. The government is restricting access to frontier models, enterprises are becoming conscious of token costs, and everyone’s trying to rebuild their product for agents first instead of humans. I’ve interviewed dozens of AI leaders and spent far too much time following these topics on X/Twitter. Here are 18 hot takes on where I think AI is headed next: The frontier-only AI stack is collapsing The AI super app era is here Traditional software risks becoming a dumb pipe for agents Cloud agents and collaboration are the next wave The Frontier-Only AI Stack Is Collapsing Tokenmaxxing at frontier API prices makes no sense. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, Microsoft moved engineers off Claude Code due to cost, and companies are realizing that running everything on frontier models can get expensive fast. Tokenmaxxing makes sense when you’re on a subsidized $200/month plan but is unsustainable at API rates. Companies will rely on a portfolio of models. Coinbase recently cut its AI spend nearly in half by switching engineers to Chinese open-source models like GLM and Kimi. Airbnb and Pinterest have done the same with Alibaba’s Qwen models. I believe that this will be the default path forward — using frontier for high-stakes work and cheaper models for everything else. China’s open-source strategy is working. Chinese models are taking market share from frontier models at US companies. China is also building the full AI stack — from energy (e.g., solar, nuclear) to data centers to domestic chips. The Chinese government is planning a $295B investment in AI data centers with at least 80% of the chips built domestically. Frontier labs are in a catch-22 situation. If they release great open-source models, they might undercut their own frontier API revenue. If they gate the best models behind a trusted list, companies