¶For several years, model developers competed primarily on benchmarks, context windows, coding performance, and reasoning capabilities. Enterprise buyers are increasingly asking a simpler question: how much useful work does each dollar of inference buy? That favors efficient models and gives Chinese developers an opening even when they do not lead every benchmark. It also pressures frontier labs carrying enormous computing, staffing, and data-center expenses. If model intelligence becomes increasingly interchangeable for routine workloads, margins could compress much faster than many AI business models assume. For startups, however, lower inference costs could unlock applications that previously failed basic unit-economics tests.

¶The eventuality of cost considerations may be arriving for AI models. And if competition begins to turn on price, will edge development continue at a breakneck pace? We’ll see.

¶On a practical level, I’m hopeful that competition on price will bring some clarity on the question of “how much AI do I get per dollar?”. It’s still largely impossible to tell, at least for me.

¶He made the admission to Slate while he was pushing back against another story, published in Knox News, that claimed he was shutting down because he was retiring and moving south.

¶“The girl that reported that did not know what she was talking about,” Hays reportedly said. “I’m not retiring....”

¶He theorized that the reporter “didn’t want to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing.”

¶This story is interesting to me on multiple levels.

¶First, it’s somewhat personal. We’ve driven by this store many times over the last several years on our trips between Toledo and St. Pete Beach. It’s a spectacle, complete with billboards, old cars with signs in the windows, and various attention grabbers out front (think car wash and appliance store streetside advertising). I don’t think we’ve ever seen more than a few cars in the lot that seemed to belong to customers, though. Apparently our drive-by’s have not coincided with some of the more active days recounted in the article.

¶Second, both the owner and an employee apparently recognize that Trump’s “dwindling” popularity is at least partly to blame for the slowdown in business. And the shop is in Tennessee, which is a heart of Trump Train country. Maybe, just maybe, some Trump supporters are waking up. Maybe, just maybe, Trump’s record low approval rating is actually accurate…in Tennessee.

¶And third, the owner of the store made a very interesting comment about the local reporting on the closure. According to the report from the Independent, local outlet the Knoxville News Sentinel claimed “he was shutting down because he was retiring and moving south.” Not true, according to the store owner. “I’m not retiring, not moving [to Florida].” Why, then, did the local report state that “the closure was in part due to the owner…purchasing a condo in Naples with plans to relocate”?

¶The Independent asked the owner this very question, who offered a theory: “the [local] reporter didn’t want to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing….”.

¶Local reporting on the closure, it seems, is incomplete at best. At least some was true.