A New Axis of Competition
Расмат Тунгуз отмечает новую ось конкуренции в софте: за один день две компании выпустили собственные AI-модели (а с учётом Cursor — три за неделю). Intercom запустил Apex 1.0 — модель для ответов на тикеты поддержки, которая обходит GPT-5.4 и Claude Opus 4.5, а у одного игрового клиента подняла долю решённых обращений с 68% до 75%. Chroma выпустила Context-1 — модель для многошагового агентного поиска с результатом 97% на бенчмарках. При этом подходы различаются: Intercom использует проприетарную модель как дифференциатор, а Chroma сделала Context-1 открытой (Apache 2.0) — как механизм продвижения и привлечения для своей векторной БД. По мнению автора, модели вендоров становятся новой ареной конкуренции: в маркетинге они привлекают внимание и обеспечивают дистрибуцию, а на дне воронки продаж служат отличием по производительности.
Would you choose one software over another because it has a proprietary model with better performance?
Two companies shipped custom AI models today (three in a week counting Cursor!1), raising that question. Intercom launched Apex 1.0, a model for answering customer support tickets.2 Chroma released Context-1, a model for multi-hop agent search.3
Apex 1.0 beats GPT-5.4 & Claude Opus 4.5 on customer service tasks.2 Context-1 scores 97% on agent search benchmarks.3 One Intercom gaming customer saw resolution rates jump from 68% to 75%.2
History suggests4 these gains may be temporary. As general-purpose models improve, today’s specialized advantage erodes. But with GPU shortages, inference costs will spike, perhaps this will be the moment for built-for-purpose more efficient models.
Intercom built Apex to differentiate in a competitive market. Chroma’s bet is different. Context-1 is open-source under Apache 2.0.3 Anyone can use it. The model isn’t the product. It’s marketing rather than sales. Distribution & brand building for their vector database infrastructure.
Two philosophies. Proprietary model as differentiation versus open-source model as adoption mechanism.
“As features become ~free to build, the technology factors that will differentiate the players will be the AI under the hood. If you’re using the same general-purpose off-the-shelf model as everyone else, you have no durable differentiation.” - Eoghan McCabe2
AI models offered by software vendors have become a new axis upon which to compete. In the marketing arena, models drive attention & distribution. At the bottom of the sales funnel, they serve as competitive differentiators in performance.
“Cursor, Kimi, & the Open-Source AI Imperative”, tomtunguz.com, March 2026. ↩︎
Eoghan McCabe, “The age of vertical models is here”, X, March 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
“Chroma Launches Context-1, Efficient Open-Source AI for Agent Search”, PR Newswire, March 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Rich Sutton, “The Bitter Lesson”, March 2019. ↩︎