AI’s Next Race: Cost, Control, and Compute — 7/9/2026
Three things the market believed about AI broke this week.
The AI race is shifting from who has the biggest model to who can run, control and deploy AI most effectively.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas joins to discuss the company’s new orchestrator model, why he’s building on open-source Chinese AI, and his argument that “token value per watt” may decide the next phase of competition.
Then, Benchmark general partner Peter Fenton and Ollama CEO Jeff Morgan discuss the rise of open models, why enterprises are increasingly running models they can download and control, and what Ollama’s growth says about where the AI ecosystem is heading.
Together, the conversations get at one big question: in AI’s next race, will the winners be defined less by model access and more by cost, control and compute?
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AI’s Next Race: Cost, Control, and Compute — 7/9/2026
