If you're shipping AI products right now, these are the tectonic plates moving under your feet:

1. Inference costs are falling faster than training costs. The race isn't just about building better models — it's about making existing ones cheaper to run. This changes unit economics for every AI startup.

2. Multi-modal is now table stakes. If your product only handles text, you're already behind. Vision, audio, and tool-use are baseline expectations.

3. Open-weight models are closing the gap. The moat for closed-source providers is shrinking. If you're building on proprietary APIs alone, your competitive advantage has an expiration date.

4. Edge inference is real now. On-device models aren't demos — they're shipping in production. This unlocks entirely new product categories around privacy and latency.

5. AI agents are moving from demos to revenue. The builders winning are shipping agents that do one thing extremely well, not general-purpose bots.

I'm tracking all of this in Byteline — a free newsletter for founders and builders shipping AI products. No hype, no fluff. Just signal.

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