That's certainly Apple's position.

by beattherush, Chicago, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 14:49 (3 days ago) @ HumanRobot

And I'd say they've earned the benefit of the doubt on their strategic decisions.

Agreed the value long-term is the data, not the models. There are a limited number of customers who will pay Altman $200k/yr for frontier models. And everything else on the model end will race to the bottom, where open source is waiting patiently.

But data is defensible.

Which is where X/Twitter has one advantage... the best near-real-time textual data signals available, other than maybe WhatsApp or WeChat. I agree with Mark that it's high noise-to-signal and probably useless for things like coding development. But it is certainly useful in retail customer-facing situations. Which is why X is moving into banking and advertising, and Google is investing heavily in the same space and has YouTube data to work with, which is somewhat slower but maybe less noisy.

Meta has WhatsApp but I don't think has the financial horsepower to keep up on the compute, but we'll see. X may just rent compute power to everyone else on the side; it's how they handle SpaceX.

China and WeChat et.al. won't have access to the compute horsepower for some time, even with WeChat and TikTok providing good real-time data.