The AI Moat Is Dead (2025 Proved It)

2025 killed the “best model wins” story—fast. This week, we zoom out: agents got real, media got usable, and the AI race turned into a build-and-ship infrastructure war.

Jeff and Annie open with quick hits: Meta’s reported $2B+ acquisition of agent startup Manus, Nvidia teaming with Grok to make inference faster and cheaper, Meter’s “5-hour tasks at 50% success” reality check, and Poetiq’s latest ARC-AGI orchestration claims. Then they break down the four biggest themes of 2025—and what executives should do differently in 2026 as moats vanish, agents collide with risk, and compute becomes the constraint.

We also discuss:

• Why “cost per answer” is becoming the new enterprise AI benchmark
• The three agent categories that actually mattered in 2025 (research, coding, web)
• Why the winners may be the best builders, not the best model labs

• Meta acquires Manus for $2B+ to accelerate AI agents
• Nvidia licenses Groq inference tech to boost production AI
• METR releases new AI task time horizon benchmarks
• Poetiq tops ARC-AGI leaderboard with orchestration harness