Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.” The reality is that building leading AI models is extremely costly, and raising $400 million isn’t even enough to compete these days. Big Tech, meanwhile, is flush with cash and looking to get in on what everyone perceives to be the next big thing.