Five days before Google I/O, the AI front has split into three
Trying to figure out how to cut my token usage, I installed Qwen3.5 122B on my M4. And the tokens dropped to single digits… The API calls really did go to zero. Exactly what I wanted. But watching the chat reply flicker out one character at a time, I realized another number had also fallen into single digits. Tokens per second. The same word landed with two meanings at once. Cost in single digits. Speed in single digits. One was the result I wanted. The other I didn't. Between them sat a beat of silence, like an ellipsis. That contradiction is where this post starts. The two single-digit numbers misaligning on my laptop get much larger at the company level. And that misalignment is exactly the next battlefield in the AI industry. A year ago we were watching "who builds the smarter model." Text understanding and reasoning were supposed to decide what came next. But as of May 2026, that race is effectively over. The new battlefield isn't one. It's split into th...