This week, Bloomberg reported that Apple is considering using AI technology from outside firms to power an updated version of its assistant, possibly sidelining its own in-house efforts, as part of a broader push to keep pace in the AI arms race.

The report comes on the heels of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment drive to poach top AI researchers and engineers at rival shops. He has offered as much as $100 million to pull outside talent into the Meta fold. On top of that, Zuckerberg had reportedly tried to acquire the AI startup Safe Superintelligence, but after the offer was turned down pursued its CEO instead. Meta also recently invested $14 billion in the data-labeling startup Scale AI and hired its top executive, Alexandr Wang, to help lead a new superintelligence unit inside the company.

The intertwining developments capture something important about the business of AI development. They get at how the public views AI’s leading upstarts and the tech platforms competing with and courting them. Call it AI’s corporate phase.

If the last two years were defined largely by the advancements in technology — the splashy presentations and dazzling updates about “compute” — we’ve now moved on to more refined questions about consumer integration and where these products fit into the tech ecosystem. The focus is moving from feats of research, development, engineering, and infrastructure to triumphs of dealmaking, marketing, and hiring. It’s “go-to-market” time, and it’s the MBAs’ turn now.

And that makes sense. It’s harder to refute just how massively capable AI has become and how the conversation around it has broadened, even as incidents where chatbots hallucinate or cite fake sources still repeatedly crop up. That sharpening of AI’s skill and capability has another logical conclusion: If Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the rest continue down their path of ever-increasing power, what exactly differentiates them from each other? What happens when AI becomes a commodity like the internet or even a search engine?