The billionaires start playing battleship

The cold war of AI has begun.

GPT-5 is here. It’s smarter, remembers more, and makes fewer mistakes. OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, says it’s their biggest upgrade yet. Think of it as loading a brand-new warhead into the silo. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Grok 4 is already on the launch pad. Google, Anthropic, and other companies are circling above, waiting for one of them to slip so they can jump in.

Why does this matter? Because this isn’t just “new app, new features.” These tech giants want to become your main way of thinking and working. If they win, they’ll control the tools you use for email, search, schedules, and more. They don’t just want to be a tool you open—they want to be everywhere.

All of them say the same thing: faster, smarter, more reliable. But under the shiny marketing, this is really a fight for power. Each side is racing to be first with the next big thing.

This isn’t a normal product launch. It’s a standoff between tech superpowers, trying to outspend and outsmart each other, while the rest of us are stuck in the middle. And if history is any clue, it’ll end the way these things always do: lots of close calls, plenty of posturing, and a “winner” no one expected.

Let’s step back and look at the last Cold War. It might help explain the one happening right now in AI—because once you see the pattern, it’s hard to unsee it.

1. How to build a nuke out of algorithms

Remember the original Cold War? I don’t. I was a kid. From what I understand, it was decades of tension, trillions in spending, everyone stockpiling weapons they were too scared to use. Kind of like two guys outside a nightclub acting like they want to fight, but they’re really just pacing in circles and shouting “come at me, bro.” Then it all sort of fizzled out.

Here’s how it worked: the US and the Soviet Union built more and more nukes, fought proxy wars in other people’s backyards, tried to outdo each other in the space race, and kept this unspoken agreement — if one pushed the button, everyone loses. That was the game.

Now swap out nukes for large language models. The United States in this version is OpenAI and Microsoft. No, Microsoft doesn’t own OpenAI — they just poured billions into it, run its models on their servers, and probably have the Netflix password. Then you’ve got Russia, which is Elon and his Grok project. Loud, unpredictable, maybe brilliant, maybe about to blow a gasket — depends on the day. And then there’s the rest of the world: Google, Anthropic, Meta. They show up for the group photos, nod politely, and hope the other two wear themselves out.

Same playbook:

• The arms buildup is GPT-5 vs Grok 4, each promising “biggest leap forward yet” every six months.
• The proxy wars are smaller AI companies like Mistral, Cohere, or Perplexity taking VC money to chip away at the big players.
• The space race is livestream product launches — think OpenAI’s “Dev Day” or Google I/O — packed with flashy demos and celebrity endorsements.
• And the mutually assured destruction? If either side actually shipped a system tomorrow that could run a country, the governments would yank the plug before lunch.

If you’ve read the history, you can already see how this ends. A few “close calls” that make headlines, decades of hype, and one side eventually claims victory because the other bankrupted itself building the AI equivalent of a moon base… that nobody actually needs.

Here’s where I net out: the superpowers can keep flexing. I’m interested in what we can do with this week’s upgrades—practical, near-term stuff—so we can run more of our work with fewer clicks and keep the taste, direction, and judgment human.

2. Running a creative empire from the fallout shelter

I started out skeptical. When AI first got big, I didn’t buy the hype. People were calling it the next internet, but it took ten minutes to write an email I could have typed in two. Fun toy, not serious tool.

Now I use it when it makes sense. I’m not jumping on every new AI app just because someone says I’ll be left behind. I know what it’s good at, I know what it’s bad at, and unless I take a two-year nap, I’ll be fine.

What excites me is the next stage—when AI can run my computer, finish tasks without me watching, and live in my system as one brain. Then I can go back to my roots. I’ve been a photographer, illustrator, web designer, product designer, and video editor. The only reason I had to choose one was because mastering each skill took years.

Soon I won’t have to choose. I can be the creative director with a full AI team doing the hands-on work—editing videos, building websites, designing campaigns—while I focus on ideas, taste, and vision. The big players can keep battling for control. I’ll be in my creative shelter, building my own empire so that when the fight is over, my doors are already open for business.