The Next AI Giants Will Build Meaning, Not Models
The future of AI belongs to those who know what to do with it.
Every few months, the leaderboard of AI models changes. A new release posts slightly better scores, benchmarks adjust, and token limits increase. Model names often become hard to distinguish.
These shifts, while still relevant, are no longer the defining factor in who moves ahead. As model performance converges, the real leverage will shift to companies that know how to turn capability into experience.
That isn’t because the models have stopped improving. It’s just that improvement itself is no longer the bottleneck. The frontier now is not defined by who builds the most capable model, but by who can create something people want to engage with — something that entertains, supports, surprises, or inspires them enough to keep coming back.
This is where the story of AI starts to look familiar. Once a technology becomes widely available and raw inputs are no longer scarce, advantage shifts. The edge moves to those who know how to design with it.
The companies best positioned for this shift don’t necessarily resemble the ones dominating the current AI conversation. They look more like Netflix, Roblox, Activision Blizzard, Nintendo.
These aren’t model labs. They are interface and experience companies. They specialize in translating code into culture. And that will matter more in the years ahead than scale or parameter count.
It’s easy to mistake AI itself for the product. In some cases, it still is. There are companies whose entire offering rests on access to the latest model, or at least the perception of it. There’s still a market for novelty, and another for optimization, but both are losing ground to integration. As models become widely available, and as open source alternatives approach parity, it becomes harder to stand out based on access or marginal intelligence gains alone.
At that point, the key question naturally (and inevitably) becomes: what are you building on top of this tech? Anyone can develop a tool that processes text. Fewer can build one that understands context, mood, or timing. Fewer still can shape a raw output into something that feels meaningful.
Netflix is capable of doing this. So is Nintendo. So are other companies that have built relationships with their users that extend beyond utility. The shift is from raw performance to thoughtful placement, from intelligence to integration.
The future of AI depends not only on what a model can do, but on where it fits in a person’s life, and how naturally it integrates once it gets there.
In a recent Bloomberg interview, Dr. Wang Jian, founder of Alibaba Cloud, noted that the major limitation in AI development is no longer computing power or model size. Instead, the bottleneck lies in the absence of creative, vision-led engineers who are willing to build new kinds of applications, not just reproduce ChatGPT-like systems.
That distinction maps out the future of artificial intelligence. There is little demand for more generic assistants. What is needed are thoughtfully designed, domain-specific, emotionally attuned tools that solve real problems without calling attention to themselves as tools.
Meeting that need requires metaphor, framing, constraint, and taste. These aren’t technical challenges, they’re creative ones. They raise questions that can't be answered with benchmarks or tuning: What creates wonder and excitement? What makes people feel safe or engaged? What tradeoffs preserve trust and encourage curiosity?
These questions fall outside the purview of AI labs, and will be better addressed by game designers, experience architects, and storytellers. Which is why the next phase of AI will favor companies that have always been comfortable building immersive, human-centered systems.
Netflix doesn’t simply deliver content. It structures how stories are discovered. Nintendo doesn’t merely publish games. It creates interaction systems that invite joy, surprise, and nostalgia. Roblox does more than host user-generated material. It builds frameworks for creativity, identity, and community.
These companies already operate where technology intersects with emotion. For them, AI is not a revolution. It is another tool in the kit — a way to shape experiences more responsively and adaptively. It's a new paintbrush that helps them refine what they already do well: creating systems that feel responsive, not merely reactive.
This won’t make headlines the way Artificial General Intelligence projections do, but it’s how meaningful change tends to arrive. Change often works that way: not through disruptive events, but through steady redefinition of what feels normal.
We are not done building models. But we are entering a new phase, one in which the model fades into the background. The companies that will matter most are those that already know how to design experiences worth inhabiting.
If you want to know who will succeed in AI, ask who already owns the interface. Who has earned trust? Who understands their users well enough to build for nuance, not just scale?
These are the companies that will lead the next era. Not because they have the fastest model, but because they have the clearest view of what to do with it.
AI will accelerate their efforts, but it won’t define them. They were already building futures worth living in. Now they can simply reach those futures faster.